Your notarial-act fees are exempt from the 15.3% self-employment tax — but only if you split them out per act. Lump them in with travel and print fees like most notaries (and most software) do, and you hand the IRS money you never owed. NotaryPilot does the split for you and logs your mileage automatically.
Under IRC §1402(c)(2), fees you earn for the notarial act itself aren't subject to SE tax. Travel fees, print fees, and signing-agent fees generally are. The catch: you have to separate them, act by act.
A $150 loan signing isn't $150 of notarial fees. Maybe $10 is the act; the rest is travel and signing-agent work. Report it as one number and you pay 15.3% on the exempt part too.
At the 2025 IRS rate, a 40-mile round trip is a $28 deduction. Miss a few a week logging by memory and it's four figures a year, gone.
No free tool or generic bookkeeping app knows a notarial act from a travel fee. So the exemption sits unused — you never even see the bill.
Log a signing in about 30 seconds. NotaryPilot separates the exempt notarial-act fee from taxable travel and signing-agent fees, tracks your mileage by GPS, and shows a running total of what you're saving — ready for your CPA at year end.
Free to start. Your journal stays free forever. Set up in under two minutes.