Berlin
tap to expand auditWhat was directly verified: Lieferando courier recruitment page contains the exact string "base wage of €13.90 per hour" for full-time directly-employed Scoober couriers, plus paid vacation, sick pay, and full health/social insurance. Cross-corroborated by Fairwork Germany 2025 third-round ratings (~€14.50/hr including delivery and distance bonuses).
What was directly verified: Lieferando courier recruitment page contains the exact string "base wage of €13.90 per hour" for full-time directly-employed Scoober couriers, plus paid vacation, sick pay, and full health/social insurance. Cross-corroborated by Fairwork Germany 2025 third-round ratings (~€14.50/hr including delivery and distance bonuses).
What was assumed (not directly verified)
- EUR/USD exchange rate: $14.30 = €13.36 implies a rate of ~1.07 USD/EUR. The exact rate at publish time was not pulled from a live FX API; this rate is approximate, sourced from training data circa April 2026. If actual current rate has moved more than ±3% from 1.07, the USD figure may be off by a similar amount.
- That the Lieferando rate generalizes to "delivery worker pay in Berlin" — Lieferando is the dominant employer (formerly Just Eat / Takeaway.com) but Wolt and other contractor-model platforms operate differently and may pay more or less. Our value reflects the largest-employer rate, not a market median.
Caveats a journalist should understand
This is base wage for DIRECTLY EMPLOYED couriers under German labor law (full benefits, taxes withheld). Contractor-model couriers (e.g., some Wolt workers) operate under different arrangements and may have different gross/net dynamics. The €13.90 figure is the floor; actual earnings including bonuses are ~€14.50/hr per Fairwork. The figure should be cited as "Lieferando's published base wage for employed couriers."
What would invalidate this
Lieferando publishes a new rate. German federal minimum wage (Mindestlohn) increase in January 2027 may pull this up. Major EUR/USD movement >5%.
Re-verify by
2026-07-29 (and immediately after Lieferando publishes a rate update or Mindestlohn rises)
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: Fairwork Germany ratings (Lieferando/Wolt)
What would you take home in Berlin?
Take-home, weekly
$268
Take-home, monthly
$1,162
Gross, weekly
$429
Gross, monthly
$1,859
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $985/mo, rent eats most of your take-home (85% 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 25 hours per week. Rent at $985 per month is 40 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Berlin delivery driver in HUD's “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 64 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $740 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Berlin ranks 11th for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 66% of local minimum wage, 38% of local median.
View Berlin 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.lieferando.de/en/courier/