2014 Standard Mileage Rates
IR-2013-95, Dec. 6, 2013

WASHINGTON — The Internal Revenue Service today issued the 2014 optional standard mileage rates used to calculate the deductible costs of operating an automobile for business, charitable, medical or moving purposes.

Beginning on Jan. 1, 2014, the standard mileage rates for the use of a car (also vans, pickups or panel trucks) will be:
56 cents per mile for business miles driven
23.5 cents per mile driven for medical or moving purposes
14 cents per mile driven in service of charitable organizations

The business, medical, and moving expense rates decrease one-half cent from the 2013 rates. The charitable rate is based on statute.

The standard mileage rate for business is based on an annual study of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile. The rate for medical and moving purposes is based on the variable costs.

Taxpayers always have the option of calculating the actual costs of using their vehicle rather than using the standard mileage rates.

A taxpayer may not use the business standard mileage rate for a vehicle after using any depreciation method under the Modified Accelerated Cost Recovery System (MACRS) or after claiming a Section 179 deduction for that vehicle. In addition, the business standard mileage rate cannot be used for more than four vehicles used simultaneously.

These and other requirements for a taxpayer to use a standard mileage rate to calculate the amount of a deductible business, moving, medical, or charitable expense are in Rev. Proc. 2010-51. Notice 2013-80 contains the standard mileage rates, the amount a taxpayer must use in calculating reductions to basis for depreciation taken under the business standard mileage rate, and the maximum standard automobile cost that a taxpayer may use in computing the allowance under a fixed and variable rate plan.

Words v. Definitions

Forward to Fifth Edition of Cochran's Law Lexicon

When we use a law lexicon, we ought to consider what some of the wise members of the legal profession, who have gone before us, have had to say about dictionaries and words. Justice Robert H. Jackson said that a dictionary was the last resort of the baffled judge. Justice Lucius Q. C. Lamar said that words are the common signs that mankind make use of to declare their intention to one another. Perhaps the most foreboding statement about words was by Lord William Mansfield:

"Most of the disputes in the world arise from words."

Lord Mansfield's statement should be a warning to people who write dictionaries, and persons who use them should also consider the advice of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.:

"A word generally has several meanings, even in the dictionary. You have to
consider the sentence in which it stands to decide which of those meanings it
bears in the particular case, and very likely will see that it there has a shade
of significance more refined than any given in the wordbook."

Similarly, Judge Learned Hand said that words are chameleons, which reflect the color of their environment. At another time he developed the same theme to a greater degree:

"Of course it is true that the words used, even in their literal sense, are the
primary,and ordinarily the most reliable, source of interpreting the meaning of
any writing: be it a statute, a contract, or anything else. But it is one of the
surest indexes of a mature and developed jurisprudence not to make a fortress
out of the dictionary; but to remember that statutes always have some purpose or
object to accomplish, whose sympathetic and imaginative discovery is the surest
guide to their meaning."

Perhaps one of the best known statements concerning this very point was from Justice Holmes, when he argued that it was not necessarily true that the word, "income", means the same thing in the Constitution and in a statute:

"...A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a
living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the
circumstances and the time in which it is used."

It is the character of human language that no word conveys to the mind one single definite idea in all situations. Almost all written work contains words which, if taken in their rigorous sense, would convey a meaning different from that which is obviously intended. In law and elsewhere, words of many-hued meanings derive their scope from the use to which they are put. Words express whatever meaning convention has attached to them.