Dead Miles Calculator

Road44, the driving log app mentioned below, is our app. This calculator uses only the numbers you enter. It isn't tax advice; for tax questions, ask a tax professional.

How the dead miles calculator works

It runs four steps. With the sample shift filled in above:

• Total miles = end odometer − start odometer: 45,355 − 45,230 = 125.0 mi.
• Dead miles = total miles − paid miles: 125 − 80 = 45.0 mi.
• Dead-mile share = dead miles ÷ total miles: 45 ÷ 125 = 36.0%.
• Pay per paid mile = pay ÷ paid miles ($142.50 ÷ 80 = $1.78), and pay per total mile = pay ÷ total miles ($142.50 ÷ 125 = $1.14). Add your gas cost per mile and you also get gas spent on dead miles: dead miles × your gas cost per mile.

For the odometer boxes, read the odometer when you head out and again when the shift's driving ends. With a trip meter, reset it at the start, enter 0 as the start reading and the trip meter's reading at the end. For paid miles, add up the trip or order miles in each app's earnings summary for the same shift, day or week.

On rounding: miles show to one decimal and money to the cent. The share is worked out from the unrounded miles and rounded once, to one decimal. It reads 100.0% when none of your miles were paid and 0.0% when there are no dead miles. You can type commas and a $ sign (45,230 or $142.50), and the odometer, paid miles and pay boxes add thousands commas when you leave them.

What counts as a dead mile

A dead mile is a work mile nobody paid for. CARB, California's Air Resources Board, splits a ride-hail driver's logged-in miles into three periods:

• P1: logged in to the app, waiting for a match.
• P2: match accepted, driving to the pickup.
• P3: a passenger in the car, until the trip is completed.

CARB counts P1 and P2 as deadhead miles. Other definitions draw the line in a different place. California's Business and Professions Code §7463 counts the drive to a pickup as engaged time, because engaged time starts when the driver accepts a request. Uber's earnings-per-km pilot counts the distance from accepting a trip to the pickup and on to the destination, and leaves out the miles driven between rides. So whether the drive to a pickup counts as paid depends on which miles your app reports. Use those miles, and count them the same way every shift.

The odometer also catches miles no app sees: the drive out to your first zone before you log in, and the drive home after you log off. They aren't in any app's trip miles, so they land in your dead miles.

For a sense of scale, CARB's 2018 data found that 38.5% of ride-hail miles in California were deadhead: about 28% in P1 and about 11% in P2 (CARB's rounded figures). In Denver, Henao and Marshall put deadheading at 40.8% at the conservative end.

Both count only miles driven while logged in to a ride-hail app, and neither covers food delivery. An odometer share includes the drive out and home, so it isn't directly comparable and can come out higher. Use these figures as background rather than a goal to hit, and don't take the sample's 36.0% as typical.

Some hours of the day leave you driving empty more than others. Our guide on how to find your most profitable driving hours shows how dead miles turn up in each time slot's net pay.

What dead miles do to your pay per mile

Dead miles don't change what a shift paid. They change how many miles that pay is spread over. The two per-mile figures are linked:

Pay per total mile = pay per paid mile × (1 − dead-mile share)

Here's the sample's $142.50 for 80 paid miles, with more and more dead miles added:

Pay per paid mile stays at $1.78 in every row. Pay per total mile is the one to set against what each mile costs you to drive, because the car burns gas on every mile, paid or not.

Enter your own gas cost per mile and the calculator also shows what the dead miles cost in gas. For net pay per hour and per mile after gas, use the gig driver hourly pay after gas calculator.

Some general ways to cut dead miles: check how far away a pickup is before you accept, wait near busy areas instead of driving back out, and plan to end the shift close to home. A few weeks of your own numbers will show which of these help.

Keep a shift log you can check later

One shift's share can swing with a single long pickup or a quiet hour. Across many shifts it tells you more, such as which days leave you driving unpaid. For that you need a record of each shift's odometer readings and pay.

Road44, our driving log app, can hold that record with its free features:

1. Start a drive when the shift starts. The Start a drive sheet has a Start odometer field. Or add the shift afterward as a past drive.
2. When you stop, the drive opens so you can add the End odometer, Gross earnings, Tips, Expenses and Fuel cost.
3. Type your gig apps' trip miles for the shift in Notes. Road44 has no paid-miles field.
4. In Export, choose CSV, check that the Earnings chip is on and switch on Notes, which starts off each time. You get a row per drive with Distance, Gross, Tips, Expenses, Fuel cost, Net and your notes, so you can work out each shift's dead miles in a spreadsheet.
5. History and the Calendar show every shift, and in Earnings mode the home screen totals your net pay.

Road44 has no GPS and never uses location. Every drive is started, stopped or typed in by hand, and distance comes from the odometer readings or a distance you type. It doesn't detect or split dead miles: you record the apps' miles yourself. There's no account, and drives stay on your device.

The log is a personal record, not an official or certified logbook. If you're new to keeping one, our guide on how to keep a mileage log covers what to write down for each drive.