Volunteer Mileage Rate Parity

The federal charitable mileage rate, which sets how much a volunteer can be reimbursed tax-free for driving on behalf of a nonprofit, is fixed in statute and has not moved in years. The federal business mileage rate, set administratively and adjusted for fuel costs most years, has risen repeatedly over the same period. NANA's position is that this gap has nothing to do with the actual cost of driving — a chapter volunteer's fuel and maintenance costs are identical whether the trip is for a nonprofit or a business — and everything to do with the charitable rate requiring an act of Congress to change while the business rate does not.

The practical effect is that a chapter board member driving three hours each way to a regional meeting is reimbursed at a rate that no longer covers the actual cost of the trip, several years running, unless the chapter tops up the difference out of its own budget. Most chapters do not have the budget line to do that consistently, so the shortfall usually falls on the volunteer.

Chapter leadership in NANA's structure runs almost entirely on volunteers who drive to in-person meetings, and the mileage gap is a real, if modest, disincentive to taking on that role. A volunteer weighing whether to run for chapter chair is not going to decline over a mileage-rate gap alone, but the accumulation of small frictions — mileage, parking, the meeting-day time away from work — is exactly the kind of thing NANA's chapter-leadership pipeline needs to keep removing, not adding to, as chapters compete for the same pool of willing volunteers.

The gap also creates an odd asymmetry: association staff traveling on the same trip for the same meeting, reimbursed at the business rate, are made whole; the volunteer board member sitting next to them in the car is not.

NANA is asking Congress to tie the charitable mileage rate to the business mileage rate going forward, so it adjusts automatically rather than requiring separate legislation each time fuel costs rise. This is the centerpiece ask at Advocacy Day 2026, where NANA members will meet with their representatives to make the case directly, using each chapter's own volunteer-mileage figures rather than a general appeal.

Short of automatic adjustment, NANA would support a one-time increase to close the current gap, though the policy team's preference is a structural fix that does not require repeating this ask every few years.