Guide
Civil Service Mileage Rates 2026 (Ireland): The Full Table
General information, not tax advice. Always check the current rates on revenue.ie or with a registered accountant.
In Ireland, the Civil Service motoring rates are the benchmark for tax-free mileage reimbursement. An employer — public or private — can reimburse an employee for business travel in their own car up to these rates without any tax, USC or PRSI arising. The current rates were set by DPER Circular 16/2022, took effect on 1 September 2022, and remain in force in 2026. They are quoted in cents per kilometre.
Two things make the rates different from a single flat figure. First, they vary by engine capacity — three bands. Second, they are cumulative and marginal across four annual distance bands: the more business kilometres you clock over the year, the lower the rate on the later kilometres. That means you need a running total of business km by date to apply them correctly.
The rates at a glance
Rates are in cents per kilometre. Read down for your engine band, and across the distance bands — each band's rate applies only to the kilometres that fall within it.
| Annual distance band | ≤ 1,200cc | 1,201–1,500cc | 1,501cc + |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0 – 1,500 km | 41.80c | 43.40c | 51.82c |
| 1,501 – 5,500 km | 72.64c | 79.18c | 90.63c |
| 5,501 – 25,000 km | 31.78c | 31.79c | 39.22c |
| 25,001 km + | 20.56c | 23.85c | 25.87c |
Electric and hybrid vehicles. Fully electric cars are reimbursed using the middle 1,201–1,500cc column. Hybrids use the rate for their equivalent engine capacity, exactly as a petrol or diesel car of the same size would.
A worked example
Say you drive a car over 1,500cc and clock 6,000 business kilometres in the year. Because the bands are marginal, you split the distance and apply each band's rate to the kilometres inside it:
- First 1,500 km × 51.82c = €777.30
- Next 4,000 km (1,501–5,500) × 90.63c = €3,625.20
- Final 500 km (5,501–6,000) × 39.22c = €196.10
Total tax-free reimbursement: €4,598.60. Notice how the big band-2 rate does most of the work, and the rate drops sharply once you pass 5,500 km — which is exactly why an accurate running total matters.
What Revenue expects you to keep
Because the rate depends on your cumulative distance, Revenue expects a record of business kilometres by date — not a round-number estimate at year end. For each business trip you should be able to show the date, the reason for the journey, and the distance. A dated log is what turns a reimbursement into a defensible, tax-free one.
That record often already exists. If you use Google Maps, your Timeline has quietly logged every drive with GPS timestamps and distances. Time-mile turns that export into the dated log Revenue wants — and it runs entirely in your browser, so your location history never touches a server. To build your log:
- Export your Timeline from your phone (see our Timeline export guide).
- Open the file in Time-mile — it is parsed locally, nothing is uploaded.
- Filter to the tax year and to your business trips by date and activity type.
- Export a CSV to total your business kilometres band by band, or a PDF report as your supporting record.
Back your mileage claim with real GPS data
Import your Google Timeline once, export a clean, dated business-km log in minutes.
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