CRA Mileage Log Template for Canada (Copy It)

Most mileage log templates you can download were built for someone else's tax system. They have a column for a rate per mile, a column for "reimbursement", and a total in dollars at the bottom. None of that is what the CRA asks a self-employed Canadian to keep, and the dollar column in particular invites the most common mistake in this whole area: multiplying your business kilometres by the CRA per-kilometre rate and deducting the answer.

A CRA log does one job. It proves what share of your driving was business. That share, your business-use percentage, is what gets applied to your actual vehicle costs on the T2125. So the template below has no rate column and no dollar column. It has three parts: a header that anchors the year, a trip log, and a summary that produces the percentage.

Copy the tables into a spreadsheet, keep the headings, and replace the example rows with your own.

What the CRA asks for, in one paragraph

For each business trip, the CRA wants the date, the destination, the purpose and the number of kilometres driven. It also wants the odometer reading of each vehicle at the start and end of the fiscal period, the dates and odometer readings if you buy, sell or trade a vehicle during the period, and a separate record for each vehicle you use for the business. The full requirement, with the ways a log that looks fine still fails, is in what a CRA-acceptable vehicle logbook contains. This page is the practical side: the sheet itself, and why each column is on it.

The template

Part 1: the year header

One block at the top of the sheet. Fill it in on the first day of your fiscal period and finish it on the last.

Field	Entry
Vehicle	2021 Toyota RAV4, grey
Plate	(your plate)
Fiscal period	2026-01-01 to 2026-12-31
Odometer at start of period	48,210 km (photo taken 2026-01-01)
Odometer at end of period	71,630 km (photo taken 2026-12-31)
Vehicle bought, sold or traded during the period	None

Part 2: the trip log

One row per business trip. These rows are from a renovation contractor who runs the business from home, has no shop or office anywhere else, and so starts and ends business trips at home.

Date	From	Destination	Purpose	Km
2026-03-02	Home	Alpine Supply, 2210 Kingsway, Vancouver	Pick up tile and grout for Lawson bathroom job	11
2026-03-02	Alpine Supply	Lawson residence, 1180 W 14th Ave, Vancouver	Install bathroom tile, Lawson job	7
2026-03-02	Lawson residence	Home	Return from Lawson job	12
2026-03-05	Home	Chen Dental, 4550 E Hastings St, Burnaby	Measure and quote reception renovation, Chen Dental	16
2026-03-05	Chen Dental	Home	Return from Chen Dental quote	16
2026-03-09	Home	R. Patel CPA, 800 W Pender St, Vancouver	Review 2025 business records with accountant	9

Part 3: the year-end summary

Filled in once, after the closing odometer photo.

Line	How it is worked out	Example
Total kilometres	End odometer minus start odometer	71,630 − 48,210 = 23,420 km
Business kilometres	Sum of the Km column in the trip log	14,052 km
Personal kilometres	Total minus business	23,420 − 14,052 = 9,368 km
Business-use percentage	Business ÷ total	14,052 ÷ 23,420 = 60.0%

That 60.0% is the number the whole sheet exists to produce. The next sections explain why each piece is there, because a template filled in without knowing what each column is proving tends to get filled in wrong.

The header, and why the odometer is not optional

The two odometer readings are the denominator of your business-use percentage. Nothing else in the log can supply it.

The trip log only records business trips, so adding up the Km column gives you business kilometres and nothing more. People who skip the odometer and then need a total tend to use that same column, which produces a business-use percentage of 100%, and that is the single least believable figure a vehicle claim can show. Personal driving does not have to be logged trip by trip, but it has to be inside the total, and the only place it gets in is the difference between two odometer readings.

A dated photo of the dashboard on the first and last day of the period is the cheapest evidence in the file. If your fiscal period is not the calendar year, read the odometer on your own start and end dates, not January 1 and December 31. Getting those two readings right, including when you missed one, is its own topic in odometer readings at the start and end of the year.

The last header line is the one people leave off because it is usually "None". It exists for the year it is not. If you sell or trade the vehicle, the CRA wants the date of the change and the odometer reading at that point, and without it you have two part-year vehicles and no total for either.

The trip log, column by column

Date. The day the trip happened. It is what ties the trip to everything else in your records: the invoice to the client, the receipt from the supplier, the calendar entry. A reviewer checking a log checks it against those, and a date that lines up with an invoice is a trip that proves itself.

From. The CRA's list does not include a starting point, and you can drop the column. It is on this template for one reason: it is the column that shows whether a trip began at your base of business or somewhere else, which is how you and a reviewer tell a business trip from a commute. If your home is not the base of your business (you rent a shop, a studio or an office), the drive from home to that place is personal driving and does not belong in this log at all. Where that line sits is covered in commuting versus business driving.

Destination. Where you went, specific enough that a stranger could find it. A business name and a street address. "Client", "site" and "supplier" are not destinations, they are categories, and they make the trip impossible to check.

Purpose. Why you went. This is the column that turns a drive into a business trip, and it is the one most often left thin. It gets its own section below.

Km. The distance of that trip. You can read it off the odometer at each end, take it from a map, or take it from a GPS record. What matters is that it is the real distance of the real route and not a round number. If you want the odometer at each end of each trip as evidence, add two columns, "Odometer out" and "Odometer in", and make Km their difference. The CRA does not ask for per-trip readings, but some people find them easier than looking up a distance afterwards.

Purpose: what a good entry looks like

The test for a purpose entry is whether it would still make sense to you in four years with no other context, because that is roughly when a reviewer might ask. A good entry names the business reason and, where there is one, the client or job.

Weak entry	Why it fails	Better entry
Work	Every trip in the log could say this, so it says nothing	Install bathroom tile, Lawson job
Client	Names a category, not a reason	Measure and quote reception renovation, Chen Dental
Errands	Reads as personal, even when it was not	Pick up tile and grout for Lawson bathroom job
Meeting	With whom, about what	Review 2025 business records with accountant
Office	If you have an office elsewhere, this is the commute, and it should not be in the log	(no entry: the trip is personal)

The last row is the important one. A vague purpose is a weak entry. A purpose that describes a commute is a wrong entry, and because it repeats every working day, it moves your percentage more than any other trip. What does and does not count as business travel in the first place is covered in what counts as a business trip.

Return trips and days with several stops

Log each leg as its own row, the way the example does on March 2. A day that runs home, supplier, client, home is three rows, not one.

There are two reasons to do it that way. First, each leg has its own destination, and the CRA asks for the destination of each trip. Second, a day often has a personal leg in the middle of it, a stop at the bank or a school pickup between two clients, and you cannot remove a personal leg from a trip you logged as one number.

The return leg deserves its own purpose too. "Return from Lawson job" is fine. It tells the reader that the drive home was the second half of a business trip, not a separate outing.

The year-end summary, worked

The summary is arithmetic, but it is worth doing deliberately, because it is the same check a reviewer performs first.

Using the example header and a full year of trip rows:

Step	Arithmetic	Result
Total kilometres	71,630 − 48,210	23,420 km
Business kilometres	Sum of every Km entry for the year	14,052 km
Business-use percentage	14,052 ÷ 23,420	60.0%
Personal kilometres	23,420 − 14,052	9,368 km

Check the last line with common sense before you trust the percentage above it. About 9,400 personal kilometres over a year is plausible for someone who also uses the car for groceries, weekends and the odd trip out of town. If your personal line came out at a few hundred kilometres and this is your only car, the business line is overstated somewhere, and it is better to find where now than in a review.

What happens to the percentage next is the CRA's standard calculation: it is applied to your actual vehicle costs (fuel, insurance, repairs, licence and registration, interest or lease payments, and capital cost allowance), and the result is your claim. The CRA's own example on its T2125 page divides 27,000 business kilometres by 30,000 total and applies the result to the year's van expenses. How the percentage is built, and the edge cases around it, are in calculating your business-use percentage, and the mileage calculator runs the arithmetic on your own figures.

Notice what is not on the sheet: the CRA per-kilometre rate. That rate is the ceiling on an allowance one person pays another for the use of their car. A sole proprietor or partner has nobody paying them one, so it plays no part in their log. The 2026 mileage rate guide explains who it is for.

One log per vehicle

If more than one vehicle is used for the business, each one gets its own copy of the whole template: its own header with its own odometer readings, its own trip log, and its own summary. The CRA asks for a separate record for each vehicle showing its total and business kilometres, and for each vehicle's expenses to be calculated separately.

In a spreadsheet the simplest way to do that is one tab per vehicle, named for the vehicle. Do not add a "Vehicle" column to a single shared log and plan to split it later. The two vehicles have different totals, so they have different percentages, and a blended log produces a single percentage that is true of neither car. Running two vehicles is covered in two vehicles and business use.

The same logic applies within one tab when you change cars mid-year. The outgoing vehicle's header closes on the date and odometer reading when you sold or traded it, and the new vehicle gets a fresh header opening on the date and odometer reading when you bought it.

Setting it up in a spreadsheet

Any spreadsheet works. The CRA specifies the information, not the medium, and paper is no better than a file. A few habits make the file hold up.

• One file per fiscal period. Name it with the vehicle and the year. A log for 2026 should not scroll into 2027.
• Let the sheet do the arithmetic. Put a sum under the Km column, and compute total kilometres and the percentage from the header cells rather than typing them in. A typed total is a total that can disagree with the rows above it.
• Fill it in as you go. A log written weekly from memory is weaker than one written the same day, and a log assembled at year end from bank statements is weaker still. Reconstruction is possible, and rebuilding a lost mileage log covers how, but it is a fallback, not a plan.
• Keep the odometer photos with the file. Same folder, named by date.
• Keep it for as long as the CRA can ask for it. Records are kept six years from the end of the tax year they relate to. A full-year log used as a base year for the CRA's three-month sample method is kept six years from the end of the last tax year it was used for, which can be much longer. That method is explained in the simplified logbook base-year rule.

Where the template stops

A spreadsheet template is complete as a format. What it cannot do is fill itself in, and the rows are the hard part: the distances, every leg of every day, for a whole year. If you would rather not type them, Claimable Drive records drives in the background, you swipe each one business or personal, it works out the business-use percentage from those swipes and keeps your car's odometer readings, and the logbook and its export are free.

FAQ

What columns does a CRA mileage log need? For each business trip: the date, the destination, the purpose and the number of kilometres driven. On top of that, the odometer reading at the start and end of the fiscal period, the date and odometer reading of any vehicle bought, sold or traded during the period, and a separate record for each vehicle. A starting-point column and per-trip odometer columns are optional extras that make the log easier to check.

Do I have to log personal trips? Not row by row. Personal kilometres reach your total through the two odometer readings, since the total is the end reading minus the start reading. If you prefer to log every trip and mark each one business or personal, that is fine too, as long as the total still ties to the odometer.

Can I use a template that has a cents-per-kilometre column? You can delete the column and use the rest. The CRA per-kilometre rate is the ceiling on an allowance paid by someone else, such as an employer, so it does not produce a deduction for a sole proprietor or partner. What goes on the T2125 is actual vehicle costs times your business-use percentage.

Is a spreadsheet as good as a paper logbook? Yes. The CRA sets out what the log must contain, not what it is written on. A spreadsheet with all the fields, the odometer readings and one tab per vehicle meets the same requirement a notebook does, and you have to be able to produce it years later either way.

How detailed does the purpose need to be? Detailed enough that the trip explains itself without you in the room: the business reason, and the client or job where there is one. "Quote for reception renovation, Chen Dental" works. "Client" and "work" do not, because every trip in the log could say the same thing.

I have two vehicles. Can I keep one log? Keep one log per vehicle. The CRA asks for a separate record for each vehicle, with its own total and business kilometres, and for each vehicle's expenses to be calculated separately. A single log with a vehicle column cannot produce a separate total for each car unless each car also has its own odometer readings, at which point it is two logs already.

Sources

1. CRA, Motor vehicle records, the four fields for each business trip, the odometer readings at the start and end of the fiscal period, vehicle changes, one record per vehicle, the simplified logbook, and retention.
2. CRA, Calculating motor vehicle expenses, business kilometres over total kilometres applied to actual vehicle costs, with the CRA's worked example.
3. CRA Guide T4002, Self-employed Business, Professional, Commission, Farming, and Fishing Income, motor vehicle expenses on the T2125.
4. CRA Interpretation Bulletin IT-521R, Motor Vehicle Expenses Claimed by Self-Employed Individuals, archived, listed by the CRA's records page as a supporting publication, on travel from home and the base of business operations.
5. Income Tax Act, section 230, subsection 230(1), the duty of every person carrying on business to keep records containing the information that lets their tax be determined.