This is week 1 of my case study “Driving for Uber and Lyft in 2018”. Since my last post there was a study released by MIT that Rideshare drivers on average only make $3.37 dollars per hour. Well I don’t see that now and I haven’t seen it in the past. Let’s get back to my Week 1 results.
For Uber I spent 9hrs online and completed 12 trips and was paid out $226.93. This was short week. I didn’t have much free time to drive.
For Lyft I spent a little over 4hrs online. I completed 9 rides and earned $159.97. Again this was short week. Below is breakdown of earnings and hourly rate for the week.
For Uber I was reimbursed for $24.24 in toll charges and for Lyft I was reimbursed for $19.83 in toll charges. So what I did to get a more accurate dollar figure I subtracted the Toll charges from my take home pay. So for this week for Uber I earned $22.25 per hour and for Lyft I earned $34.26 per hour for a average hourly income between the two platforms of $28.26. As you can see, this is much more than $3.37 dollars per hour. This spreadsheet doesn’t show my estimated expense of 0.20 cent per mile, but even with that the hourly amount is still over $20 per hour. I may include the estimated depreciation in future reports.
For tracking mileage I use Quickbooks Self-Employed. When using the App on your phone, you can automatically track your mileage. This saves me so much time, I don’t have to manually track miles. Uber and Lyft tracks mileage from the time you pick up your rider until the time you drop them off. Mileage isn’t tracked going to pick up your ride. These miles need to be tracked also.
- New Uber Drivers will get up to 350 dollars guaranteed after signing up: Sign up for Uber
- New Lyft Drivers will get up to $500 dollars guaranteed if you sign up: Sign up for Lyft
