Is this Uber ride worth it?
Short answer: take the fare, subtract your cost per mile across every mile the offer makes you drive — including the unpaid drive to the rider — then divide by the total time from accepting to drop-off. That is your real hourly. If it lands under the least you will work for, it is not a good offer, no matter what the per-mile figure says.
The calculator below does exactly that, using the same arithmetic the DriverSignal app runs on the offer card. It is an estimate of one offer, not a projection of earnings.
An offer screen is built to look good. It shows you a dollar figure and a trip time, and your brain does the division before you have thought about the four miles you have to drive just to reach the rider. Those miles cost real money and real minutes, and nobody pays you for them.
The offer
- What it looks like
- $10.59/hr
- What it actually pays
- $6.50/hr
- If you drive back empty
- $2.89/hr
- Net $6.5/hr is below your $20/hr floor.
Show the arithmetic
| Total distance (pickup + trip) | 7.6 mi |
|---|---|
| Total time (pickup + trip) | 29 min |
| Fuel (0.114/mi) | −$0.87 |
| Wear (0.146/mi) | −$1.11 |
| Left over | $3.14 |
| Per mile, net | $0.41/mi |
What this can't know: surge that appears after you accept, whether the rider tips, traffic on the day, tolls, how long you wait at the curb, or what the next offer would have been. It also can't return the app's WAIT verdict — that one depends on your own history of scored offers, which a single form has no way to see. This is an estimate of one offer's economics, not a projection of earnings.
The math, in full
Nothing here is proprietary. You can run it on paper:
| Total miles | pickup miles + trip miles |
|---|---|
| Total minutes | pickup minutes + trip minutes |
| Fuel per mile | gas price ÷ real MPG — at $3.20 and 28 mpg that is $0.114 |
| Wear per mile | total cost per mile − fuel per mile — the remaining $0.146 |
| Net earnings | fare − (total miles × cost per mile) |
| Net per hour | net earnings ÷ (total minutes ÷ 60) |
Cost per mile is the total — fuel is part of it, not an extra line on top. The split above exists so you can sanity-check it against your own spending, not so you can add it twice.
Why per-mile is the wrong yardstick
Per-mile has one fatal flaw: it has no clock in it. A long highway run at $0.70/mile can out-earn a short city crawl at $2.00/mile, because you finish it and get another one. DriverSignal used to gate on per-mile and stopped, precisely because it was flagging good highway trips as bad ones. The calculator still shows you net per mile, because it is useful context — it just does not decide anything.
Long pickups get the same treatment. A pickup over 6 miles or 12 minutes is a warning sign, but it is overridden when the hourly still clears 1.5× your floor — otherwise a genuinely good fare gets punished twice for the same long drive, once in the arithmetic and once in the rule.
Common questions
- What is a good dollar-per-mile for Uber drivers?
- There isn't one number, and anyone who gives you one is selling something. Drivers argue over $1, $1.50 and $2 per mile, but per-mile is a poor measure because it ignores time — a $2/mile crawl through downtown can pay less per hour than a $0.70/mile highway run. Your cost per mile also depends on your own car. Net dollars per hour, after your fuel and wear, is the number that decides whether the shift was worth working.
- Does the drive to pickup count?
- It costs you fuel, wear and time, and no platform pays you for it — so yes, it counts, and it is the single most common reason an offer that looks fine is not. This calculator adds pickup miles and minutes into both the cost and the clock, which is why its hourly figure is usually lower than the one you would get dividing the fare by the trip time.
- Why is my calculated hourly lower than what the app shows me?
- Because the platform's implied rate is gross and only counts the paid trip. This number is net — it subtracts your cost per mile across every mile you drive for that offer, including the unpaid ones, and divides by the total time from accepting to dropping off.
- Does declining offers hurt my account?
- Declining protects your take-home, but it is not free. Uber ties acceptance rate to Uber Pro tier status and the perks attached to it, including trip-preview visibility at higher tiers, and drivers report being logged out briefly after several declines in a row. What the public evidence does not show is drivers being deactivated simply for declining. Treat it as a trade against Pro-tier perks and a short cooldown, not against your account.
- What is cost per mile and how do I find mine?
- Cost per mile is fuel plus wear — tires, brakes, oil, depreciation, the repairs your mileage brings forward. This tool defaults to $0.26, splitting it into fuel (your gas price divided by your real MPG) and wear (whatever is left). To get your own, total everything you spent on the car over a year and divide by the miles you drove that year, including the unpaid ones.
Marcio Azevedo — Rideshare driver in Durham, NC · Founder of DriverSignal. Marcio Azevedo drives rideshare in Durham, North Carolina, and built DriverSignal because he got tired of doing offer math in his head at a red light. DriverSignal reads the offer card on screen and scores it against the driver's own cost per mile and hourly floor before they accept. He writes about offer economics, cost per mile, deadhead pickups, and the gap between what an offer says it pays and what actually lands in the bank.
Related reading: the long version of this question, or browse everything we have written.
Early access
Know what the offer really pays.
DriverSignal reads the offer card on your screen and scores it against your own cost per mile and your hourly floor — on device, before you accept.
No driver-account login · On-device analysis · You decide every ride