How to calculate your true hourly rate as a delivery driver
The app's number leaves out gas, wear, waiting time, and dead miles. Here's the real formula with a worked example.
Published October 8, 2026 · 8 min read · By the Driver's Ledger team
The only formula that matters
True hourly rate = (Gross pay − Gas − Vehicle wear − All other driving expenses) ÷ Total hours worked, door to door.
Every word in that formula is doing work. Gross pay is what the app shows you — tips included. Gas is obvious. Vehicle wear is the one almost everyone skips: tires, oil, brakes, depreciation, the slow grind your car takes for every mile. Total hours, door to door means from the moment you leave home to the moment you're back — including waiting for pings, waiting at restaurants, and driving between zones.
A worked example
Say last week looked like this: $850 gross pay, $130 in gas, 620 miles driven, 40 hours door to door.
Vehicle wear is the tricky part. A reasonable estimate many drivers use is around $0.30–$0.40 per mile for a typical used car (gas excluded, since you counted it separately). At $0.35 × 620 miles, that's $217 in wear.
True hourly rate = ($850 − $130 − $217) ÷ 40 = $12.58/hour.
The app probably told you something like $21/hour. The $8+/hour gap is the money your car spent for you.
The three mistakes that inflate the number
1. Counting only "active" hours. Apps love to show earnings per active hour — time with food in your car. But you can't pay rent with active hours. Your time waiting counts; it's time you gave to the job.
2. Forgetting dead miles. The miles after the drop, driving back empty to the hotspot. The app paid you for 6 miles; you drove 12. We'll cover this in its own guide — it deserves one.
3. Treating the car as free. It's the most expensive thing in the equation and the easiest to ignore because the bill arrives later — all at once, usually as a repair you can't afford that week.
How often should you run this?
Once a week, 20 minutes, Sunday night. One week of numbers beats a year of guessing. Track which app won your hours, which days paid, and what one thing you'll change next week. Drivers who do this stop repeating the same bad week — drivers who don't, repeat it.
You can run the formula by hand, or use the free calculator on our homepage — it takes 30 seconds and your numbers never leave the page.
Want the full system behind this?
This guide is one chapter of the thinking inside The Driver's Ledger — the 36-page money playbook plus an earnings tracker that does all this math for you automatically, every shift. $27 once, yours forever, 30-day guarantee.