DoorDash: Earn by Time

Over the winter holidays, I headed out to Oregon as usual to spend some time on the coast and visit family. As I often say, while travel hacking is a way to save money on travel expenses, travel itself is a chance to explore opportunities outside your immediate area.

For example, back in 2015 the California grocery chain Smart & Final was running a promotion for American Express cardholders to save $25 on purchases of $50 or more — and I happened to be in San Diego at the time the promotion was running, letting me rack up hundreds of dollars in statement credits across a slew of authorized user cards that I wouldn’t have been able to do back home. The trip more than paid for itself.

Earn by time lets you be paid like a normal person, but only for “active time”

Since we were in Oregon for so long, I had planned on sneaking off between visits with friends and family to earn some money working for DoorDash. DoorDash has a peculiar feature in that it takes a little while after you arrive in a new area to switch your app’s geography over, but once that happened after a day or two, I was surprised to find a new feature had appeared in my iPhone’s Dasher app: “Earn by Time.”

You can read the linked article yourself, but the basic idea is simple: instead of being paid the sum of base pay, bonus pay, and customer tips for each order you deliver, you’re paid an hourly rate from the time you accept an order to the time the order is delivered, in other words, for “active time,” while still collecting 100% of the tips customers leave on each order.

While I was in Portland, the Earn by Time rate was $14.75, which happens to be the minimum wage within the “urban growth boundary” of Multnomah, Clackamas, and Washington counties.

According to this Reddit thread, other workers have seen Earn by Time rates of $10 per hour in Houston and Tennessee, $15 per hour in Maine, $9.99 in Indiana, and so on. Since these are all over the place, the connection to the minimum wage in Portland seems to be something of a coincidence (Maine’s minimum wage is $13.80, for instance).

Unfortunately, dear reader, I was not, in fact, able to sneak away and complete any Earn by Time orders, so I have nothing to report about how it works in practice. Upon returning to the nation’s capital, the option disappeared, so it will take another trip (or an expansion of the earning option to my area) for me to report from personal experience.

What’s better: Earn by Time or Earn by Order?

Nevertheless, I can provide some suggestive evidence, and a framework for thinking about whether to Earn by Time or Earn by Order based on my earning history. For this purpose I’m only going to use my 4 highest-earning weeks since I started working for DoorDash, as those were the weeks when I most successfully optimized my dash-time-to-active-time ratio, and it roughly approximates a “month” of earnings (28 days).

When looking at this data, it’s absolutely essential to remember that even when you are in Earn by Time mode, you still collect 100% of customer tips. That means we need to identify the breakeven point including only base pay and bonus pay. Let’s take a look.

Over my 4 highest earning weeks I earned a total of $866.70 ($171.02, $195.46, $202.62, and $297.59), across 29.33 hours (5.62, 6.8, 6.78, and 10.13) of “active time,” a total pay rate of $29.55 per hour.

However, that includes base pay, bonus pay, and customer tips. To make a comparison to Earn by Time, we need to first back out customer tips to show only the amount DoorDash paid me to for active time.

Of the $866.70 total pay, only $540.75 was paid by DoorDash — the rest was customer tips. That brings my Earn by Time breakeven rate down to $18.44, assuming Earn by Time workers are equally likely to be assigned orders as Earn by Order workers. That’s an enormous, unjustified assumption that I do not have any reason to believe, but it gives at least one possibly useful frame of reference.

That’s several dollars higher than the minimum wage in the District of Columbia (although it will increase to $16.50 in July, 2023), so you would need an active-time-to-dash-time ratio of about 87% to earn the minimum wage from DoorDash using Earn by Time. That’s much, much higher than even my most successful week on the platform, but it’s not totally unrealistic.

Conclusion: Should you earn by time or order?

As the above makes clear, the obvious answer is: “it depends.” If DoorDash offered me $18.44 per hour or more to Earn by Time, it would be a no-brainer; that’s what I’m earning anyway on my best weeks. If you can earn more using Earn by Time, then use it!

The subtler answer is that if Earn by Time is or becomes available in your area, or if you’re traveling and land in an area where it’s available, you should give it a shot. You can switch out of that mode any time, so I’d certainly consider starting a lunch rush in Earn by Time mode and then finishing it in Earn by Order mode, or try alternating days in each earning mode.

The one thing DoorDash is very good about is earnings transparency, so it should be obvious within a week or two which earning option generates the highest total pay. And if you want to run the experiment again every month or two to see if the dynamic has changed, that’s always an option too.

The most important thing seems to me to simply be staying out of any ruts and avoid forming any habits; when a strategy stops meeting your goals or needs, it’s time to try something else!