What a trip really pays: cost per mile, unpaid miles and real hourly pay
A rideshare offer is a price for a trip. What it pays you is that price, less the cost of every mile you drive to earn it — including the ones before the passenger gets in.
Start with what a mile costs
Most drivers think of fuel as the cost of driving. It is usually the smallest honest part of it. Take a car doing 30 miles per US gallon with fuel at $3.60, driven 30,000 miles a year, with $900 a year of maintenance and $300 of tyres, worth $25,000 now and $13,000 in three years:
| Fuel | $0.12 a mile |
| Maintenance and repairs | $0.03 a mile |
| Tyres | $0.01 a mile |
| Value lost | $0.13 a mile |
| What a mile costs | $0.29 |
Fuel is 41% of it. The largest part is the value the car loses, which is invisible until you sell it. Counting all of that loss against distance leans towards overstating the cost, because some of a car’s value goes with age alone — but for deciding what to accept, overstating is the safer mistake.
Fixed costs — a rideshare insurance add-on, a phone plan, cleaning — are real, but they arrive whether you drive another mile or not. They belong in the weekly picture, not in the decision about one trip.
Then count the miles nobody pays for
An offer pays $12 for an 8-mile, 18-minute trip. That looks like $1.50 a mile. But the pickup is 2 miles and 6 minutes away, and those are driven for nothing, so the same $12 is really paying for 10 miles and 24 minutes: $1.20 a mile, $30.00 an hour.
Now take off the car. 10 miles at 30 cents is $3.00, which leaves $9.00: $0.90 a mile and $22.50 an hour. Against minimums of $20 an hour and $1 a mile, it clears one and not the other. To clear both it would need to pay $13.00.
Set minimums, and hold them
A minimum per hour protects your time; a minimum per mile protects your car. Short trips can pay well per mile and badly per hour; long highway trips often do the reverse. Holding both stops you from winning on one while quietly losing on the other.
Finally, the whole week
A week that paid $900 in trip earnings, $120 in tips and $80 in bonuses looks generous. With 40 hours online, 26 of them actually on trips, and 800 miles driven:
| The apps paid | $1,100.00 |
| Car, 800 miles at 30 cents | −$240.00 |
| A quarter of $120 of monthly fixed costs | −$30.00 |
| After costs | $830.00 |
On trips it looked like $42.31 an hour. Counting every hour the app was on, after the car, it was $20.75. Put 20% aside for tax and it is $16.60. The gap is mostly the 35% of the time spent waiting and driving to pickups.