Your real hourly rate, and how to work it out

Everybody in gig driving quotes a gross hourly figure and nobody can tell you what they actually made. The gap between the two is the whole subject of this page.

The calculation

Real hourly rate = (what the platforms paid, minus running costs, minus tax and National Insurance) divided by hours worked

Three inputs, and the one people get wrong is the third. Hours worked means every hour you were available and working, not the hours you were carrying an order.

A worked shift

One driver, one eight-hour Saturday. Their own figures, not an average.

The app for that shift would have shown £19.81 an hour. The driver kept £8.56. Neither number is dishonest; they measure different things, and only one of them buys anything.

The lever that matters

Look at the second and third lines. Twenty-two miles an hour at 36p is £7.92 an hour of cost before anything else. A driver working denser, shorter routes at 14 miles an hour has a cost of £5.04 an hour at the same gross rate, and takes home nearly £3 an hour more for identical work.

That is why the useful question about a job is what it pays per mile, not what it pays per hour, and why chasing surge across a city is usually a losing move.

Work out yours

1. Pick a full month. A single shift is too noisy and a year is too slow to act on.
2. Add up everything every platform paid you in that month, gross.
3. Add up the miles you drove while working. Odometer readings, not estimates.
4. Multiply the miles by your cost per mile. Work that out first if you have not.
5. Take your marginal tax rate off the profit. For most drivers that is basic rate income tax plus Class 4 National Insurance.
6. Divide by the hours you were working, including waiting and repositioning.

What it really costs you per mile covers step four, which is the one that needs a year of data behind it.

What to do with the number

Compare it between platforms, between times of day and between areas, rather than against anybody else. It is a measurement of your own operation, and the parts of it you can change are the miles per hour and which work you accept.

JoltMile calculates this per shift and across the year from your own figures. It is deliberately lower than the number in the app, and why is my hourly rate lower in JoltMile explains exactly which lines are being subtracted.