Mumbai
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: BusinessToday investigative reporting July 2024 (verified at businesstoday.in): named Mumbai/Bangalore Swiggy/Zomato workers. Shiva (Swiggy): ₹40-50k/mo; Taiyappa (Zomato): ₹40k/mo at 70hr/week. Plus Fairwork India 2024 Ratings (verified at cxotoday.com Oct 2024 press release: 11 platforms evaluated. Amazon Flex, bigbasket, BluSmart, Flipkart, Ola, Porter, Swiggy, Uber, Urban Company, Zepto, Zomato; only bigbasket and Urban Company received Fair Pay first point). ₹110-120/hr × $0.0120 = $1.32-1.44.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: BusinessToday India gig economy investigation
What would you take home in Mumbai?
Take-home, weekly
$24
Take-home, monthly
$104
Gross, weekly
$42
Gross, monthly
$182
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $407/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (391% 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 $407 per month is 168 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Mumbai 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 294 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $70 per month.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 133% of local minimum wage, 62% of local median.
Notes
Mumbai has India's highest urban food delivery earnings (Swiggy, Zomato, Zepto). Cross-verified with India press; Fairwork India 2024 noted no major platform pays the local minimum wage after costs. Outside-of-center rent estimated as 70% of city-center pending Round D1.
View Mumbai 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.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/are-zomato-swiggy-delivery-agents-earning-more-than-some-it-engineers-new-video-reveals-shocking-facts-438047-2024-07-22