DoorDash: Pay

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It’s fun to scoot around handing people their lunch for a few hours a day, but obviously the reason most people work for app-based delivery companies is because they’re paid to do so. Needless to say, this will come up constantly as I write about my experience working for app-based delivery companies, but I wanted to introduce the basics from my experience working for DoorDash so far.

Understanding the 3 components of pay

Your pay for each DoorDash delivery you make is composed of three parts:

  • “Base pay” is (supposedly) computed by DoorDash based on “estimated time, distance, and desirability of the order.”

  • “Peak pay” is (supposedly) based on the volume of orders and availability of drivers within a given DoorDash “starting point.”

  • “Customer tip” is chosen by the customer (either though a default tip on every order, or on a per-order basis).

Obviously the only thing that matters to a DoorDash worker is their final pay (the sum of the 3 components), but splitting them is essential to understand the “known” and “unknown” components of any given order’s pay.

Base pay

Your experience is guaranteed to differ from mine, but after 25 DoorDash orders, 100% of them have had “Base pay” between $2.75 and $5.25, overwhelming between $2.75 and $3.75. This is surely because my DoorDash app is configured for “Bicycle,” so if you have a larger or faster vehicle, then you might get larger orders or deliveries over longer distances, which may have a higher base pay, but even DoorDash speculatively puts the highest base pay at $10.

Base pay is concealed from the worker until the delivery is completed.

Peak pay

Peak pay, or what we used to call “surge pricing” in the early days of the app-based workforce, is also paid by DoorDash, but unlike base pay is known in advance: you can check at any time whether the area you’re working in is offering peak pay and the exact amount you’ll receive in peak pay for each order you deliver.

I’ve seen peak pay as low as $1 per order and as high as $5.50 per order, and when DoorDash anticipates high demand and low availability in the future, they’ll allow you to schedule peak pay periods up to a day or so in advance, which is supposed to be a convenience if you’re trying to plan your delivery schedule around other activities.

Customer tip

In 2020 our Attorney General extracted a settlement from DoorDash that (supposedly) ended their long-running criminal enterprise of using customer tips to reduce the amount DoorDash paid out of pocket to its workers. Now, customer tips (supposedly) are paid out on top of the base pay and peak pay discussed above.

Total pay

Now that you know the three components of each order’s payment, you can work backwards from the estimated pay that pops up when you’re offered an order to deliver.

For example, if you’re working during a non-peak period and are offered an order with a $2.75 estimated payment, you can assume you’re being offered the base pay, with no peak pay and no customer tip. If you’re working during a period with $3 in peak pay and are offered a $5.75 delivery, you know you’re being offered the base pay, the peak pay, and no customer tip. And if you’re offered an order for $14.75 (the highest I’ve been paid so far), you can work backwards to guess the customer added a huge tip, $6.50 in that case.

After your delivery is completed, each component is broken out explicitly on the summary page, and twice in my experience my total pay has been higher than my estimated pay. I do not believe this is because I did an exceptionally good job delivering their food (I always do an exceptional job), but rather that DoorDash occasionally conceals the total amount of unusually high tips in order to generate “intermittent positive reinforcement,” which is widely regarded as one of the most effective ways of manipulating test subjects.

Conclusion

This post is focused exclusively on your wage per delivery, not timing or geography, which I’ll cover in future posts, but hopefully it begins to make clear that delivering through DoorDash would make absolutely no sense if you didn’t have access to free transportation between your starting point, the restaurant, and the customer. In fact, over the course of my 25 deliveries so far, there is not a single order that would have paid me more than the cost of renting a scooter to execute that delivery.

Of course, if you do have access to free micromobility services, then the equation changes entirely.