Gross vs. net: why your real hourly is 23% lower than you think
Your platform's earnings screen shows gross — what you were paid before your car took its cut and before the empty minutes between trips diluted your hour. In our June 2026 Earnings Index, the gap between the number drivers see and the number they keep was about 23%.
Where the money leaks
1. Your car is a silent partner. Fuel, maintenance, and wear are real costs on every mile — the IRS's 2026 standard rate values them at $0.725 per mile. Drive 150 miles in a shift and roughly $109 of your gross already belongs to the car.
2. Unpaid time is still time. Real hourly divides your net by every hour online — including waiting between offers and driving to pickups. Gross hourly quietly ignores the denominator.
3. Untracked expenses vanish. Phone plans, supplies, platform fees, tolls — small individually, meaningful annually, invisible unless captured.
Compute your own real hourly
Real hourly = (gross earnings − mileage cost − tracked expenses) ÷ total hours online
Run it for last week. If your number lands near the Index median, you're typical. If it lands well under, the fix is usually one of two things: too many low per-mile offers accepted, or too much unpaid time in the shift. GigReal computes this continuously — net earnings after expenses, divided by real tracked hours — so the number on your dashboard is the honest one.
Figures from the GigReal June 2026 Earnings Index — aggregated and anonymized across US drivers; methodology on the Index report.
