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🇺🇸United States · High income · 2026-Q2

Denver

47composite score · #25 of 46

MEDIUM · sourced, not yet live-verified

MEDIUM 2026-04-29 (Round F) — newly added. Denver city minimum wage is high but doesn't directly apply to gig delivery contractors. Earnings figure is a market-median estimate based on national platform aggregator data calibrated for Denver market. To promote to HIGH: need a Colorado-specific tier-1/2 source for gig delivery hourly earnings.

Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.

Earnings (USD per hour)

Net, after tax & expenses$12.24/hr
Gross$17.00/hr

Source: BLS OES + market estimate

What would you take home in Denver?

30hrs

Take-home, weekly

$367

Take-home, monthly

$1,591

Gross, weekly

$510

Gross, monthly

$2,210

With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $1666/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (105% 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

Hours of work for one month's rent (1BR outside centre)170 hours

That works out to roughly 39 hours per week. Rent at $1,666 per month is 57 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Denver 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 79 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $880 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Denver ranks 24th for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.

Rent, 1BR outside centre$1666/mo
Restaurant meal (mid-range)$20.00

Pay vs. local labour market

Minimum wage$19.29/hr
Median wage (all occupations)$26.00/hr

Gross hourly is 88% of local minimum wage, 65% of local median.

Notes

Denver has the 4th highest US local minimum wage at $19.29/hr (2026).

View Denver 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_19740.htm · archived