Federal mileage rates changed in the middle of the year for only the second time since 2017, and the notice telling agencies about it arrives six weeks after the rates began to apply
Seventy-six cents a mile, backdated to the first of July.
The General Services Administration filed a notice for public inspection on Monday morning adjusting what the federal government pays an employee who uses a privately owned vehicle on official travel. The rates apply to travel and relocation performed on or after 1 July 2026 and run to the end of the calendar year. They are carried in FTR Bulletin 26-03 and are already on the agency's website. The notice publishes on Tuesday, and it says of itself that it is the only notification agencies will get.
So the rates have been in force for about six weeks before the formal notice reaches the people who administer them.
Two of the rates are the agency's own arithmetic and two are not
GSA has no discretion over the automobile figure. Statute requires it to set that rate at the single standard mileage rate the Internal Revenue Service establishes, and the notice records that the IRS announced a midyear adjustment on 13 July. The business rate went from 72.5 cents to 76. The rate the IRS sets for medical and moving purposes went from 20.5 cents to 23.5, and that one governs two separate lines in the federal travel rules: what an employee gets when a government automobile was authorised and available and they drove their own instead, and the standard rate for an official relocation.
The airplane and the motorcycle are different. Neither rate comes from the IRS at all. GSA runs its own periodic investigations into what it costs to operate a privately owned airplane or motorcycle, and the notice states that the IRS midyear modifications prompted it to complete new ones.
Those produced the largest move on the list. A privately owned airplane goes from $1.78 a mile to $1.935, an increase of 15.5 cents. A motorcycle goes from 70.5 cents to 74.
Against the table of rates GSA publishes, which runs back to 1 January 2017, $1.935 is the highest airplane rate in the record. The previous high was $1.81, set on 1 July 2022.
The smallest number moved the furthest
The automobile rate rose 3.5 cents on a base of 72.5, which is about 4.8 percent. The relocation and government-car-available rate rose 3 cents on a base of 20.5, which is about 14.6 percent. It is the smallest figure on the sheet and it took the biggest proportional increase, which matters to anybody moving house for a federal job this autumn rather than to anybody driving to a meeting.
Midyear is the unusual part
The historical table on the GSA page lists eleven effective dates going back to the start of 2017. Ten of them fall on 1 January.
The exception is 1 July 2022. This is the second time in that published record that federal mileage rates have changed in the middle of a year, and the notice offers no reason of its own beyond following the IRS and the results of its own investigations. Why the IRS moved in July is not addressed in anything GSA filed.
