FOR DOORDASH, UBER EATS, INSTACART, UBER & LYFT DRIVERS
Gross pay isn’t take-home pay.
The app screen shows what it paid you per hour. It never subtracts gas, tires, oil changes, or insurance — those are entirely yours. Enter one session’s gross pay, miles, and hours, and see what you actually kept per hour and per mile, plus what to set aside for taxes nobody withholds for you.
This session
Whatever period you want to check — one dash, one shift, one week. Count every mile the car moved, including the drive to go online and the drive home.
Your vehicle (per mile)
Maintenance/mile is your own reserve for oil changes, tires, and repairs — not the IRS standard mileage rate, which changes every year and would go stale here. Prefer the current standard rate as one figure? Put it here and set gas price to 0.
Monthly fixed cost
Insurance and other fixed costs don’t care how many sessions you drove this month. This session gets the share of them its miles represent, out of your typical monthly business miles.
Tax reserve, and how this session compares
Nothing withholds tax for a self-employed driver. Put in whatever share of profit you set aside for self-employment and income tax and every figure below accounts for it. Leave it at 0 and the page behaves exactly as if the reserve did not exist. We do not guess the percentage — ask a tax preparer for yours.
Net pay per hour
$—
kept per hour, after the car
Gross pay per hour
Gross pay per mile
All-in vehicle cost per mile
Vehicle cost this session
Net pay per mile
Net profit this session
Tax reserve
Take-home after reserve
Take-home per hour
Take-home per mile
Gross pay needed for target
Transparent arithmetic from your own inputs. Starting figures are an illustrative example, not a benchmark or a claim about what any platform pays. Replace them with your own gas receipts, insurance bill, and app screen.
Session log and weekly total
One shift rarely tells you whether the week was worth it. Save each session as you enter it and see the week as total net over total hours, so a short lucky dash cannot hide a long bad one. The log stays in this browser only; export it as a CSV any time.
Week of
Sessions
Hours
Miles
Gross/hr
Net/hr
Net/mi
Car ate
Net profit
Weekday
Sessions
Hours
Net/hr
No saved sessions yet.
What this checks
Every delivery and rideshare app shows gross pay per hour or per trip. None of them subtract the car. The decision a driver actually faces is whether this session, after gas and wear, still cleared what it looked like it cleared on the app screen — and what is left once a tax reserve comes out too. How much to set aside for gig-driving taxes walks through the reserve in search-query words.
It does not tell you which platform to drive for, which order to accept, or what your car is worth. The gap between gross pay and net pay is arithmetic on the numbers you typed.
Deciding on a single offer before you accept it? Is this order worth taking? prices one offer's payout, miles and minutes after the car and finds the lowest payout that meets your floor.
How do I calculate my real hourly pay driving for DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Instacart?
Take everything the app paid out this session — base pay, tips, promotions — and subtract what the vehicle actually cost to run: fuel for every mile driven (including the drive to go online and back home), a per-mile reserve for maintenance and tires, and a share of your monthly insurance and other fixed costs spread across your typical monthly mileage. Divide what is left by hours logged, not by hours with a delivery in progress. On this page’s starting figures — $180 gross, 90 miles, 6 hours, 28 MPG, $3.49 gas — the vehicle costs about $30.64 for the session, so $30.00/hour gross becomes about $24.89/hour net, before income tax.
What miles count toward the cost, active delivery miles or every mile?
Every mile the car moved this session, not just miles with an order in progress. The drive to a good starting spot, the loop between orders with nothing assigned, and the drive home all burn the same gas and put the same wear on the car as an active mile does. Undercounting miles by only logging active-delivery mileage understates vehicle cost and overstates how much the session actually netted.
How much should I set aside for taxes as a DoorDash, Uber, or Instacart driver?
This page will not tell you a percentage — that depends on your filing status, state, total income, deductions, and quarterly-estimate schedule, and picking one for you would be a claim about what you owe. What it does is arithmetic once you tell it your own reserve percentage: it holds that share out of session profit only (never out of a losing session, which reserves nothing), and shows both the pre-tax profit and what is actually left after the reserve. Ask a tax preparer for your percentage, then use this page to see what it does to a session’s take-home.
Am I actually making minimum wage after gas and car costs?
Enter an hourly wage to compare against — a state minimum wage, a job offer, whatever you want to check against — and the page reports the gap between that number and this session’s net-per-hour, both stated before income tax so they compare on the same basis. It does not assume a minimum wage for you; wages vary too much by state and city to guess at one.
Does this use the IRS standard mileage rate?
No. The standard mileage rate is a single blended figure the IRS sets once a year for a tax deduction, and it changes annually — hardcoding a specific year’s rate here would go stale the first time it changed. This page instead asks for your own gas price, MPG, and a maintenance reserve per mile, plus your monthly insurance and other fixed costs spread across your typical monthly miles, so the cost per mile reflects your actual car rather than a national average. If you prefer to use the current standard mileage rate as a single per-mile figure, put it in the maintenance-per-mile box and set gas price to 0.
What gross pay do I need to hit a take-home goal?
Type an hourly take-home goal and the page solves backwards: it takes the session’s vehicle cost, adds the profit needed to clear that goal after the tax reserve, and reports the gross pay — and gross pay per mile — that would take. At the starting figures with a 25% tax reserve, a $20/hour take-home goal on a 6-hour, 90-mile session solves to about $190.64 of gross pay, roughly $2.12 per mile.