What is the best mileage tracker app for iPhone in 2026?

The short answer: six mileage tracker apps compared

Six apps cover what most people search for: a business log for taxes, a gig-work tracker with expenses, a free unlimited tracker, an easy log with a hardware trigger, a free tracker from a tax company, and a whole-car app that records mileage as a side effect. The table compares them on the two things that decide the choice: the free limit, which matters more than the sticker price for an occasional driver, and how a trip starts on its own, which matters more than anything for a daily one.

All six run on iPhone. MileIQ, Everlance, TripLog, Driversnote and Stride also have Android apps; WrenchTime is iPhone and iPad only, iOS 26 or later. Prices change often and are stated here in US dollars as each vendor's own page showed them on October 1, 2026; the vendor's page is always the current one.

Sources: MileIQ pricing, Everlance pricing, TripLog pricing and TripLog auto-tracking options, Driversnote pricing, Stride on the App Store; WrenchTime's own feature list. Checked October 1, 2026.

How automatic mileage tracking actually works

A mileage tracker app has to notice you are driving before it can log the trip, and the apps on this page do it in four ways: motion and speed, a Bluetooth connection, a beacon or a plug-in, and a geofence around where you parked. Automatic trip detection is the app starting a recording from one of those signals with no tap from you. Each signal trades battery, false starts and missed starts differently, which is why the method matters more than the sticker price for anyone who drives every day.

Motion and speed. The phone's motion sensors and GPS speed say you are moving like a car. TripLog's MagicTrip "kicks in as 1-2 minutes of driving", is rated by TripLog itself as higher battery usage, and can also log a ride as a passenger, a jog or a bike ride (TripLog help). WrenchTime arms detection on automotive motion from the phone's sensors but only starts the trip at the first GPS fix above a speed gate, so a parked car with the stereo on does not create a phantom trip.

Bluetooth. The phone connects to the car's stereo and the app takes that as the start. TripLog starts after you drive over 5 mph while connected to the car's Bluetooth, which it rates as moderate battery use; WrenchTime pairs a car stereo or helmet headset to a vehicle once, so the connection both starts the trip and assigns it to the right vehicle. Bluetooth is the most reliable trigger for a car you drive often and the one that costs the least battery between trips.

Beacons and plug-ins. A beacon is a small Bluetooth device left in the car; a plug-in trigger starts when the phone is on the car's charger. Driversnote's iBeacon is free with its yearly plan, and TripLog sells a Beacon and offers Plug-N-Go, which starts when you plug the phone in and pass 5 mph and which TripLog rates as no battery drain at all. The cost is remembering to plug in, and a beacon can be fooled by a car whose USB port stays powered when parked.

Geofences and visits. A geofence is a circle around a place that iOS watches without GPS running. WrenchTime draws one around where you parked and arms detection when you leave it, and also on a significant location change or a departure reported by iOS; arming is not recording, and the trip still waits for the speed gate. Whatever the method, an iPhone app can only detect a drive in the background if Location is set to Always and Background App Refresh is on, and nothing here should ever be touched while driving: the point of automatic detection is that you do not.

• Motion and speed: no setup, works in any car, highest battery use and the most false starts. TripLog MagicTrip, Everlance, MileIQ, WrenchTime as one of its signals.
• Car Bluetooth: reliable, low battery between trips, assigns the vehicle; needs a car with Bluetooth audio. TripLog, Stride's phone-connection trigger, WrenchTime.
• Beacon or plug-in: nearly no battery, needs a device in the car or the habit of plugging in. Driversnote iBeacon, TripLog Beacon and Plug-N-Go.
• Geofence and visits: no battery while waiting, arms when you leave where you parked; still needs a speed gate to start. WrenchTime.

MileIQ: best for a simple business or personal log

MileIQ is the right pick if all you want is a log that sorts itself into business and personal with one gesture. It tracks drives automatically, and you swipe right to classify a drive as business or left as personal, add notes and create custom labels (MileIQ). The free plan covers 40 drives every month; Unlimited costs $13.99 a month, or $11.66 a month billed annually (MileIQ pricing, October 2026).

One correction to what search engines still repeat: the AI Overview and older forum threads quote MileIQ at $5.99 a month. That was the old price. The pricing page on October 1, 2026 says $13.99, which puts MileIQ at the expensive end of this list for a tracker that does one job well.

Everlance: best for gig workers who track expenses too

Everlance is the right pick if your mileage is one line of a larger self-employment picture, with expenses, receipts and a tax return behind it. The Basic plan is free with 30 automatically detected trips per month and unlimited manual trips. Starter, at $8.99 a month or $69.99 a year, removes the cap with unlimited automatic mileage tracking and adds custom IRS compliant reporting. Professional, at $99.99 a year with no monthly option, adds automatic expense tracking, an AI deduction finder, all-inclusive 1099 tax filing and a $1 million audit defense (Everlance pricing, October 2026).

New users get a 7-day free trial of Starter, and a card is required: the card is charged when the trial ends unless you cancel, with a reminder email two days before. For a driver under 30 automatic trips a month the free plan is complete; above that, Starter is the cheapest unlimited automatic tracker on this page after TripLog.

TripLog: best for unlimited free automatic tracking and trigger options

TripLog is the right pick if you want automatic tracking with no monthly cap and no monthly fee, and you want to choose how a trip starts. Since January 2025, TripLog Basic includes "unlimited automatic trip detection at no cost" plus one 7-day Premium Pass a year to use the paid features and download reports (TripLog product update). Premium, which adds the web dashboard, year-round unlimited reporting, receipt capture, bank connections and accounting integrations, costs $4.99 a month paid yearly as $59.99 (TripLog pricing, October 2026).

No other app on this page offers as many ways to start a trip: MagicTrip motion detection, car Bluetooth over 5 mph, a Beacon ($19.99 once) or the TripLog Drive GPS device ($79.99 once), Plug-N-Go on the car charger, a gig-app mode that starts when a delivery app is open and you drive, and manual. The trade-off is that the free tier's reports are locked behind the yearly Premium Pass, so a free user downloads a year's log once a year rather than any time.

Driversnote: best for an easy log with a hardware beacon

Driversnote is the right pick if you want the log to start from a beacon left in the car and you drive few enough trips to stay free, or are happy to pay for unlimited. The free plan covers up to 15 trips a month. Pro costs $11 a month and brings automatic mileage tracking, unlimited trips, log editing and a public API; the iBeacon comes free with the annual subscription, valued at $40, or can be bought alongside a monthly plan. Teams costs $11 per license a month for small teams (Driversnote pricing, October 2026).

Fifteen free trips a month is the lowest cap on this page, so Driversnote's free plan suits someone who logs a handful of business drives a month and nothing else. The beacon is the reason to pick it over the others: a trigger that costs almost no battery and never depends on the phone noticing motion.

Stride: best completely free option

Stride is the right pick if you want a free mileage tracker with no trip cap and no paid tier at all, and you are self-employed. The app is free on the App Store, with automated GPS mileage tracking, reminders so you do not miss miles, expense tracking and "IRS-ready mileage logs" (Stride on the App Store). Stride funds the app through its insurance and benefits business rather than through the tracker.

The reservations come from a review written by a competitor, MileageWise, so weigh them accordingly: it describes Stride's tracking as manual start and stop or an auto-trigger on the phone's connection to the car, and reports users complaining of missing or partial trips, straight-line paths and drives stopping early (MileageWise, September 2025). Which is better, Everlance or Stride? Stride is free with no cap and fewer tools; Everlance caps free automatic trips at 30 a month and adds expense tracking, IRS reporting and tax filing in its paid plans. A driver who only needs the miles picks Stride; one who wants the tax return built from them picks Everlance.

WrenchTime: best for owners who want trips, fuel and maintenance together

WrenchTime, the app I develop, is the one app on this page that is not a mileage tracker first: it is an iPhone and iPad app for the whole vehicle, with maintenance, fuel, charging, trips, parking and OBD-II data in one log, and the mileage is what ties them together. Trips start on their own from four signals: the car stereo or helmet headset you paired connecting over Bluetooth, which also assigns the trip to the right vehicle; automotive motion from the phone's sensors; leaving the geofence around where you parked; or a significant location change reported by iOS. Each one only arms detection, and the trip starts at the first GPS fix above a speed gate. You can also start a trip by hand, from a Shortcuts automation, from CarPlay or from the Apple Watch app.

A trip ends after five minutes without movement, sooner once the stereo disconnects and the phone detects walking, and you set the minimum distance and duration a drive must clear to be saved, with the distance of a discarded one still added to the odometer. Each saved trip keeps a route matched to the road network rather than a GPS zigzag, its start and end addresses, distance, duration, average and top speed, and whatever an OBD-II adapter read during the drive. Afterwards you can tag it in one of eight colors, merge a drive that got split by a fuel stop, split one that ran through a stop, or assign a trip recorded in a borrowed car to the right vehicle. Every trip updates the vehicle's odometer with an audit trail of old value, new value and source, which is what moves the next service closer to due. A trip survives iOS killing the app: it is rebuilt from the phone's motion history on the next launch.

What it does not have is the tax tooling of the apps above: no business-or-personal swipe, no reimbursement rate, no deduction total. What it has instead is a CSV export per vehicle that can be narrowed to a tag, and a PDF export with totals and the addresses of each trip, which is enough to hand a dated log to whoever needs one. If you only need a business log, the dedicated apps above do that job with less. If you want the mileage to feed the rest of your car's records, this is the one: the automatic mileage tracker guide explains detection in detail, and what an iPhone car maintenance app should do covers the rest of the log.

Best free mileage tracker app: the limits side by side

Free unlimited automatic tracking in October 2026 means TripLog Basic or Stride; every other app on this page caps the free tier, by trips per month or per week. The table lists each free tier and what it leaves out, from each vendor's pricing page on October 1, 2026.

Sources: the pricing pages linked in the first table; WrenchTime's own feature list. Checked October 1, 2026.

How to choose a mileage tracker app: a five-question checklist

Five questions settle the choice for almost everyone. The first one matters most in 2026, because the IRS business rate changed mid-year: 72.5 cents a mile from January 1 and 76 cents a mile from July 1, 2026 (IRS, standard mileage rates), so a log without a date on each trip cannot be priced at all. The standard mileage rate is the cents-per-mile figure the IRS lets you deduct instead of actual car expenses.

• Do you deduct miles or claim reimbursement? Then every trip needs a date, a destination, a purpose and the miles, recorded at or near the time. What an IRS compliant mileage log needs lists the fields; MileIQ, Everlance, TripLog, Driversnote and Stride all produce that log, WrenchTime exports the dated trips and addresses for you to classify.
• How many trips a month? Under 15, every free tier works. Under 30, Everlance and MileIQ stay free. Above that, TripLog Basic and Stride stay free, the others cost money.
• How do you want trips to start? Car Bluetooth if your car has it (TripLog, Stride, WrenchTime); a beacon if it does not (Driversnote, TripLog); motion if you change cars a lot (MileIQ, Everlance, TripLog MagicTrip); manual if you drive rarely.
• Do you need expenses and tax filing in the same app? Everlance Professional files the 1099; Stride and TripLog track expenses and prepare reports; MileIQ and Driversnote are logs only.
• Do you also want fuel, service history and the odometer in the same place? Only WrenchTime, where a recorded trip moves the odometer and the next service, and the fuel economy is computed from the same miles.

Key takeaways

What to remember from this comparison, checked on October 1, 2026.

• The free cap decides more than the price: TripLog Basic and Stride track unlimited trips free; MileIQ allows 40 drives, Everlance 30 automatic trips and Driversnote 15 trips a month; WrenchTime 10 a week.
• The trigger decides the battery and the misses: Bluetooth and beacons cost little and rarely miss a drive; motion detection works in any car but uses more battery and can log a bus ride.
• MileIQ costs $13.99 a month, not $5.99: the price search engines still quote is the old one.
• A 2026 log needs dates: 72.5 cents a mile until June 30, 76 cents from July 1.
• One app records the whole car: WrenchTime logs trips as the mileage behind fuel, maintenance and the odometer, with the tax classification left to you.

Record the mileage your car's log is built on

If what you want from a mileage tracker is the car's own record, trips that start when the stereo connects, a road-matched route, the odometer kept right and the next service moved closer with every drive, that is WrenchTime: free for 1 vehicle and 10 trips a week with CSV and PDF export included, and WrenchTime Pro for unlimited trips, route maps, merge and split, CarPlay and Apple Watch, as a monthly or yearly subscription with a free trial or a one-time lifetime purchase. How the automatic mileage tracker works.