Washington
LOW · source quality below tier-2
STAYS LOW 2026-04-29 (Round H): Cleaned up earnings_url to point to DC Office of Wage-Hour Compliance instead of Glassdoor. DC has the highest district-level general minimum wage in the US ($17.95) but no delivery-specific gig labor protections. Previous Glassdoor citation removed. To promote: would need DC Council to pass a delivery-specific ordinance (none currently proposed), or a tier-1/2 source publishing DC-specific delivery hourly rates.
Only HIGH-confidence cities carry a full verification audit. See the methodology for what each tier means.
Earnings (USD per hour)
Source: Glassdoor Uber Eats Delivery Driver DC (n=216, March 2026)
What would you take home in Washington?
Take-home, weekly
$388
Take-home, monthly
$1,681
Gross, weekly
$539
Gross, monthly
$2,334
With a 1BR apartment outside the city centre at $2099/mo, rent costs more than your monthly take-home (125% 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 30 hours per week. Rent at $2,099 per month is 68 percent of gross monthly earnings, which puts a Washington 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 94 percent. Affordable rent at this earnings rate, defined by HUD as no more than 30 percent of gross income, would be around $930 per month. Across the 46 cities in the dataset, Washington ranks 15th for hours needed to cover rent, where lower is better.
Pay vs. local labour market
Gross hourly is 123% of local minimum wage, 69% of local median.
Notes
DC minimum wage $17.50/hr (highest in US). Couriers typically run DoorDash + Uber Eats; large federal worker base means strong tipping culture. Earnings figure represents food/grocery delivery specifically; Glassdoor figures often blend rideshare which pays $25-30/hr.
View Washington 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: does.dc.gov/service/office-wage-hour-compliance-0