Philadelphia
MEDIUM · sourced, not yet live-verified
MEDIUM 2026-04-29 (Round F) — newly added. Pennsylvania remains at federal minimum and has no gig-delivery-specific protections. Earnings figure is a market-median estimate based on national platform aggregator data. To promote to HIGH: need a Pennsylvania-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)
Source: BLS OES + market estimate
What would you take home in Philadelphia?
Take-home, weekly
$281
Take-home, monthly
$1,217
Gross, weekly
$390
Gross, monthly
$1,690
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $1324/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (109% 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 47 hours per week. Rent at $1,324 per month is 59 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Philadelphia 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 82 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $670 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Philadelphia ranks 31st for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 179% of local minimum wage, 53% of local median.
Notes
Pennsylvania uses the federal minimum wage of $7.25/hr — one of 20 states still at the federal level.
View Philadelphia 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_37980.htm · archived