![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
An exercise.
Say you want to work full time as a ridehail driver, 40 hour weeks, 2000 hour year. Does it work?
Eyeballing the apps, passengers pay $1/minute. $60/hour, nice!
But Lyft takes like 25% of that, so $45/hour. (Uber, who knows.)
And you're not carrying fares all the time. Let's favor the driver, 10% or so deadhead time, so $40/hour.
That's $80,000/year, but we have to pay taxes too. $60,000 take-home, or maybe $54,000 if paying self-employment tax.
Ah, but expenses! Let's say an average of 30 MPH, but also 30 MPG, these cancel out, so going through 2000 gallons (for 60,000 miles), maybe $6000/year. More to the point, putting 60,000 miles of wear on the car.
This says about 5 cents per mile in maintenance costs, so another $3000.
New drivers typically already have a car, but if you're putting this much mileage on it, you might need to replace it in oh, say, 3 years. If it's $30,000 cash down, that's $10,000/year.
Insurance $2k? I dunno.
Total expenses $21,000 out of after-tax income of $54,000, $33,000 net, or $16.50/hour. Matches some other estimates I've seen. Maybe you can get a tax deduction on business expenses, too. Note that's *after* tax, so it's better than a $16.50/hour job.
Of course, if you're not carrying paying passengers 90% of the time, then your income goes down a lot. But so do most of the expenses... at least if you can pull over and park somewhere until the next fare. (Free parking subsidies Uber, as does free use of the roads despite congestion.)
If you only carry fares half the time, after-tax income drops to $30-33,000 (lower gross means lower taxes), expenses $11-12,000. Optimistically, $22,000 net income, or $11/hour profit. Still not bad... depending on what you have to pay in rent and health insurance. Of course, in the cities where there's a lot of ridehail business, rents have been going up to like $1000/month for a room.
But it does look doable. It's not like alternative "anyone can do it" jobs pay great either.
Of course, excitingly, the *companies* still don't make money, which can only be fixed by them taking more of the fare or by raising prices, which will reduce demand while not getting the driver anything more (because this is money the company needs to break even...)
Say you want to work full time as a ridehail driver, 40 hour weeks, 2000 hour year. Does it work?
Eyeballing the apps, passengers pay $1/minute. $60/hour, nice!
But Lyft takes like 25% of that, so $45/hour. (Uber, who knows.)
And you're not carrying fares all the time. Let's favor the driver, 10% or so deadhead time, so $40/hour.
That's $80,000/year, but we have to pay taxes too. $60,000 take-home, or maybe $54,000 if paying self-employment tax.
Ah, but expenses! Let's say an average of 30 MPH, but also 30 MPG, these cancel out, so going through 2000 gallons (for 60,000 miles), maybe $6000/year. More to the point, putting 60,000 miles of wear on the car.
This says about 5 cents per mile in maintenance costs, so another $3000.
New drivers typically already have a car, but if you're putting this much mileage on it, you might need to replace it in oh, say, 3 years. If it's $30,000 cash down, that's $10,000/year.
Insurance $2k? I dunno.
Total expenses $21,000 out of after-tax income of $54,000, $33,000 net, or $16.50/hour. Matches some other estimates I've seen. Maybe you can get a tax deduction on business expenses, too. Note that's *after* tax, so it's better than a $16.50/hour job.
Of course, if you're not carrying paying passengers 90% of the time, then your income goes down a lot. But so do most of the expenses... at least if you can pull over and park somewhere until the next fare. (Free parking subsidies Uber, as does free use of the roads despite congestion.)
If you only carry fares half the time, after-tax income drops to $30-33,000 (lower gross means lower taxes), expenses $11-12,000. Optimistically, $22,000 net income, or $11/hour profit. Still not bad... depending on what you have to pay in rent and health insurance. Of course, in the cities where there's a lot of ridehail business, rents have been going up to like $1000/month for a room.
But it does look doable. It's not like alternative "anyone can do it" jobs pay great either.
Of course, excitingly, the *companies* still don't make money, which can only be fixed by them taking more of the fare or by raising prices, which will reduce demand while not getting the driver anything more (because this is money the company needs to break even...)