Figuring out how much Uber drivers really make is harder than you might think.
Uber won’t give you any specific earnings numbers, and a lot of the info you see online may not be reliable.
Tiktokkers and Youtubers might say they are making $50 an hour. Then someone who sounds smart on Reddit will say that, actually, drivers make less than minimum wage after subtracting expenses!
Who can you trust? The best thing you can do is look at a variety of data from many different sources to figure out a general number.
We looked at the top employment sites, trusted bloggers, and sources that get income data directly from drivers.
What you need to know
- Based on the top sources we studied, average Uber driver pay ranges from $15–$25 per hour
- On a yearly basis, salaries for an Uber driver range from $30,000–$65,000
- You can make $1000 per week, but it may take 50+ hours
- According to the BLS, similar drivers make $16 per hour or $35k per year
- Pay on Uber can be inconsistent. It can change day to day and week to week
Want to drive? Apply to drive for Uber here!
Article Contents
- Table: How Much Uber Drivers Make
- Can You Make $100/day? $1000/week?
- Earnings Data from Salary.com, Indeed, Glassdoor
- What Trusted Bloggers say about Uber Pay
- Crowdsourced Data and Government Research
- True Profit: Gross vs Net Earnings
- FAQs about Uber Driver Pay
- Is Driving for Uber Worth it?
How much Uber drivers make, according to top sources
Data from leading sources around the web: Job sites, bloggers, and crowdsourced data.
| Data Source | Uber Driver Pay |
|---|---|
| Salary.com | $41,000 per year |
| Indeed | $30,000 per year |
| Glassdoor | $40,000–$100,000 per year |
| The Rideshare Guy | $15–$20 per hour |
| GoBankingRates.com | $8–$12 per hour |
| Gridwise | $12–$25 per hour |
| Bureau of Labor Statistics | $34k per year, $16.67 per hour |
What does Uber say about driver pay?
Let’s start by going straight to the source. At Uber.com, visit “how much can drivers make with Uber” to get a good idea of how they handle this question.
You’ll find that Uber doesn’t make any claims about specific driver earnings.
For example, they don’t list hourly pay, salary, pay per ride, or pay per trip.
The closest you’ll get to a direct answer about driver pay is: “The money you make driving with the Uber app depends on when, where, and how often you drive.”
So why won’t Uber tell you how much you can make? Surely they have tons of data from every city where they operate.
Uber used to make more specific claims about driver earnings, but they were hit with lawsuits claiming that advertised income figures were misleading.
In just one example of many lawsuits, Uber had to pay $20 million in fines for misleading earnings claims.
Making claims about driver earnings is a legal and regulatory minefield, so generally, you won’t see Uber making earnings claims anymore.
Can you make $100 per day driving for Uber?
Uber drivers can make $100 per day, according to the driver pay data from our sources.
The number of hours it takes to reach $100 varies quite a bit, depending on how much you can earn in your city,
If you earn $20 per hour, you’ll hit $100 in just 5 hours.
But if you’re on the lower end of earnings, like the $14,000 per year figure from Indeed.com, it will take you a lot longer to make $100.
Can you make $1000 per week?
The data we studied shows that some drivers can earn $1000 per week but it is very location dependent and not something that every driver can achieve.
The drivers hitting $1,000 per week are in busy markets during busy times of the year. $1,000 per week is around $50,000 per year, which is on the higher end of most of the data we looked at.
Most of the data shows that full-time drivers will earn about $30,000 to $40,000 per year. So if you drive 50 weeks in a year, that works out to $600–$800 per week.
Put another way; if you make $15 per hour, you’ll have to drive over 66 hours to hit $1,000. That’s not sustainable for most drivers.
You may have a great week here and there or even a $4,000 month, but during slower times of the year, your earnings will likely dip below your target of $1,000.
Is driving for Uber a reliable source of income?
DoorDash is a reliable source of part-time income that can help you earn an extra $100–$1000 per month.
Driving for Uber is a reliable way to earn part-time income, but it may not be as reliable for full-time income.
You can rely on Uber for an extra $100–$1000 per month, and it’s a great way to help cover surprise bills or save up a few hundred dollars every month.
In in smaller, less active markets, you can depend on Uber for side money.
But driving for Uber isn’t as dependable for full-time income. It may be easy to find examples of $1,000 per week or $50,000 per year, but you can’t always expect that to be true in your case.
There are lots of barriers to reliable making a full-time income on Uber: Local demand for rides is constantly changing, Uber regularly changes payout rates, and vehicle expenses are much higher for full-time drivers.
Data from job & career websites about average Uber driver pay
On your first search about Uber driver income, you’ll probably land on one of the big-name job sites that advertise their job listing services all over TV and the internet.
Sites like Indeed and Salary.com are good ways to get a general sense of the pay for a particular job, but there are limitations.
One thing to look out for is that these sites mostly talk about Uber driver pay in terms of salary, but Uber doesn’t pay a salary.
You’re paid for each ride you complete, and there is no guaranteed minimum hourly pay (except in California and NYC).
So when you see that Glassdoor says you can make $50,000 per year with Uber, remember that most drivers actually think about their pay in terms of earnings per hour, per mile, or per trip.
Salary.com: $41,000 per year on Uber
According to Salary.com, the median Uber driver in Los Angeles makes $41,802. That means that half earn more, and half earn less.
The data says that the top 10% of drivers make more than $59,000, and the bottom 10% make around $28,000.
Salary.com doesn’t provide any information about earnings per hour or earnings per trip. Their data is more oriented toward traditional salaried positions, and driving for Uber is anything but traditional.
It’s helpful to see a range of salaries based on location, but the fact that the data doesn’t include any extra nuances about the Uber earnings model indicates that the data isn’t perfectly reliable.
Salary.com has pretty visuals with a higher-than-average median
Indeed: ~$30,000 per year for Uber drivers
If you look up ‘uber driver’ at Indeed.com, you’ll find a page for your city or state that lists yearly salaries for drivers.
According to Indeed, an Uber driver in California can expect to make an average of $30,516 per year.
On the low end, drivers earn $14,000 per year, and on the high end, $73,000. That’s a big range!
Indeed doesn’t go into any detail about how drivers are paid. For example, they don’t discuss earnings per trip, earnings per mile, or even earnings per hour.
Indeed.com generally talks about traditional salaried jobs and tries to fit Uber driving into that mold.
Driving for Uber is not a traditional salaried job, but they maintain that their data is from real drivers.
It may be more helpful to think in terms of earnings per hour/trip/mile, but Indeed gives a decent general sense of what you can expect if you drive in your area.
Indeed provides another salary-oriented income figure
Glassdoor: $40,000–$100,000 per year
Glassdoor says that an Uber driver in Los Angeles can earn, on average, $63,000 per year, with a likely range of $40,000 to $100,000.
Glassdoor offers the biggest range of pay and the highest maximum pay of all the major job sites. No other large job site says you can make $100k with Uber.
But there is a problem. Glass door breaks the numbers down in terms of ‘base’ pay, ‘additional’ pay, and a ‘pay trajectory’ for drivers. Uber doesn’t offer any of those for drivers.
Those measures are closer to the traditional salary + bonus that salaried workers typically get. Uber doesn’t have a salary or bonus.
However, lower on the page, you’ll find a range of hourly pay that sounds more in line with other data sources: $15–$20 per hour.
And $15–$20 per hour is nowhere near the $60k–$100k range listed on the page. So take these measures to be very general info.
Glassdoor had the highest income numbers of all the sources
But Glassdoor’s hourly numbers don’t match up to the yearly salary numbers
What trusted blogs say about Uber driver income
Another common data source you’ll find online is rideshare bloggers. Typically these are drivers—or former drivers—who write about Uber.
The Rideshare Guy: $15–$20 per hour
The Rideshare Guy has a comprehensive article going over Uber driver pay. Ultimately, they say drivers can expect to earn around $15 to $20 per hour.
Interestingly, they mention some Uber data that says Uber driver pay is around $19 per hour or about $28–$32 per hour in Los Angeles.
That must be older data from Uber because it seems like Uber no longer publishes any specific earnings data.
The information from The Rideshare Guy is much more helpful than the big job sites because they go into a lot of detail about the entire payment system with Uber.
You’ll learn how drivers are paid, how surge pricing works, pay per mile, pay per ride, tips, sign-up bonuses, driver expenses, and how to earn more.
GoBankingRates.com: $8 to $12 per hour
GoBankingRates.com has a top-ranking article about Uber driver pay.
In the article, the author provides a few data points. The first is a pay range of $8 to $12 per hour that cites unlinked studies.
The second piece of data is an earnings table that lists income ranges in a few US cities.
In that table, the median yearly income is around $33k–$43k. That means that half of the drivers earn more, and half earn less.
But much of the data is quite a bit higher than the other stated figure of $8 to $12 per hour.
If you drive 50 hours per week and 50 weeks per year at $10 per hour, your yearly income would only be around $25,000.
The article doesn’t cite their data, but there is other helpful information about how pay works for drivers and other important issues like gross vs. net income.
GoBankingRates shows more data variety but didn’t link to their source
Driver income from crowdsourced data and government research
Many of the other sources in this article use secondary data or user-submitted data. The sources below use primary data that comes directly from real drivers.
Gridwise: $12 to $25 per hour
Gridwise is an app for gig economy drivers that uses real earnings information to help drivers earn more.
Users can share their app data with Gridwise, giving Gridwise a direct source of information about driver income.
According to Gridwise, Uber drivers earn anywhere from $12 to $24 per hour. Gridwise data proves that earnings vary substantially from city to city.
Gridwise also has detailed data about earnings per mile and trip, which are much more relevant to Uber drivers than yearly salary figures.
Gridwise integrates with individual driver accounts to pull in earnings data
The Bureau of Labor Statistics: $16.67 per hour, $34k per year
The Bureau of Labor Statistics, a federal government agency, doesn’t have a category specially for Uber or other on-demand app drivers. But there is a category that closely matches this type of work.
‘”Passenger vehicle drivers” is a category at the BLS that may include Uber drivers, and if it doesn’t, it is a close enough match to be helpful for a study of driver income.
The BLS says that the median pay for passenger vehicle drivers is $34,670 per year or $16.67 per hour. Half of the drivers earn more than that number, and half earn less.
The BLS data is in line with other data sources and uses real info from US taxpayers, so it does appear to be a relevant comparison for Uber drivers.
For government data, the Passenger Vehicle Driver category is the closest we can get to Uber driver
Calculating your true profits: Gross vs net pay
Most of the sources you’ll find that discuss Uber driver earnings are for gross pay, which means that driver expenses aren’t considered.
Uber drivers have to pay for their own expenses, so a more realistic way to talk about a driver’s earnings is net pay, which is income minus expenses.
Income – Expenses = Net Profit
Without subtracting expenses, you won’t know your true profit.
Significant expenses for Uber drivers include:
- Fuel
- Maintenance and repairs
- Insurance
- Taxes
- Vehicle depreciation
After subtracting expenses, your net profit will look much lower than your gross income.
In terms of vehicle expenses, according to data from AAA a smaller vehicle costs around 40 cents per mile to operate. So if you drive 25,000 miles per year for DoorDash, that’s $10,000 in vehicle expenses.
But wait! There’s a massive tax deduction that changes the equation and accounts for much of your vehicle expenses.
How the standard mileage deduction increases your profits
Uber drivers can claim the standard mileage deduction on their taxes. It’s designed to compensate self-employed drivers for vehicle expenses.
For 2022, the deduction is 65.5 cents per mile.
If you drive 25,000 miles in a year for Uber, your standard mileage deduction is $16,375. That means that your taxable income is reduced by that amount.
Your vehicle most likely does not cost 65.5 cents per mile to operate, so this large deduction will help offset your vehicle expenses by substantially lowering your taxable income.
Carefully track your miles, either with an app or a logbook.
Before tax time, Uber will provide some mileage tracking data, but you will want to use your own numbers because Uber may not include all deductible miles.
FAQs about Uber driver pay
How do Uber drivers get paid? What’s the earnings formula?
There are currently two earnings formulas for Uber drivers.
The newer formula, called upfront pricing, is now in most markets in the US.
With the upfront model, drivers see how much they will earn for a ride before accepting the request. The ride request shows how far the pickup is, and the drop-off distance & location.
With the upfront model, Uber uses a private algorithm to determine pay. Drivers aren’t paid according to a rate card formula.
In other words, with upfront pricing, you won’t know why you’re being paid a certain amount, but you’ll have plenty of information to see whether a ride is worth it or not.
The other earnings formula is a model that calculates pay based on a set rate card.
In this model, the rate card for each city determines how much you are paid per mile and minute. Then, after a ride, you’ll see exactly how much you earned based on the rate card.
How and when are drivers paid?
Uber pays drivers once per week via direct deposit.
Drivers can also choose to withdraw their earnings at any time with Instant Pay, but there is a fee of 85 cents per withdrawal.
If you sign up for the Uber Pro Card, you can get Instant Pay withdrawals for free, along with other benefits like cash back on gas.
Does Uber cover gas or any other vehicle expenses?
No, Uber does not directly compensate drivers for expenses. Drivers must pay for their own gas, auto insurance, maintenance, and other expenses.
What are Quest, Boost, and Surge?
Quest, Boost, and Surge are earnings bonuses that allow drivers to earn more than the standard rate.
With Quest, you earn a bonus for completing a set number of rides.
Boost is an earnings multiplier added to rides that begin and end within a designated area on the map.
Surge is another earnings multiplier that is added during periods of high demand.
What are the best days and times to drive for Uber?
Morning commute, evening commute, and nightlife hours are the best times to drive in many cities. Other top times are weekend nights and Sundays.
You can use an app like Gridwise to see the best days and times to drive in your city based on real driver data.
Summing it up: Is it worth it to drive for Uber?
When someone is thinking about driving for Uber, they might have two questions: How much can you expect to make, and is it worth it?
It’s hard to find specific, reliable data about Uber driver earnings in any one particular place.
So many variables go into figuring out earnings, and just as many go into figuring out expenses and true profitability.
But in the end, most US Uber drivers earn around $15–$20 per hour. You may make much more on a great week or much less on a bad one.
You could earn $1,000 per week in busy Spring and Summer months, only to see your weekly earnings decline to $500 during slow winter days.
Does that sound worth it to you? Only you can answer that!
More reading about driving for Uber
Stacy says
The standard mileage deduction is not overly generous as you state in the article. If you look at the Edmunds dot com True Cost to Own calculator you will see that a very economical car like a Prius will cost on average about 50 cents per mile to operate. A car like mine costs on average 60 cents per mile to operate over a 5 year period. The new IRS mileage deduction is 62.5 cents per mile.
I just did some calculations this morning. I drove 94 miles with Lyft. I gave rides to 9 passengers in about 4 hours. I was paid about $62. My mileage deduction comes out to about $59 so I basically made $3 for 4 hours of driving.
It’s just not worth it where I live. It might be worth it if you live in a big city where you don’t have to drive several miles to get to your next passenger like I usually do.