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Half of US Uber Drivers Make Less Than $10 An Hour After Vehicle Expenses, Study Says (recode.net)
Echoing a similar study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute, a new study finds the median hourly pay with tip for Uber drivers in the U.S. is $14.73, which includes tips and excludes expenses like insurance, gas and car depreciation incurred while working. The study was conducted by Ridester, a publication that focuses on the ride-hail industry. Recode reports: Using Ridester's low-end estimate of $5 per hour in vehicle costs, drivers would bring in $9.73 per hour and potentially much less. That implies a driver working 40 hours per week would make an annual salary of almost $31,000 before vehicle expenses, and about $20,000 after expenses (but still before taxes). That's below the poverty threshold for a family of three. It's also a far cry from the $70,000 to $90,000 Uber once claimed its drivers made in major markets.
The study, which was conducted this summer, asked drivers for a screenshot of their Uber app's earnings page from their last full day driving. The 719 valid screenshots they used show how many hours the drivers worked and how much they were paid after Uber's cut. It doesn't factor in other costs like taxes or healthcare. And -- worth noting -- the study only represents drivers who were motivated enough to send in their data and isn't necessarily representative of the geographical distribution of Uber drivers.
The study, which was conducted this summer, asked drivers for a screenshot of their Uber app's earnings page from their last full day driving. The 719 valid screenshots they used show how many hours the drivers worked and how much they were paid after Uber's cut. It doesn't factor in other costs like taxes or healthcare. And -- worth noting -- the study only represents drivers who were motivated enough to send in their data and isn't necessarily representative of the geographical distribution of Uber drivers.
They should go to Amazon. They are paying $15 now.
and took an Lyft. 14 mile round trip during 'surge' pricing (it was raining) was $26 bucks. I left a $10 tip each way (hopefully Lyft doesn't take 30% of it). One guy was pretty obviously a recently out of work fellow driving an SUV bought during better times...
Also, $20k is below the poverty threshold for a family of one. Screw the gov't for not raising it. I don't think it's been raised significantly since I was a wee lad.
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but Amazon's very physically demanding. A lot of Uber drivers are folks who can't stand up straight let alone for 8 hours a day. Still, Amazon being forced to pay $15 will help drive wages up. When it comes to wages a rising tide lifts all boats.
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Sit down sometime and do the math.
See how much YOU make per hour after taxes, Medicare, SS, medical - dental - vision insurance, 401k, deductions for various reasons, etc.
It's downright sad.
to run my shop I would be making twice as much. No forced them to be an Uberneer.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Uber never promises you will make any sort of minimum amount. They tout "make up to...", but ever "make at least". On one hand, I can feel bad. Think is, only way it really changes is if the drivers band together and won't drive unless they get paid more. Oh wait, that's what Uber is against........
Nothing showed me the "bad at math" tax more than talking to a driver who was renting their car via Lyft... at $250/week with insurance. They looked at it as they just need to drive 12 hours per week and the car is free. I understand extenuating circumstances, but talk about indentured servitude...
I really appreciate the fact that it is half the price of a taxi-- it means I don't have to rent a car and drive myself nearly as often, so potentially it is better in economic terms. At 20% more though, I don't think I would be able to justify it as much though (with still tipping).
Yes, when you take into account vehicle costs, being an Uber driver does not pay very well.
In Australia, a regular (regulated) taxi driver makes more than an Uber driver.
While you might get paid more by Uber (and "surge pricing"), the Uber driver is responsible for all on-road costs, unlike taxi drivers.
As an Uber driver let me just add that you can to catch mad amounts of pokemon in Pokemon Go while waiting for a ride so there's that.
Wow... that's a lot more than I expected. I'm going to stop being so nice to them.
According to Google the average cost per year for a car is $8000-$9000 which brings a $15 and hour salary down to about $11.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
So where im at, the local car sharing ride kinda-uber drivers know they are earning minimum wage doing this.
But heres the catch. The toyota they bought for this brand new? They will sell it in 3 to 5 years and apparently that's where the payday is.
The economics doesn't work like how it is in usa as a Toyota avanza new is about 60 months minimum wage. After 3 years they can sell it for about 40 months minimum wage.
Interesting way of profiting.
I believe, most car insurance excludes driving for profit/business.
What is the percentage of drivers that are telling their insurance providers how they are using their cars?
No, they weren't forced, but they were conned, and articles like this wake people up to the realities of the numbers.
It reminds me of "Groupon". Groupons sales people would endlessly promote fake gains for shops and restaurants that participated in offering a groupon discount, then a cake shop revealed the actual math of it and Groupon went away, to be reborn as some other thing. Again it was articles like this that revealed the true nature of Groupon.
In this case they would have been better to sell the car and use the money than to become an Uber.
(Settle in, folks. This one REALLY got away from me.)
People seem shocked when the laws of economics are proven over and over and over again. You can't make money out of nothing, or rather wealth out of nothing. You might think finding a seam of gold in a hillside you've claimed, or a giant, perfect pearl in an oyster, or a diamond, etc., is wealth out of nothing but it's not. The reason that those things are commonly held as being worth something, (often quite a bit,) is that they are relatively hard to come by, nearly impossible to fake, (at least until recently... I know, there's fool's gold, and gold-plated solid lead, or fake-looking diamonds, but throughout most of history, the technology to create fakes has rarely raced meaningfully ahead of the technology to detect them and make faking them only briefly ever really profitable. (Some of that technology includes things penalties for fraud, of course, but it's not like there was more than maybe a few years during which someone could fake any of these things and evade detection reliably and long-enough term to be able to extract or accrete about themselves a serious amount of wealth formerly and rightly belonging to others.)
Wealth is simply the accumulation of money; that which represents value, and is a negotiable and highly portable and durable form of storage and exchange that can be, generally, more or less freely converted back and forth between stored value, and a good, service, or other valuable mention. Money that is not exchangeable for anything is quite literally WORTHLESS. Think of Deutschmarks following World War I, when it's said that people would cart whole wheelbarrow-fulls of them to buy a loaf of bread. Consider places that have experienced hyperinflation, where the government is printing trillion-dollar (or trillion-whatever the currency is called)
notes to be used as petty cash. Sure, you might be able to do other things with the bills, like write on them, shred them to start fires, wipe your ass with them, but as a medium of wealth storage and exchange they're worthless. If someone offered you a billion dollars to do some small favor, an unpleasant or annoying task, but not excessively so, obviously most people would do it, once convinced the offer was genuine, and there were no other strings attached... unless of course, while determining if the offer were legit, the person found out that the reason he or she was being offered a billion dollars is that overnight, the dollar's value has crashed so that now a billion dollars is worth less than a penny. Suddenly, most people might be disinclined to do that favor or minor task. Especially if the person asking for the favor first said, "have you heard the big news," and the other person said "no."
"But what, my dear Mister Sinister," you might ask, "is the point of that and how does it relate to Uber?" I am so glad you might ask, as I was just getting to that. Eventually, after this brief furtherance of my digression. Also, please... it's just Hallux. Mister Sinister was my FATHER. (LOL)
Money is only worth what it can be traded for. If someone who can issue currency does so in wild disproportion to the value of the economy that the money is essentially a share of, the money quickly loses value. The more ABOVE the amount at which the value is stable printed or issued impacts the value of each unit in the economy or circulation. See... if there were a trillion US dollars floating around, and overnight, the government quietly printed another trillion and started either giving it away or buying things with that money, the total value of the US economy will not have changed meaningfully; actually it will shrink a little due to the expense of printing all that money pointlessly, (let's further suppose it were unnecessary to print that,) and the market volatility and panic buying of supplies that would result would do further damage. BUT even once the dust has settled, the printing of a second trillion makes the original trillion (and each of
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
No skill required besides driving that everyone does anyway, no job interviews, no fixed hours. Car depreciation only needs to be paid off years later, which is a good tradeoff if you need cash now. So the main complaint is that an entry level job is... an entry level job. If you learn to drive a bus or a luxury limo, or do something that requires more skill than just driving around, you can get more.
you take away $10/hr after all expenses, and all you do is sit down on your ass all day long. You don't even get out of the car to eat, you just go to the mcdonalds drive-through for dinner like always.
Meanwhile, there are people in other countries performing manual labor 10 hrs per day for less than half of that.
You're lazy.
...Where you are allocated to work in a factory for less money, building mobile phones for people in affluent capitalist countries?
But hey! Everyone is equal! As equal as people in prison! This time it communism will work!
Really not my concern, If you take a job that doesnt meet your needs then find another job. Sorry your not being force to drive for uber. Drive the car and shutup.
Taking on student loans you can't afford and won't be able to afford is pretty silly, especially if you get a degree in Iranian History or Women's Studies at a private university for $60,000.
My Cisco CCNA cost me $400. ($300 for the exam, $100 for study materials, YouTube study videos free). The payback period from the salary increase was well less than a year. I've now quadrupled my income after earning six certifications.
My masters degree in computer science from Georgia Tech will cost $5,600. That's $7,000 tuition minus $1,400 tax credit.
In my family, we get training and education, not loans. You can do what you want.
PHD is the new High school and US people have 250K loans vs others with no loans and much lower costs.
And you may be better off not working vs working at min wage with no benefits and a big loan to pay back.
Is this ridesharing, where the title suggest that you're just sharing your vehicle on the way to a prescheduled event. Or are these people professional taxi drivers?
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
PHD is the new High school and US people have 250K loans vs others with no loans and much lower costs.
And you may be better off not working vs working at min wage with no benefits and a big loan to pay back.
Well that's a whole new level of hyperbole. Hardly any job requires a PhD and the average student loan debt is around $20-30k.
Well, gee, we should just let Hallux run our economy and then only perfectly just economic decisions would get made. You are entirely capable of determining what is fair for everyone to get paid for what they know and are capable of, right?
And if someone wants to pay someone more than you'll allow... well I guess you could have either the willing buyer of services or the willing seller of services imprisoned for trying to perform an unjust transaction!
In a free society, however, prices aren't set by a third party who thinks he's got it all figured out. They're made by mutual agreement of the concerned parties.
Plenty of Billionaires make a point of giving away huge amounts of money to charities... but it's theirs to give away, not yours. You worry about yours. Bill Gate's billions didn't take a bite out of your mouth, though you think you'd be great at taking billions from Bill Gates and putting it in other people's mouths.... nothing could possibly go wrong with that, correct?
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Half of the planet, really..
I know a few people that left decent paying FTJs to go drive for Uber. Every one of them ended up making WAY less money. I kind of get it. When I was a kid I had a delivery driver job and it was pretty fun. Driving is fun — except during rush hour. It makes sense as a way to pick up a few extra bucks. If it (Uber) is your primary source of income, you're doing it wrong.
So is your excuse that you're bad at math, or you think your Business Adminstration degree is going to earn hundreds or thousands more than my masters in Comp Sci?
Comes with the territory, I suppose.
I'll try to cry a little tear for them later on tonight.