Boston
LOW · source quality below tier-2
STAYS LOW 2026-04-29 (Round H): Cleaned up earnings_url to point to MA general minimum wage page. The MA AG settlement applies to RIDESHARE only — Uber's own policy explicitly excludes delivery from active-time calculation. Previous published rationale incorrectly suggested the $34.48 settlement floor applied to delivery; corrected. To promote to MEDIUM/HIGH: would need a Massachusetts-specific delivery hourly rate from a tier-1 (gov) or tier-2 (Fairwork, named union) source. None currently exists for food delivery.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: Mass AG Campbell settlement page (rideshare $32.50→$34.48/hr engaged)
What would you take home in Boston?
Take-home, weekly
$388
Take-home, monthly
$1,681
Gross, weekly
$539
Gross, monthly
$2,334
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $2539/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (151% 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 37 hours per week. Rent at $2,539 per month is 82 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Boston 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 114 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $930 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Boston ranks 21st for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 106% of local minimum wage, 53% of local median.
View Boston 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.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-law-about-minimum-wage · archived