Delivery driving is a customarily tipped occupation, and app-reported tips — the ones itemized in your DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Instacart annual summary — are qualified tips under the 2025 deduction. For a full-time dasher, tips routinely make up 40–60% of gross earnings: $10,000–$18,000 a year of potentially deductible income.
The gig-specific catch is the self-employment limit: your tip deduction can't exceed the net income of the delivery business. Every mile at the standard mileage rate shrinks that net — and high-mileage drivers who (correctly) deduct $12,000 of vehicle costs against $30,000 of gross can find their net income, not their tips, is the binding cap. The tip deduction and the mileage deduction are both real; they just interact, and software handled that interaction badly in 2025.
W-2 delivery drivers — pizza chains, catering companies — skip the net-income complexity entirely: reported tips on the W-2 qualify directly, and any FLSA overtime premium stacks as a separate deduction. Either way, the checkup runs both numbers, and 1040-X recovers what a filed return missed.