Driving for Uber is one way to earn extra side hustle income. After all, the more income you make, the sooner you can reach financial independence. Side hustles are a part of the post-pandemic era of making money.
Uber is currently DESPERATE for drivers again as the economy rebounds from the pandemic. A lot of drivers quit driving in 2020 for safety and lower pay reasons. Drivers are coming back, but not fast enough.
For those of you who would like to join the Six Figure Club (SFC), it’s relatively straight forward. Charge $50 an hour for 40 hours a week for 52 weeks in a row and you’ll get the SFC invite in the mail! Of course, you’ve first got to develop some valuable skills, but that’s what college and all those extra hours side hustling were for.
If you make $100 an hour working 40 hours a week, you can make $17,333 a month and $208,000 a year. That’s when you’ll really be able to live comfortably in any expensive city in the world.
With my most recent Uber pay stub, I just might have found a way to get there after only three months of driving. The great thing is that if you have a car, a relatively clean record, a smartphone, and a willingness to hustle, you can probably earn six figures from Uber as well.
Making Six Figures Driving For Uber
I decided to drive for Uber because the company is one of the most popular private companies in the world, valued at $50 billion, and based right here in San Francisco. I wanted to see what it felt like driving a car for a living, and whether it could be a viable income stream to support oneself in an expensive city. If it was, then surely driving could be a great means for many people around the world to help make ends meet as well.
After driving for two months, I knew I could easily make ~$50,000 a year driving 40 hours a week. What I didn’t expect, or believe, was that many drivers were actually making a solid $100,000+ a year. I had to learn more.
Three Examples Of Uber Drivers Making Six Figures
My friend Jabir makes $100,000 a year by not only driving ~50 hours a week, but also by lending out his second car, a paid off 2012 Honda Civic, to his younger brother and friend for 40% of their profits. His goal is to regularly bill an extra 60 hours a week at ~$12/hour after his cut of $30 / hour. That extra 60 hours a week earns him an extra $38,000 a year in passive income.
Then I got to talking to my Uber driver from JFK airport to Manhattan when I went for the US Open. He said he made $115,000 in 2014 driving for Uber. He revealed he was able to earn extra income because he was rated 4.8 out of 5.0. With a high rating, he gained access to the lucrative NYC – Hamptons route, which limits the number of Uber drivers on any given day. Every weekend for six months he was earning 50% more an hour thanks to an artificially low supply of drivers.
Finally, I talked to another Uber driver on the way to Nyonya, my favorite Malaysian restaurant in Manhattan, and he mentioned he also makes over $100,000 a year as a driver. He said he earns roughly $70,000 a year from Uber, and another $40,000 as a private driver for one of Manhattan’s real estate developers. The developer hired him after being his Uber passenger.
With three examples of regular people without a college education making over $100,000 a year driving for Uber, my motivation to drive was rekindled. I read everything I could about maximizing my income, and was able to achieve a $42/hour gross rate (see pic above) from $28/hour when I first started. An annualized income of $82,000 gross a year is pretty damn good, but that’s still short of entering the Six Figure Club.
So, as any lazy person would do, I gave up after a week since $42 / hour is still not the best use of my time as a middle-aged man. Then, I got my latest weekly earnings update. See below.
I made $414.21 NET of Uber fees after only driving for 3.6 hours! That comes out to a whopping $115 / hour, or a samurai slicing $240,000 a year if I am able to drive for 40 hours a week.
Ah-ha! Maybe the three guys making $100,000+ a year driving for Uber were telling the truth. After all, driving was their full-time job, while driving for me is more about investigative journalism and story-telling. With this latest income report, I was reminded about the power of leverage.
How I Mad Over $100 An Hour Driving For Uber
There are two ways any enterprising individual should think about ways to make money.
The first way is to think about the total amount of money you can earn in a year, since the yearly salary is the standard way to calculate income. If you think this way, you’ve got the employee mentality. There’s a natural tendency for the majority to slack off or do the minimum over time since you’re going to get paid a set rate, no matter how little you work. Gotta love it!
The second way to think about earning money is through the hourly rate. If you think this way, you’ve got the independent contractor mentality. I think in this way because I decided to hit the eject button from Corporate America back in 2012 due to boredom, a lack of correlation with compensation and effort, and my intense desire to be free.
I only want to actively work about 25 hours a week so I can spend time on my online business and do other fun things. Therefore, my goal is to maximize my income on those 25 units a week.
Uber Earnings
Take a look at the chart below that breaks down my $414.21 Uber paycheck for the week to understand how $115/hour came about. I only worked for two days out of the seven (Uber pays every Thursday like clockwork) for a total of $105.21. Meanwhile, I made $300 in “Other” and $9 in a toll, which is basically a reimbursement since I have to pay tolls up front.
So what is this mysterious “Other” you’re wondering? Well, after I gave my first 20 rides when I first started out, I earned a $300 bonus under the Other category. Every new driver earns a bonus after giving a certain number of rides. This $300 Other income on this latest income statement is my bonus income for referring a San Francisco driver who successfully completed his 20 rides!
The new driver apparently found me from one of my previous articles on Financial Samurai and decided to sign up and give Uber driving a whirl. Not only did I get the $300 referral income, so did he for a total payout of $600. The bonus amount depends on where you are located, but I think it is an absolute no-brainer to drive for Uber to collect the bonus payout (usually 10 – 50 rides). After that, quit and just pick up passengers along the way using their destination feature to make extra bucks. Why not?
Bonus Income
After the bonus is collected, I’d just use Uber to pick up passengers along the way to wherever you’re going using their destination feature. I realized it’s not worth driving full-time anymore. The reason is because the hourly gross wage drastically declined since I started due to a large increase in drivers.
The great thing about this $300 income is that I had no idea it was coming. It was completely out of the blue, like seeing an Amazon gift box from a stranger at my front steps during a non-holiday period. Furthermore, it’s not like I’ve written a ton of articles about my Uber experience either. I only have two dedicated articles out of 2,000+ articles on Financial Samurai that revolve around my Uber experience.
Out of the $414.21 income, roughly 25% was active, and 75% was passive. As someone who is trying to maximize his time based on an hourly wage, such a high ratio for passive income is solid!
Money Lessons Learned
- People make more money out there than you know. Getting a 9-to-5 job is not the only way to make six figures a year. Plenty of independent contractors also make six figures because they’ve learned how to maximize their time and leverage existing assets (a car, a second car, relationships, etc.). Don’t look down on people who don’t have full-time jobs. Try to figure out their secrets instead.
- Market yourself by registering your domain name online. You must have an online presence if you want to be found. Don’t let Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter be the owner of your brand. Own your own brand! By creating a presence online, you can market yourself much more efficiently. You can leverage your platform to make referral income like I do with Uber. You can also use your platform to earn consulting gigs, sell products like my book, and earn advertising revenue. My online income is well north of $200,000 a year, allowing me to no longer have to work a day job. Sign up for Bluehost to register your domain and pay less than $4/month for hosting your website. It’s cheap and easy to get started. Here’s my step-by-step tutorial for how to start your own website.
- Develop your X Factor. Think about your X Factor as your happiness insurance policy. Your X Factor could be methodically developing a network of key individuals over the years who could hook you up with a new job when the time comes. My X Factor happens to be starting Financial Samurai in 2009 as a place to share my thoughts about the financial crisis. I never imagined the site would give me the confidence to engineer my layoff three years later, make more than my day job in banking five years later, or give me opportunities to consult for various fintech startups in Silicon Valley.
- Continuously experiment with new ways to make money. Test, test, test! This is the main lesson I learned while consulting at various marketing departments. Someone out there is doing it better than you. Figure out what they are doing and replicate in your own unique way. Don’t just settle for one source of income.
- Nothing beats hard work. The up to $1,000 sign-up bonus to drive is nice, and everybody should take advantage. But one of the main reasons why I decided to drive for Uber is because I wanted to prove to all the incredibly annoying people who complain they aren’t getting ahead and aren’t willing to work more than 40 hours a week, that making a healthy income is possible if you try harder! Yes, you need a car that’s less than 10 years old, and a smartphone, but come on. Some of the poorest people I know whom I play tennis with during the middle of the day have the latest iPhone, 60″ LED TV, and pimp daddy car. Thanks to the sharing economy, there are so many new ways to make money nowadays.
My goal is to consistently make over $100 / hour through Uber.. I’m a big proponent of working smarter, rather than harder. But in order to get smart, you’ve first got to put in your time!
The first step everybody needs to do is start their own platform online. Once you’ve got an online platform, your income upside is unlimited!
The pandemic has shown us that having an online business that cannot be shut down is a very valuable asset to have. Everything is moving online. Further, the value of cash flow has gone way up because interest rates have gone way down.
Related: How To Start Your Own Profitable Site To Leverage The Internet
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Recommendation For Leaving A Job
If you want to leave a job you no longer enjoy, I negotiating a severance instead of quitting. If you negotiate a severance like I did back in 2012, you not only get a severance check, but potentially subsidized healthcare, deferred compensation, and worker training.
When you get laid off, you’re also eligible for up to roughly 27 weeks of unemployment benefits. Having a financial runway is huge during your transition period.
Conversely, if you quit your job you get nothing. Check out the book How To Engineer Your Layoff: Make A Small Fortune By Saying Goodbye.
It’s the only book that teaches you how to negotiate a severance. In addition, it was recently updated and expanded thanks to tremendous reader feedback and successful case studies.
For more nuanced personal finance content, join 50,000+ others and sign up for the free Financial Samurai newsletter. Financial Samurai is one of the largest independently-owned personal finance sites that started in 2009. Everything is written based off firsthand experience.
I can say this as a fulltime uber driver that the claims made above could be truthful, however if you got paid our 400 dollars in 3 hours of work, I am saying that total is with included weekly 50/60/70 trip bonuses added.
I made 100k this year from driving with uber and lyft, but what they don’t tell you in this article is the expense to operate, the expense to actually hold commercial insurance to be able to drive independently, and the tens and thousands of dollars of repair bills that acquire very quickly. Plus the added expense of putting 120k miles on your vehicle every year at the cost of lets say 15k if your driving something brand new, if your driving something used, them repair bills multiplied.
So making 100k a year is cool, if your not spending 65k a year in operational costs.
Its fools gold!
If You work alot in NYC with a tlc license driving for both Uber and Lyft can You make sixty thousand after yearly tax and expenses?
I have been driving for Uber in the Dallas/FTW area for a few months. I really enjoy it. Let me first throw out a couple of disclaimers. First, my wife is the primary bread-winner right now, so Uber is a secondary/supplementary income for us while I’m going back to college in my middle age. I am able to do this because my wife is earning most of our family income. I would never be able to make it on my own as an Uber driver. Second, my Uber car is a secondary car for us and is an older paid-off cash car. You would never ever want to be making payments on an Uber car.
So with that said, here are my main points. First, FREEDOM AND INDEPENDENCE. I go to work whenever I want and go home whenever I want. That one thing–my personal freedom and independence–is more important to me than anything else in life, other than my beloved wife.
Second, STOP THINKING IN TERMS OF AN HOURLY WAGE OR YEARLY SALARY. Instead, treat it as a business and always think in terms of profit. In fact, I would probably say that is good advice on most aspects of your life. Treat almost everything like a business. Uber driving IS a business of sorts, really, since I’m an independent contractor with respect to my taxes.
Third, I don’t drive during certain hours of certain days of the week when I’m likely to pick up drunks who could puke in my car. Regardless of the compensation or profit, I value my car and my record more than money/profit. And even my safety in certain situations.
Fourth, I spent nearly twenty years as an OTR truck driver. That is a rough profession full of rough people, and we went to many rough places. Consequently, very few people/places scare me very much. So I feel comfortable picking up most people from most places, and it generally doesn’t bother me going to the “bad” part of town. If I were a woman or a young lady, I would be a little more concerned generally, and I would be very concerned about going to certain parts of town as an Uber driver or working during certain hours, especially in those areas.
I guess that’s about all I’ve got right now. Thanks.
78 year old husband started driving Uber 5 days ago, in Foxboro, MA. Has already made $804.61 As soon as the snow melts in the spring, I’ll be getting a 4-door car myself so I can drive also. Impressed!!
I do this in my free Time a few times a week, holidays and during big events in my city. I like the flexibility. I also was able to get started very quickly and I even completed my car inspection at work during my lunch break with RideShare Mechanic.
I understand the deal here is to get that referral money.
But, I drove for uber for two months in order to raise some cash flow. Not to make money, but to raise some cash flow.
A few thoughts;
1. I actually enjoyed it most of the time.
2. Depreciation, in the form of miles. Driving 40 hours a week can put 1000 miles in your car. Everyone can do the math. Four years of this will put 200,000 miles on your car.
3. Insurance. How many drivers have supplemental insurance. I didn’t.
4. Pukers. It happens more often than you would think.
5. Dead miles and dead time.
6. How many drivers enjoy having a drunk rate your job performance?
Cheers.
#6. !!!!!!!!!!
Bullsh*t must cities are not as busy as NY and they don’t make anything close to the amount you are talking about in this article. Again bullsh*t.
My city sucks I. Tips and not busy at all 11 rides equals almost 80.00 very low$$
Signing up all these referral drivers means more cars out on the road, which makes driving Uber more competitive. In the end that will make this bad situation with too many Uber drivers on the road even worse. The bottom will fall out, it’s just a matter of time.
Uber is NOT the solution to making a good income and Uber drivers will eventually find this out…not worth the time and Uber is continuously reducing what they pay per mile. Wake up people Uber sucks!
So very true. I got a request to drive someone 199 miles away, AC to the Poconos, and after getting off the phone with Uber I found out I was going to only make a lousy $164. $164 not considering gas and 3 hours one way is not my idea of proper compensation. Obviously I canceled that trip. All of it is a joke.
Yeah, you should be paid at least $350 for that trip!
That’s probably what the pax was paying.
Actually in the Boston area, I’ve had an unbelievable experience. With the 90 and 115 trip bonuses, I can expect $1200.00 a week with a typical Monday through Friday with no nights past 6pm. That’s only 23 trips a day and dont forget tips.
If I decide to do friday and saturday night then easily 1600-1800 in a week.
Is it possible to do 115 trip in Boston driving 6 days a week full time ?
get off the road, boston roads are congested enough with you fools
But you’re not taking into account the taxes or other expenses… anyone saying they are making this much don’t consider that.
Surges don’t exist anymore in Boston. Charlie Baker, already an enemy of rideshare, decided there will be no surge bonuses during a “time of emergency” (these past 6 months of coronavirus), and will not budge on his decision, despite this being now the “new normal”. I’m from MA, and do almost all my driving in RI now. $5, $9, $14, $17 surges everywhere! Now riders in MA are waiting 15+ minutes longer on average for a rideshare compared with neighboring states. Why? Because so many of us earn far better money in Maine, NH, RI, etc. Why deal with Chucky the cheapskate? (for the record, I DID NOT and WILL NEVER vote for him). There is supply and demand, and during busy crazy times, getting in/out of Boston during rush hour…. Why would anyone do that for the same cheap pay that they get when driving passengers on a relaxing Sunday afternoon? Of course drivers now avoid the Boston area during busy times, what incentive do they have to deal with the most hellish traffic on the planet?
Hope Chaz comes to his senses…
Yeah, in NY. This is not the norm everywhere. Not in NC that’s for sure.
The normal is earning minimum-wage and hating life. Financial Samurai is a place to be abnormal and a good sense. To figure out how to leverage the Internet and knowledge to make more money and lead a better life.
Very cool & inspiring. I get what people are saying about not counting a one-time bonus as an hourly wage but I also think like a boss & not an employee so I get it, Sam. I just drove for both Uber & Lyft today for the first time! I got laid off a couple of weeks ago & am trying to figure out where I want to go with my life (@ 35 with technology & medical sales experience & so done with corporate America). I made the easiest $100 I’ve ever made today with both Lyft & Uber. I could see myself making good money with them actually & I’ve been in the SFC for years now. My best friend has urged me to start a blog for years now! I just may look into it, Sam! Thanks!
That’s a load of crap. Tell that garbage to all the Uber drivers that went on strike last week, days before Uber started trading on the NY Stock Exchange. Uber had a crappy opening and it is still crappy. You need to wake up too.
Question. This article mentioned a guy who loaned his car for 40 percent of the income. Just wondering is there a way to set that up for guaranteed payment or because it was his brother and and a friend was it just a trust, honor payment?
Crapy post. The hourly gross rate is 105.21/7.2=14.6 dollars. That is without deducting the gas cost, auto maintenance etc. In fact driving Uber is a losing concern if you add gas cost and auto care.
All these people are hallucinated by becoming a easy taxi driver. Making nothing at all just wasting time.
You missed the point of the article regarding leveraging the internet to earn referral income.
so this article wasn’t about uber at all? Gotta say, you are not the world’s most talented writer, and not even a passable one. If people are losing your main point because of all the excess verbiage, you didn’t do the one thing all good writers do: rewrite, then rewrite again and again and again.
I agree. I need to write shorter articles because people tend not to read to the end in this ADHD world.
Even though I have no tallest, at least I was generating over $100/hour driving for Uber and don’t have to work for a living ever again. How about you?
And that doesn’t include taxes. Living in the bay working over 60 hours a week and homeless.
I have driven for Uber now for 5 months, and have definitely NOT had the same experience. I gross about $18 an hour before expenses, and not including a ticket I recently received for rolling through a stop sign. I would say your experience is rare, and limited to the San Fransico / NYC area. I am hoping Uber drivers can at least be eligible for minimum wage, we desperately need it.
You are right in that living/working in a denser city has more fares. But remember, living in an expensive city has more costs as well. A one bedroom in SF costs $3,000+/month!
The key to making $100/hour is by starting a website and earning referral driving income.
Here’s and idea, how about getting a REAL job.
LMAO TRUE
I’m an Uber driver, very street savvy and knows all the roads very well. I have a 4.94 rating due to going out of my way to ensure each rider is comfortable and has the best experience. I hate to be a “critic” of this but simply not possible. You would have to be in every prime time spot almost each and every ride . Furthermore you don’t know where you riders are going and were you will end up at? You can make this much late at night in specific situations but not often enough. Don’t count on this to be specific to your region and area. Just not a good representation of earnings. Airport runs are great too early morning as well.
You missed the point about using the Internet to make money easier through driver referral income. The Internet is all about leverage so you don’t have to trade your time for money.
Thanks for the tips and I can certainly identify with the lines…..”I think in this way because I decided to hit the eject button from Corporate America back in 2012 due to boredom, a lack of correlation with compensation and effort, and my intense desire to be free”…
I felt suffocated so decided to change the situation, drove part time last year while I learned to be a developer and now work as a full stack .net developer from home n love it, so 10-15 hours/week of Uber will be great to fill in any gaps in income until I am able to charge a better rate:)..
OMG your article is great! I have learned more about making money just reading this article then all my years of experience. If you look at earnings as hours ×’s rate = X. I was always thinking in ways getting a high paying job when in fact you can have any job ×’s hour’s =’s. Ha ha. Awesome! Look at it as hours per day × a week, it makes it easier because your focus is not on work but time. You changed my life, there is not enough thank you’s, so here is at least one, THANK YOU and God Bless you and yours!
Plus, haven’t surge pricings gone the way of the dodo in the past week?
I’m in Dallas/Fort Worth. It’s not looking to optimistic right now for Uber/Lyft with the rate cuts. Plus I’m new to this and am in a fair amount of debt. I just don’t see how a driver can make close to $70,000 a year without driving 24/7 and 22 hours a day if not more on uber fares alone. And how many referrals can one expect? That would be where the real money comes in. Thank you.
Driving for the sign up bonus and making referrals really is where the money is. Even if you can get just 4 referrals a month, you can make an extra $400 – $4,000 a month, depending on the promotion. This is why having an online platform is a good idea.