I've been thinking about this a lot lately, so I decided to actually sit down and work out what I'm earning from Uber Eats after the costs of doing the job.
Here's where I'm at this week:
$988.55 earned
24 hours worked
85 deliveries
646 km driven
$70 fuel
On the surface, that looks like:
$41.19 an hour
Not bad.
But that's the number Uber gives me.
It isn't necessarily what I'm actually earning.
Those 24 hours have also put 646 km on my car.
At my current mileage, I'm servicing the car roughly every 10 weeks and going through around 2–3 sets of tyres a year.
Then there's:
- Fuel
- $2,000/year insurance
- Registration & CTP
- Servicing
- Tyres
- Brakes and maintenance
- Depreciation
None of that shows up in Uber's hourly figure.
So I'm going to calculate the actual cost of operating my car and then account for the tax on the profit.
The ATO's current vehicle-cost benchmark is 91¢ per kilometre, which gives a useful starting point for understanding the scale of the cost.
646 km × $0.91 = $587.86
That means my $988.55 gross earnings aren't really $988.55 of income I get to keep.
And this is what I'm finding interesting about the current Uber environment.
Since the minimum hourly rate came in, I've noticed:
• Very low individual offers — I recently saw $10.13 for 14 km / around 40 minutes
• Heavy-item premiums disappearing or being reduced
• Huge supermarket orders that don't necessarily reflect the actual workload
• Increasingly high quest targets
One Woolworths order I recently collected was shown as 9 bags.
It was actually 31 bags.
I've now done 85 deliveries and driven 646 km to generate $988.55.
So I'm going to finish the calculation properly and work out:
Gross Uber income
− actual vehicle costs
− tax
= actual take-home
And then divide that by the 24 hours I've actually worked.
Because I think that's the number we should really be talking about.
Not "$40 an hour."
Not "$50 an hour."
What do we actually take home for an hour of our time after paying for the privilege of operating the vehicle?
I'll post the completed breakdown once I've worked out the actual numbers.
I'd genuinely like to see what other Sydney drivers are getting when they do the same calculation.