Car, moped or bike: which is best for delivery work?

The right vehicle depends far more on where you work than on what the internet says. A bike that clears £15 an hour in central Manchester will not cover its own tyres on a rural parcel round.

Side by side

What decides it in practice

Distance between drops. Under a mile, a bike beats a car easily because parking eats the car's speed advantage. Over two miles, the car pulls away and never looks back.

What you are carrying. Food delivery fits a bag. A parcel round does not fit anything but a car or a van, so the choice makes itself.

Hours you want to do. Cycling forty hours a week is a physical job on top of a job. Most riders doing serious hours move to a moped within a year.

Winter. A December evening in the rain is where the honest comparison happens. Riders lose more hours to weather than drivers do, and those hours are earnings.

The tax angle, which cuts the other way

Mileage relief rewards the expensive vehicle. A car earns 55p a mile of deduction; a bicycle earns 20p. That is not a subsidy, it reflects that a car costs far more to run.

The practical effect is that a car driver's taxable profit is much lower than their turnover, while a cyclist's is close to it. A rider taking £14,000 on a bike will pay tax on nearly all of it; a driver taking the same on 12,000 business miles has around £6,000 of mileage relief before anything else.

That does not make the car the better choice. It means comparing gross earnings across vehicles is misleading, and comparing what is left after costs and tax is the only version that answers the question.

A reasonable order to try things

1. Start with what you already own. Nobody should buy a vehicle to find out whether they like delivery work.
2. Log a month properly and look at the true hourly rate, not the gross.
3. If a bike is limiting your drops, price a moped and the hire and reward insurance for it before committing.
4. Only look at a car specifically for this if you are moving into parcel work, where it is the entry requirement rather than an upgrade.

JoltMile supports all three vehicle types, applies the right mileage rate to each, and lets you set a different vehicle per shift, so a month of comparing is a month of logging rather than a spreadsheet.