Is DoorDash or Uber worth it after gas? How to work out your real pay

"Is it worth it after gas?" has a real answer for your own car and your own city, and it takes four numbers you can collect in a week of driving. The trap is working it out per order, when the cost of a shift also includes the kilometres and minutes between orders.

How do you work out your real pay?

Use a whole period (a shift, a day or a week) and this formula:

Real pay per hour = (payouts − fuel − wear) ÷ hours signed in

• Payouts: what the platforms paid you, tips included.
• Fuel: every kilometre you drove while working, including to pickups and between orders, plus the fuel burned waiting with the engine on.
• Wear: what the driving costs the car in maintenance, tires and lost value. More on that in how much wear gig driving puts on a car.
• Hours signed in: all of them, not only the time with an order. Waiting is part of the job.

This is before income tax. In Canada, self-employed drivers also pay both halves of CPP out of it (taxes for Uber, DoorDash and Skip drivers in Canada).

What does gas cost per kilometre?

Fuel cost per km = litres per 100 km × price per litre ÷ 100. Using example prices (yours will differ):

In miles: price per gallon ÷ miles per gallon. A car getting 30 mpg at an example $3.60 a gallon costs 12 cents a mile.

Use what your car really burns, not the rating. Look up the official figure in Natural Resources Canada's ratings, then expect worse in delivery driving. The US government's fueleconomy.gov says "excessive idling decreases MPG," that "cold weather and frequent short trips can reduce fuel economy," and that hard acceleration and braking can cut mileage by "10% to 40% in stop-and-go traffic." Short hops between restaurants and doors combine all three (our inference). The most reliable figure is your own: litres pumped divided by kilometres driven between full tanks.

What does waiting cost?

With the engine running, waiting burns fuel and pays nothing. Argonne National Laboratory measured a 2.5-litre sedan idling at about 0.28 mL a second, roughly 1 litre an hour (Argonne). Natural Resources Canada says a 3-litre engine wastes 300 mL every 10 minutes, about 1.8 litres an hour (NRCan). Heating or air conditioning adds more.

NRCan's advice: for a warm engine, idling for more than 10 seconds uses more fuel than restarting, so turn the engine off when you're stopped for more than 60 seconds, except in traffic. Parked outside a restaurant for ten minutes is exactly that case. Many municipalities also have idling by-laws (see our fleet idling article).

A worked example

One evening shift, with example numbers:

The arithmetic is ours. Two things move the answer most in practice: the share of kilometres you drive without an order, and the hours you sit waiting. An order that pays well for the trip itself can still drag the hour down if it needs a long empty drive to reach it.

Which costs are easy to forget?

• The empty kilometres. Driving to a pickup or repositioning between orders burns the same fuel as a paid trip.
• Wear. Tires, brakes, oil and the car's value all go with kilometres. A US driver who takes the IRS standard mileage rate can't also deduct depreciation, lease payments, maintenance and repairs, fuel, oil, insurance or registration (IRS Publication 463), because the rate stands in for them (our reading): a useful reminder that fuel is only part of the cost.
• Insurance. A rideshare or delivery endorsement, where your insurer requires one, is a cost of the work.
• Your phone. Data and a mount are business costs too.