Austin
MEDIUM · sourced, not yet live-verified
MEDIUM 2026-04-29 (Round F) — newly added. Texas has no gig-delivery-specific labor protections and no state regulator publishing hourly rates. Earnings figure is a market-median estimate based on national platform aggregator data (Gridwise, ShiftTracker) calibrated for Texas market conditions. To promote to HIGH: need a tier-1/2 Texas-specific source for delivery driver hourly earnings.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: BLS OES + market estimate
What would you take home in Austin?
Take-home, weekly
$302
Take-home, monthly
$1,310
Gross, weekly
$420
Gross, monthly
$1,820
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $1413/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (108% of monthly net).
Take-home is gross hourly minus an estimated tax/expense rate per country. See the methodology page for the derivation. This widget assumes you actually work the hours you set. For app-based delivery, a portion of logged-in time is unpaid waiting; the headline rate reflects engaged time only where regulators have defined it.
Cost of living vs. earnings
That works out to roughly 48 hours per week. Rent at $1,413 per month is 58 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Austin delivery driver in HUD's “severely cost-burdened” band by the federal definition (over 30 percent of gross income on housing). Measured against net take-home pay, which is what a worker actually has available to spend, the same rent is 81 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $730 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Austin ranks 33rd for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 193% of local minimum wage, 57% of local median.
Notes
Texas has no state minimum wage. Austin city ordinance allows $15/hr for city employees but not private-sector floor.
View Austin on the interactive map
See full source citations for this city on the sources page. Read about how each metric is computed in the methodology.
Primary earnings source: www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_12420.htm · archived