About & methodology

Independent pay math for gig workers.

Gig Earnings Guide is an independent publisher of free guides and paid playbooks for US delivery and grocery-shopping gig workers: Instacart, DoorDash, Uber Eats, Amazon Flex, Grubhub and more. We are not affiliated with any of these companies.

What we publish

  • Free guides (in up to 13 languages) that answer the questions gig workers actually ask: how pay works, which offers to accept, ratings, deactivation appeals and taxes. Every guide starts with a direct answer, then shows the math.
  • A state-by-state gig pay map built from public city-level pay data for 12 apps.
  • A free income audit that estimates real hourly pay after mileage and taxes.
  • Paid e-books (one per platform) that turn the guides into step-by-step routines. The free guides never hide the key facts behind the paywall.

Where our numbers come from

  • Pay per hour: public Solo Pay Insights city pages. Solo is an earnings and mileage tracker that aggregates pay from gig workers who connect their accounts. Our 2026 snapshot covers 642 city × app pages updated between August 26 and October 21, 2026. We report medians and quartiles across city pages, and we always say whether a figure is gross or net and per active hour or per hour online.
  • Car costs: the IRS standard mileage rate (72.5¢ per mile January–June 2026, 76¢ July–December 2026), used as an upper-end estimate of the full cost of a work mile.
  • Taxes and pay laws: IRS.gov, California Prop 22, New York City DCWP and Seattle Office of Labor Standards pages.
  • How each app works: the companies' own help centers and driver pages (shoppers.instacart.com, help.doordash.com, uber.com, flex.amazon.com, driver.grubhub.com).
  • Field experience: patterns that shoppers and drivers report in public communities. We label these as reports ("shoppers report…"), never as facts or guarantees.

Every guide lists its sources at the bottom and shows a "Last updated" date. Worked examples are illustrative and labeled that way.

Editorial rules

  • Answer first. The first paragraph of every guide answers the question in plain language.
  • No income promises. Pay depends on your market, hours, car and the offers you accept. See our earnings disclaimer.
  • Net, not just gross. We subtract car costs and point out unpaid waiting time, because that is where most gig pay disappears.
  • No paid placements. No app pays us to be ranked higher, and we do not use affiliate links in rankings.
  • Same facts in every language. Translations follow the US English source and keep its numbers and hedges.

Updates and corrections

We review pay data and tax figures when the source changes (new Solo snapshots, new IRS rates, new city or state pay laws) and at least once a quarter. If you find a wrong number, an outdated rule or a broken link, email gigearningsguide@gmail.com with the page address; confirmed errors are fixed and the page's update date changes.

Citing our data

You are welcome to quote our figures with a link to the page they come from. Plain-text versions of every page are available by adding .md to the address (for example /guides/which-delivery-app-pays-most.html.md), and a summary for AI assistants is at /llms.txt.