← Gig driver net pay calculator

How much to set aside for gig driving taxes

DoorDash, Uber Eats, Instacart, Uber, and Lyft pay drivers as independent contractors. No app withholds federal income tax, state income tax, or self-employment tax from a payout the way an employer withholds from a paycheck. Whatever a driver does not set aside during the year is due, in full, at tax time — or sooner, if quarterly estimated payments are required.

This page will not hand you a percentage. The right reserve depends on filing status, state, total income from every source, deductions, and whether you owe quarterly estimates — none of which a free calculator can know, and picking a number for you would be a claim about what you owe rather than arithmetic on what you typed. What it can do is show you what a percentage you supply actually removes from a session.

Worked example. A session nets $149.36 in profit after vehicle cost (gross pay minus gas, maintenance, and a share of insurance). At a 25% reserve, that holds back $37.34, leaving $112.02 — about $18.67/hour on a 6-hour session, down from $24.89/hour before the reserve. The reserve never touches a losing session: if vehicle cost had exceeded gross pay, the reserve would be $0 and take-home would equal the loss, not a smaller loss plus a phantom refund.

Two things this reserve deliberately does not do:

  1. It does not model quarterly due dates or underpayment penalties — it is a running tally of what one session should have set aside, not a filing calendar. For the actual IRS safe-harbor payment and the real (holiday-adjusted) due dates, see the quarterly estimated tax calendar.
  2. It does not net against other income, other jobs, or last year's refund. Whether a slow week's loss offsets something else is a judgement for your return, not this page.

Open the calculator, put in your own reserve percentage, and see what it does to your next session before you spend the gross number. Nothing is uploaded.