Cape Town
MEDIUM · sourced, not yet live-verified
Pending live-verification. The source URLs have not yet been fetched and archived in this round; the city will return to a HIGH classification once that is done. Original rationale: Fairwork South Africa 2023 Ratings ("Advocating for safety, and dignity in the Platform Economy"). in Fairwork published reports list at fair.work/en/fw/fairwork-reports/. Oxford Internet Institute + WZB Berlin Social Science Center methodology. Evaluates Uber Eats, Mr D, Bolt rates. R45/hr × $0.054 USD/ZAR = $2.43.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: Fairwork South Africa ratings
What would you take home in Cape Town?
Take-home, weekly
$42
Take-home, monthly
$183
Gross, weekly
$72
Gross, monthly
$312
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $585/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (319% 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 more than 90 hours per week. Rent at $585 per month is 141 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Cape Town 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 240 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $120 per month.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 94% of local minimum wage, 31% of local median.
Notes
Outside-of-center rent estimated as 70% of city-center rent pending Round D1 verification.
View Cape Town 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: fair.work/en/fw/fairwork-reports/ · archived