If you drive for a rideshare app, deliver food, or rent out a spare room, your tax bill this spring may look different than last year's.
A change in how platforms report income is pushing more of those earnings onto a Form 1099-K, the document once reserved for bigger operations.
The result: millions of side-hustlers are seeing a paper trail they never had to deal with before.
Getting a 1099-K does not mean you suddenly owe tax on money that was never taxable.
What's new is that the government and the apps are now matching numbers more closely, so the "I didn't know I had to report that" defense is fading fast.
The bigger headache is that a 1099-K often reports gross payments, not your profit.
If you drove 12,000 miles and spent $4,000 on gas, tolls, and phone bills, that money is not income.
You have to subtract those costs yourself, or you'll pay tax on money you never actually kept.
That is why tracking mileage matters more than ever.
The standard mileage rate for 2024 sits at 67 cents per mile, and every business mile you log is a deduction.
A driver who puts on 15,000 business miles can knock roughly $10,000 off their taxable income.
Skip the log, and you hand that money back to the IRS.
Self-employment tax is the other gut punch.
Gig workers pay both the employee and employer share of Social Security and Medicare, which lands at 15.3% on top of regular income tax.
Set aside roughly 25% to 30% of your net profit as you earn it, and April stops being a crisis.
Some apps now offer to withhold taxes for you, but many do not, and a few have quietly changed their settings.
Check your dashboard before the year ends, not after.
If nothing is being set aside, open a separate savings account and move a slice of every payout into it.
Free filing options exist through IRS Free File if your income is low enough, and many tax software tools handle gig income for under $50.
Paying a preparer $150 to catch a missed mileage deduction is often the cheaper move.
The people who get burned are rarely the ones earning the most.
They are the ones who ignore the forms, guess at their expenses, and file at the last minute.
The people who come out fine do three boring things: log their miles, save a cut of every payment, and keep receipts in one folder.
But gig work is real work, and the tax code finally treats it that way.
Final Thoughts
Treat your records the same way, and the surprise disappears.