Gig Platform Comparison Calculator — True Net per Hour

Every gig platform advertises earnings per hour, and every one of those figures is gross. What decides which app is actually worth working is what survives after the car and the tax collector take their share, and the platform with the highest headline number is regularly not the one with the highest net.

Miles are the variable that does the damage. Fuel, tyres, brakes, servicing and depreciation run roughly 25 to 35 cents a mile for a typical vehicle, so an app that pays four dollars an hour more while putting eight more miles on the car has already given the advantage back. Delivery work that keeps you inside a small radius beats long-haul dispatch at the same gross rate, and no earnings calculator that ignores mileage can see that.

The tax side pushes in the opposite direction and is why the comparison needs both effects at once. The standard mileage deduction — 72.5 cents a mile for 2026 — is normally larger than the actual cash cost of driving, so a high-mileage platform generates a bigger deduction and pays less tax on the same take-home. That claws back part of what the driving cost. Comparing platforms on cash profit alone overstates the low-mileage option; comparing on the deduction alone overstates the high-mileage one. Both belong in the same calculation.

Two practical points on top of the arithmetic. Track your miles from the moment you go online rather than only during an active delivery — miles driven while waiting for and driving to a dispatch are deductible business miles, and drivers who only log the delivery leg routinely understate the deduction by a third. And be careful what counts as an hour: if you spend long unpaid stretches waiting to be dispatched, lower the gross figure you enter rather than raising the hours, because the waiting hour costs you time without generating either earnings or a deduction.