How to Track Gig Driving Earnings After Gas
Track gig driving earnings after gas and expenses: net each shift as gross plus tips minus costs, then divide by every hour and mile you drove.
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A gig shift’s net is gross pay plus tips, minus the expenses and fuel that shift cost you. Divide it by every hour you were logged in and every mile the odometer moved, including the ones the app didn’t pay for. Write the numbers down when you go offline, while they’re still on the screen.
A few details can change the answer: which hours count, what to do with a weekly fill-up, whether car wear belongs, and where taxes fit.
Road44, the driving log app mentioned near the end, is our app. This is a guide to keeping your own record, not tax advice. Figures were checked on IRS, AAA and platform pages in September 2026.
What your payout screen shows, and what it leaves out
Earnings screens are built around what the platform paid you. DoorDash’s Earn by Time page splits a shift in two: “Active time is the time you’re engaged in completing an offer, which begins the moment you accept an offer and ends once you drop it off to the customer.”
Idle time is “the time you spend when you are waiting for an offer.” DoorDash sums it up: “To put it simply, your active time + your idle time = your dash time.”
Uber’s weekly summary shows “total earnings, completed trips, and number of hours you were online and active.” Neither page subtracts gas or car costs. DoorDash’s Dasher pay page says Dashers “may be eligible for tax deductions on mileage, phone use, and vehicle maintenance,” which is another way of saying those costs are yours.
Unpaid time is the other gap. A UC Berkeley Labor Center study calls it P1: “when drivers await a request for a ride or delivery and/or are returning from an outlying area after dropping off a passenger or delivery.” In all five metro areas it studied, “drivers are not paid for the time they spend waiting for a ride or the time they spend returning to their ride and delivery hubs (P1 time).”
The study priced car costs at the IRS business rate in effect at the time. After those expenses and including tips, median delivery driver earnings came to $13.62 an hour in California and $9.87 in the other metros. That’s January 2022 data in 2022 dollars, so read it as a sign of the gap rather than as today’s pay.
A per-active-hour figure flatters the shift. If you want to know what your time earned, divide net by every hour you were logged in.
The per-shift math, worked through
You need three lines of arithmetic:
- Net = gross pay + tips − expenses − fuel
- Net per hour = net ÷ hours logged in
- Net per mile = net ÷ odometer miles
“Hours logged in” runs from the moment you went online to the moment you went offline, waiting included. “Odometer miles” is the end reading minus the start reading. That catches the drive to your first pickup and the miles spent repositioning between orders, which the platform may not count.
Take an illustrative shift (the figures are made up):
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Gross pay (from the platform’s earnings screen) | $112.00 |
| Tips | $38.00 |
| Expenses (parking and a toll) | −$8.00 |
| Fuel: 120 odometer miles ÷ 30 mpg × $4.15/gal | −$16.60 |
| Net for the shift | $125.40 |
The driver was logged in for 5 hours, and 3.5 of them were active. Measured four ways, the same shift looks like this:
| Measure | Math | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Gross per active hour (what the payout screen suggests) | $150.00 ÷ 3.5 | $42.86 |
| Net per active hour | $125.40 ÷ 3.5 | $35.83 |
| Net per hour logged in | $125.40 ÷ 5.0 | $25.08 |
| Net per mile | $125.40 ÷ 120 | $1.045 |
The money didn’t change. Subtracting costs takes about $7 an hour off the headline figure, and counting the idle time takes another $10.75, so in this example the unpaid waiting cost more per hour than gas and expenses combined.
A real shift: NerdWallet’s DoorDash test
NerdWallet writer Tommy Tindall tried delivering for DoorDash (article updated March 27, 2026): “I made $86 over the course of three dashes that totaled 6.5 hours. I put 90 miles on my personal vehicle, a full-size pickup truck.” At 17 mpg and about $3.60 a gallon, fuel came to $19, leaving “$67 after expenses, or $10.31 per hour.”
Run it through the same lines: pay including tips was about $13.23 an hour and 96¢ a mile.
After fuel, net was $10.31 an hour and about 74¢ a mile, with fuel alone running about 21¢ a mile. That’s gas only. Parking, tolls and wear aren’t in it.
Getting the gas number right for one shift
Gas skews single shifts, because you rarely buy exactly one shift’s worth. You can handle that in two ways.
The first is to log fill-ups where they happen and judge by the week. Enter the whole receipt on the shift where you filled up. That shift will look bad and the next few will look great, so read your net over a week or a month rather than shift by shift.
The second is to estimate each shift’s fuel: miles ÷ your real mpg × price per gallon. At 120 miles, 30 mpg and $4.15 a gallon, that’s 4 gallons and $16.60.
Pick one and stick with it. Mixing them, or entering the same gas purchase as both an expense and fuel, subtracts it twice.
Use your measured mpg, not the sticker. fueleconomy.gov says EPA ratings “may not accurately predict the average MPG you will get,” and lists “How & where you drive” among the reasons.
To measure yours, fill the tank and note the odometer. At the next fill-up, divide the miles driven by the gallons you added.
For a yardstick, AAA’s Your Driving Costs 2026 puts fuel at 17.3¢ a mile for new vehicles, based on regular gas averaging $4.152 a gallon over the 12 months ending May 2026.
The example shift works out to about 13.8¢ a mile ($4.15 ÷ 30), because 30 mpg beats that average. NerdWallet’s pickup ran about 21¢. Use your own number.
Expenses and car wear: what to count
Cash expenses are the easy part. For a shift, count anything you paid because you were working:
- Parking and tolls
- A car wash after a messy run
- Insulated bags or other delivery gear
- The work share of your phone bill, if you want it in
Car wear is harder, because you don’t pay for it on the day. Tires, brakes and oil changes show up months later, and depreciation never sends a bill. You can still set a per-mile allowance for it.
AAA’s 2026 fact sheet gives two reference points:
- Maintenance, repair and tires: 11.7¢ a mile. Adding AAA’s 17.3¢ fuel line gives 29.0¢ a mile for fuel plus upkeep. That’s our sum of two AAA lines, not a figure AAA publishes.
- All-in: 86¢ a mile at 15,000 miles a year. On top of fuel and upkeep, that covers depreciation, insurance, finance charges, and license, registration and taxes for a new car on a full-coverage personal policy, averaged over five years and 75,000 miles.
Neither describes an older, paid-off car used for deliveries. A personal policy also may not be the whole insurance picture for gig driving, so check with your insurer.
The IRS standard mileage rate doesn’t measure your car either. It’s a deduction standard built from a study of vehicle costs (more on that in the tax section), so it isn’t your cost per mile.
We’d suggest logging cash net as the main number and applying any wear allowance afterward, as a separate per-mile deduction. In the example, 120 miles × 11.7¢ = $14.04, which brings the shift to $111.36.
That’s $22.27 per hour logged in and about 93¢ a mile. Keeping the two apart means you can change the allowance later without redoing every shift.
A 60-second end-of-shift habit
The numbers are easiest to get right the moment you stop. IRS Publication 463 makes the same point about records: “A timely kept record has more value than a statement prepared later when there is generally a lack of accurate recall.”
- Before you pull out: note the start time and the odometer.
- When you go offline: note the end odometer, then copy gross pay and tips from the platform’s earnings screen. Add the shift’s expenses and fuel.
- The next day: check for late tips and update the shift.
- Once a week: total the week’s net, hours and miles, and divide.
Keep tips on their own line, so you can see how much of your pay depends on customers and check what the platform passed on. In 2021 Amazon agreed to pay more than $61.7 million to settle FTC charges that it failed to pay Amazon Flex drivers the full tips their customers gave.
If you run more than one app at once, add up each platform’s total for the shift and note which apps you ran.
Keeping the log in Road44
We built Road44 as a driving log, and its Earnings mode does this exact math: each drive is netted as gross + tips − expenses − fuel. Pick Earnings as your goal metric, and the home screen shows net earnings for All-time, This month and This week.
The calendar shows each day’s net, and all of that is free.
You can log a shift as one live drive. The start sheet takes the start time, the start odometer and a Business purpose tag.
A full-screen timer survives backgrounding and restarts, and holding the stop button opens the entry form for the end odometer, gross, tips, expenses and fuel. For a late tip, tap the drive in History and edit it.
Net per hour, net per mile, fuel economy and a cost ratio live on the Insights screen, which is Pro, as are recurring weekly and monthly targets. On the free tier you do the division yourself: a CSV export always includes each drive’s date, duration and distance, and can include earnings, so a spreadsheet can total the week.
The app has limits. Road44 doesn’t import pay from Uber, DoorDash or any other platform, and it doesn’t track miles by GPS. You type in the money, and distance comes from odometer readings or a manual entry.
Expenses are a single amount, so put the breakdown (toll, parking, car wash) in the notes. There’s no pause button, so a long break means editing the times afterward or splitting the shift into two drives.
Drives stay on your phone, with no account, cloud or receipt attachments, so keep receipts elsewhere and export regularly (Text, CSV, PDF or PNG, free, no watermark). It’s a personal record, not an official logbook or a tax tool. If you want your per-shift net kept for you, download Road44 here.
Where taxes fit (briefly)
Your net per shift is a cash figure, not your taxable profit.
Under Topic 510, you use either the standard mileage rate or actual expenses for a car used in business. The business standard mileage rate is 72.5¢ per mile for Jan 1 – Jun 30, 2026 and 76¢ per mile for Jul 1 – Dec 31, 2026. It comes from “an annual study for the Internal Revenue Service of the fixed and variable costs of operating an automobile” (Notice 2026-10), so it’s a standard, not your car’s cost.
Publication 463 says: “If you use the standard mileage rate for a year, you can’t deduct your actual car expenses for that year,” and gasoline is on that list. Business parking fees and tolls can be deducted on top of the standard rate. Keep logging fuel for your own net either way.
Self-employment tax is 15.3%, applied to 92.35% of net self-employment earnings. Gig income has to be reported even if no Form 1099 arrives (IRS). For your situation, start at the IRS Gig Economy Tax Center or ask a tax professional.
Whatever you log with, divide net by every hour and mile it took to earn it. That’s the number to watch.
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Frequently Asked Questions
How do I work out what a gig shift actually netted?
Add gross pay and tips, then subtract that shift's expenses (parking, tolls and the like) and its fuel. Divide the result by the hours you were logged in to get net per hour, and by the miles on your odometer to get net per mile.
Should I divide by active hours or total hours online?
Total hours online, if you want to know what your time earned. DoorDash defines dash time as active time plus idle time, and Uber's weekly summary reports the hours you were online and active. Active hours leave out the waiting between orders, so a per-active-hour figure makes a shift look better than it was.
Does DoorDash or Uber pay for gas?
Their pay summaries don't subtract fuel. DoorDash describes Dasher pay as base pay, promotions and tips, and its pay page points Dashers to possible tax deductions for mileage and vehicle maintenance. Treat gas as your own cost and track it yourself.
How do I count gas for one shift if I fill up once a week?
Either log each fill-up on the shift where you bought it and judge your net by the week, or estimate each shift's fuel as miles divided by your real mpg, times the price per gallon. Pick one method, and don't enter the same purchase as both an expense and fuel.
Should I include car wear and depreciation in my net pay?
It's optional, and easier to keep separate from your cash net. AAA's 2026 figures put maintenance, repair and tires at 11.7¢ a mile, and all-in costs at 86¢ a mile at 15,000 miles a year for a new car used for personal driving. An older, paid-off car costs something different, so treat those as yardsticks.
Is my net per shift the same as my taxable profit?
No. For taxes, car costs use either the standard mileage rate (72.5¢ per mile for Jan 1 – Jun 30, 2026 and 76¢ per mile for Jul 1 – Dec 31, 2026) or actual expenses, not both. Self-employment tax is 15.3% on 92.35% of net self-employment earnings. This isn't tax advice, so check the IRS gig economy pages or ask a tax professional.
Do I still need to track gas if I plan to take the standard mileage rate?
For taxes, IRS Publication 463 says you can't deduct gasoline for a year in which you use the standard mileage rate. For knowing what a shift really netted, the fuel figure still matters, because that money left your pocket. A tax professional can tell you which method suits you.
How often should I log my shifts?
Right after each shift, while the platform's numbers are on screen. IRS Publication 463 says a record made at or near the time carries more weight, and that a log kept on a weekly basis counts as timely. A weekly review also smooths out lumpy fuel purchases.