Nairobi
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 Kenya 2023 Ratings ("The Promise and Peril of Platform Work in the Kenyan Platform Economy") + Fairwork Kenya 2022 ("Towards Regulating the Platform Economy"). both in Fairwork published reports list at fair.work/en/fw/fairwork-reports/. Plus Fairwork Kenya impact: 2023 supported Transport Workers Union (TAWU) + Automobile Association of Kenya submission to Ministry of Transport. Cross-corroborated by Daily Nation Kenya delivery rate reporting. KES 230/hr × $0.0078 = $1.79.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: Fairwork Kenya 2024 ratings
What would you take home in Nairobi?
Take-home, weekly
$30
Take-home, monthly
$129
Gross, weekly
$54
Gross, monthly
$234
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $214/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (166% 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 50 hours per week. Rent at $214 per month is 69 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Nairobi 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 125 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $90 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Nairobi ranks 34th for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 110% of local minimum wage, 47% of local median.
Notes
Fairwork Kenya 2024 noted no platform could prove riders earn the KES 15,201/mo minimum after costs. Outside-of-center rent estimated as 70% of city-center pending Round D1.
View Nairobi 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