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What an Uber driver earns depends heavily on the city where the app is switched on. A new analysis of more than 1.8 million trip offers across 16 US metro areas finds that the same company can pay a driver a few dollars an hour in one place and more than 20 dollars in another, once the cost of running a car is counted. In six of those cities, estimated pay after costs falls below the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.
The work comes from Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, and is part of a series he has published this month on Uber’s pricing and driver pay. It draws on data from GigU, an app that shows drivers what a trip offer is likely to be worth before they accept it. The dataset covers offers from March 2025 to March 2026 and includes both the trips drivers took and the ones they turned down. That matters, because declined offers tend to be the lower-paying ones, and they rarely show up in company averages.
The widest gap is between Boston and Orlando. In Boston, the median offer works out to $2.31 for every mile driven. In Orlando it is 72 cents. Using a common set of assumptions, Sherman estimates that an Orlando driver nets about $3.18 for each working hour after paying cash costs such as fuel, maintenance and insurance. In Boston the same calculation gives $21.87. Tampa sits near the bottom as well, with a median offer of 81 cents a mile and an estimated $4.23 an hour after cash costs. Los Angeles sits near the top, with a median of $2.15 a mile, which the analysis puts at about $46 for each hour spent on active rides.
Those two hourly figures measure different things, and the difference is easy to miss. The roughly $46 in Los Angeles and $19.30 in Orlando describe pay for time spent on trips, before costs. The $3.18 and $21.87 figures are estimates of net pay for each hour a driver is working. That includes time between rides and is calculated using a 7-mile trip, including the drive to the pickup, and an average of 1.68 trips an hour. Cash costs are taken from each state’s driver average, which ranges from 38 to 47 cents a mile. The figures leave out depreciation, which GigU estimates at about 16 cents a mile, so they are generous to drivers in that respect.
Across more than 7,100 drivers in 26 states, GigU’s own cost data puts the average cash cost of driving at 42 cents a mile. That figure explains why an offer of 72 or 81 cents a mile leaves so little behind. When most of each mile’s pay goes to fuel, upkeep and insurance, a small drop in the offer wipes out most of the profit.
The pattern across cities is clear. The six lowest-paying metros in the analysis are all in Florida, Texas, Georgia and Arizona, and every one of them comes in under the federal minimum wage after costs. The three best-paying, Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles, are in states where pay floors for drivers have been written into law. Massachusetts guarantees $34.48 for each utilized hour under a 2024 settlement with Uber and Lyft, and California set its own standard through Proposition 22. Sherman reads the contrast as evidence that Uber’s pricing responds to rules. His own line on the subject is that the company will price to a floor when a state builds one.
Florida makes a pointed example. The state’s minimum wage rose to $15 an hour on September 30, but it does not cover Uber drivers, because the company classifies them as independent contractors. Sherman’s estimate for the median Tampa driver is $4.23 an hour, and he notes that half of the offers there pay less than the median.
Uber disputes the analysis. A company spokesperson said it contains flaws, that it overstates lower-paying offers, and that it overlooks tips, promotional bonuses and minimum pay protections that apply in states such as California and Massachusetts. The spokesperson did not share the figures behind Uber’s own models but said its average pay per active hour is more than 25 percent higher than the rates Sherman uses. The company has also said publicly that its drivers earn more than $30 an hour on average while they are carrying passengers. Uber describes its platform and driver tools on its official website.
Sherman stands by his calculations. He argues that, because Uber does not publish detailed US data on trip counts, fares, driver pay or its share of each fare, analyses like his are the best inference available. His broader reading is that Uber’s switch in 2022 to upfront pricing, where one algorithm sets the rider’s fare and another sets the driver’s pay, let the company keep a larger share of each trip. In earlier work based on trip records from six full-time drivers, he estimated that riders’ average price per mile rose 53 percent between 2023 and early 2026 and that Uber’s take rate climbed from 48.2 percent to 55.2 percent.
There are reasons to read the new figures with care. The offers come from drivers who use a particular app, so they may not match the full range of drivers in every city. An offer is not a completed trip, and the net-pay estimates rest on assumptions about trip length and trips per hour that will not fit every driver. Tips and bonuses, which can add to take-home pay, are the main item Uber says the analysis misses. Sherman himself flags a similar limit in Colorado, where a state filing shows Uber paid an average of $1.04 per active mile in the first half of 2026 while the median offer to GigU drivers in Denver was $1.17, and he cautions that the two datasets are not a perfect match.
For drivers, the practical lesson is to know what a trip is worth before accepting it. That means working out cost per mile for your own car, including insurance and maintenance, and comparing it to the pay offered rather than judging by the fare total. For riders and policymakers, the numbers add to a growing debate over whether pay standards, transparency rules or driver organising will do more to narrow the gap between cities. The full methodology and charts are in the published analysis, and more technology and business coverage is available on Business Tech.
