Feb 02, 2021 Average Uber Driver yearly pay in the United States is approximately $31,537, which is 34% below the national average. Salary information comes from 823 data points collected directly from employees, users, and past and present job advertisements on Indeed in the past 36 months. DoorDash Driver Income Report I have not yet completed a delivery for DoorDash, so I interviewed John, a DoorDash driver in Orange County, and asked him to report his real-life earnings. Orange County is a big, sprawling area that requires lots of driving, so it was interesting to see how distance between deliveries can factor into overall pay. After paying all expenses, and after the app takes its cut, drivers for a service like Uber and Lyft average between $8.55 and $11.77 per hour. That's quite a bit less than what the U.S.
Delivery jobs with DoorDash are now available in most major cities in the US, and the company is beginning to promote itself as one of the best new on-demand jobs that is similar to Uber and Lyft. DoorDash ads say you can make up to $25/hour, but is that really how much DoorDash drivers make? I found a real DoorDash driver who can help us find out.
DoorDash Driver Income Report
I have not yet completed a delivery for DoorDash, so I interviewed John, a DoorDash driver in Orange County, and asked him to report his real-life earnings. Orange County is a big, sprawling area that requires lots of driving, so it was interesting to see how distance between deliveries can factor into overall pay at the end of each shift.
Read more about DoorDash driver requirements to see if you qualify.
How John’s day out driving for DoorDash broke down:
- Hours worked: 4
- # orders: 5
- Pay: $45.37
- Miles driven: 60 miles
- Pay: $11.34/hour (not factoring in miles driven)
- Vehicle expenses for John’s Honda: $0.30/mile
- Pay, after deducting vehicle expenses: $27.37
- Frustration factor: Low to medium
It looks like John made around $11/hour, but after factoring in vehicle expenses, his hourly take-home is less than $10/hour. If you’re interested, check out John’s daily driving log to see how much he made on other shifts.
What DoorDash shows on a daily income report
DoorDash reports income to drivers by week and by “dash,” their term for each continuous shift. If you drive a split shift in one day, you’ll get two separate income reports. Below is John’s income report for his shift on December 1st 2015.
DoorDash reports your pay from deliveries (each delivery pays a $5 flat fee), tips, deductions (in case of errors), and Boost Pay, a bonus system DoorDash uses for longer or more difficult orders.
0014There’s no way to see how much each individual customer tipped you. The Postmates app does show the tip amount for each individual order.
John’s DoorDash diary: How the day went down
“It was a busy day for me. In four hours I got five orders and had almost not downtime. I got my first order 16 minutes after I signed on, which is good. My final order ended 4 and a half hours into my 5 hour shift, and I spent the last 30 minutes of my shift driving home.
My pay for today was average to slightly above average, and I drove fewer miles than some other shifts I’ve driven in Orange County. I drive as much as 100 miles in a 5 hour shift.
The day didn’t come with too many frustrations, which was different from other days. On some other days there are order mixups, long waits to get food, confusing calls with the customer, long waits to reach customer support, and very long drives between orders. All of that can add up to a bit of frustration.”
Stories from John’s shift:
“I had a few name mixups on this shift, which is pretty common. On one order I had for “James,” the restaurant only had a order for “Jane.” The restaurant asked me to describe the order, and it turned out that my order for “James” matched the order for “Jane,” so they gave me the food and I went off to deliver it. Not too big of a hassle, but it’s something that happens pretty regularly, I think because when DoorDash employees manually call in orders, restaurants mishear the name.
On another order, a notification in the app let me know that I would be personally ordering the food. Typically DoorDash support orders the food, but occasionally the driver has to do it if the restaurant doesn’t take phone orders. I read off the list of items on the order, and the restaurant employee said they didn’t make two of the items. I called the customer to let him know, and he decided to cancel the order. I’m pretty sure I didn’t get paid anything for that!”
Thanks for sharing, John.
Readers: I’ll update this post with more DoorDash income reports in the future. If you’re a DoorDash driver and you’d like to share your earnings, leave a comment below.
(Extract from pages 47-48 of BIS Quarterly Review, March 2016)
The recent debate has focused mostly on income inequality - the distribution of returns from labour and capital - within, but also across, countries.
Within countries, income inequality has risen globally. Graph A (left-hand panel) shows that there is a U-shaped time pattern in average income inequality, a pattern that is observable across economies. After thinning in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, the right tail of the income distribution has been getting fatter.; The same U-shaped pattern is found in the share of income accruing to the top 1% of the distribution (Graph A, centre panel), suggesting that the top end of the distribution is an important driver of inequality. Rising income inequality within countries contrasts with narrower income dispersion across countries. Between 1988 and 2008, the global income distribution narrowed: the bottom tail of the distribution shifted to the right (Graph A, right-hand panel). This shift largely reflects growth in middle-income EMEs, especially China.
Rising income inequality within economies and a lower dispersion of incomes across countries are consistent with global factors driving inequality trends. Economic and financial globalisation is thought to have widened the income distribution by increasing the ratio of skilled to unskilled wages. Highly skilled workers benefit from global opportunities, whereas the low-skilled face stiff competition from (cheaper) foreign labour and a loss of bargaining power. By the same token, workers in EMEs have seen their wages rise relative to those of their AE counterparts even as low-skilled wages have fallen relative to those of more skilled workers within AEs. This process has likely been supported by skill-biased technological progress and by advances in information technology in particular.
The integration of the labour force of large EMEs into global production has probably reduced the rate of return on labour relative to capital. As a consequence, the returns to wealth (ie corporate profits, dividends, rents, sales of property, capital gains) and the share of capital in total income have increased. Given that the distribution of wealth is more concentrated than the distribution of income, a rising capital share increases income inequality.
Lyft Drivers Income
Moreover, the faster rise in remuneration at the very top of the income distribution relative to wage growth in the lower percentiles has been linked both to the rapid growth of the financial sector since the 1980s and to changes in the social norms that contribute to the determination of executive pay (Piketty (2014)).
Redistributive fiscal policies appear have reduced the level of inequality, especially in AEs, but they have not changed long-term trends (Graph B).
Drivers Income Inequality
The left-hand panel of Graph A plots time series of the Pareto coefficient - a measure that captures the higher-income part of the distribution. The higher the Pareto coefficient, the fatter the upper tail of the income distribution. For concreteness, if the Pareto coefficient is 2, the average income of individuals with income above $100,000 is $200,000 and the average income of individuals with income above $1 million is $2 million. Lakner and Milanović (2013) estimate the global distribution of income by aggregating within country household surveys. They correct for income underreporting at the top by using the discrepancy between consumption growth in national accounts and in household surveys. This is allocated to the top 10% of the income distribution by fitting a Pareto distribution to the upper tail. In the United States, for example, in 2010 the top 1% of households held about 35% of total wealth (see Graph 1, right-most panel) but 18% of total income (see Graph A, centre panel).