By Jules Suzdaltsev

This summer Uber blanketed Muni buses with ads promising a guaranteed $5,000 a month in exchange for driving for the company. That’s quite a tantalizing offer, although the guarantee only seems to apply to new drivers who’re willing to drive 40 hours a week and earn a 90% acceptance rating. Still, driving a rideshare car has quickly become many people’s second or third income. So how much money can really be made on these scattered fares, and how realistic is it to make a livable wage through Uber, Sidecar, or Lyft?

The number crunchers at NerdWallet examined three levels of annual income — $50,000, $75,000, and $100,000 — and through a data collection service called SherpaShare, determined the average driver’s insurance costs and driving expenses. They discovered some interesting statistics. Uber, for example, brings in more money per trip for drivers, at an average fare of $15.97, with Sidecar at $13.35, and Lyft at the bottom with only $11.48; nearly 30% less. They also found that with average insurance premiums, at minimum all drivers would need to make about 1.5 trips a week just to break even, another 2 trips a week to cover gas, and one more for maintenance. That doesn’t seem like much, so is it actually possible to make $100,000 a year just by driving around town?

Sort of. With Uber at the head of the pack, a driver in San Francisco would need to make about 97 trips every week of the year to earn $100,000. That translates to 13.7 trips every day, including weekends. In the rest of the country, that number would be 120 trips a week, or about 17 a day. Since most trips on Uber are about 10 minutes long, that only comes out to about two hours and 45 minutes a day of being on the clock. However, this doesn’t take into account “driver utilization” or how long drivers are not on the clock, but still on the job. New York City yellow cabs, the busiest in the country, average about 50% downtime, which translates to a five and a half hour working day with Uber, although NerdWallet points out that anecdotal evidence suggests the downtime rate is substantially higher than 50%. On the other side of the spectrum, Lyft drivers not only earn less, but drive more. For a Lyfter to earn $100,000 a year, they’d have to be on the clock nearly five and a half hours every day, or best case scenario: 11 hours with downtime.

On a much more realistic scale however, an Uber driver could expect to only work those same two hours and 45 minutes total, give or take some downtime, and earn $50,000 a year, a very livable salary, and Uber General Manager Josh Mohrer claims that making $90,000 a year is the median wage for drivers. So should we all quit our jobs and start cruising for Uber? Probably not, according to most actual rideshare drivers, who really only make about $34,000 a year on average, after expenses. Maybe it’d be best to keep your day job.

Via:NerdWallet, top photo by Alfredo Mendez/Flickr

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