Marginal cost vs full cost — the distinction that pays your rent
Two different questions hide inside "what does driving cost": what does one more mile cost me tonight (the accept/decline question), and what does this whole gig cost me per mile over the years (the is-this-worth-doing-at-all question). Offer decisions run on the first: gas, wear items, and the value your car sheds with each mile. The second adds everything: insurance changes, registration, financing, and the day the car needs replacing.
For context on the full picture, AAA's 2025 Your Driving Costs puts an average new car's all-in cost at $1.00/mile at 10,000 miles a year, 77¢ at 15,000, and 66¢ at 20,000. The per-mile figure falls as fixed costs spread over more miles. Those totals are built on a car bought new, including its depreciation and its financing, which is why they don't describe a paid-off older vehicle. An already-depreciated, boring, reliable car is the right tool for this job precisely because the most expensive part of those AAA figures happened to somebody else.
The IRS rate is neither of these numbers
The standard mileage rate (76¢/mi for the second half of 2026) is an optional deduction rate based on average fixed and variable vehicle costs. It is not a measurement of your cash spending. Happy consequence: an efficient older car usually spends far less per mile than it deducts per mile, and the gap is real economics in your favor. The mileage deduction page handles that side.
Running this page's own defaults all the way through
Here is the whole calculation, start to finish, using nothing but the numbers already loaded in the boxes above. Gas is $4.10 a gallon (the EIA weekly U.S. average of $4.096 for the week ending July 27, 2026, rounded up). The car does 28 miles per gallon. Maintenance sits at the AAA benchmark of $0.11. The wear reserve is blank until you choose one, and the placeholder suggests $0.08.
Fuel is the cost you can see. It isn't the cost that hurts.
Gas is the only vehicle expense that hands you a receipt while you're working. You watch the pump climb, you feel it, you remember it, and so it becomes the number you argue about in driver groups. But look again at the arithmetic above: on the defaults, fuel is fifteen cents of a thirty-four cent mile. Less than half. Everything else on that list is real money too. It simply arrives later, in lumps, disguised as bad luck.
This is why drivers who track only fuel consistently overestimate what a shift paid. They subtract the visible cost, pocket the difference, and then treat the brake job in October as an unrelated misfortune rather than the delayed invoice for miles they drove in June. The cost per mile is an attempt to move those lumps back to where they were actually incurred: on the road, one mile at a time, on the offers that caused them.
Fuel is also the one input on this page that genuinely moves week to week, which is why it sits in an editable box with a national average as a starting point rather than a hard-coded constant. Your metro's price and your car's real-world economy (not the sticker figure, the one you compute from your own fill-ups) will move that fifteen cents further than anything else on the page. The national average behind the default comes from EIA's Monday pump survey, published around 10 a.m. Eastern each Tuesday, so it is the figure here most likely to be a week behind by the time you read it. Overwrite it with what you actually paid.
Depreciation: the bill that never arrives in the mail
Every mile you drive makes your car worth slightly less, and nobody sends you a statement. Depreciation is invisible in a way that fuel never is: you only meet it once, at the moment you trade the car in or sell it, and by then it is far too late to price it into the offers that caused it.
Its scale is easy to underestimate. AAA's Your Driving Costs 2025 puts depreciation on an average new vehicle at $4,334 a year. Spread across the 15,000-mile year that produces their 77¢ figure, that works out to roughly 29 cents a mile, more than double the 11.04 cents that same study assigns to maintenance, repairs and tires combined. Depreciation is not a rounding error hiding behind the exciting costs. On a new car it is the cost.
Delivery work accelerates it in a specific and unfair way. Used-vehicle pricing keys on the odometer as much as on the model year, so packing three or four ordinary years of driving into one calendar year ages your car in the only dimension the resale market really punishes. It also brings the day of replacement closer, and replacement is the largest single expense in this line of work. A driver who runs a car into the ground over two years and then has to finance another one has paid for those miles, just not in a way any weekly earnings screen ever showed.
Putting a number on your own car's slide
There is no honest universal per-mile depreciation figure for a used car, and this page will not invent one for you. The AAA number quoted above describes a new vehicle and does not describe yours. What you can do is measure it: look up your exact model and year on a couple of listing sites at two different odometer readings (say one near where you are now and one thirty or forty thousand miles further along), take the difference in asking price, and divide it by the difference in miles. That quotient is your car's observed value loss per mile in today's market, and it is a far better basis for the reserve box than any average.
Whatever you decide, decide something. A blank reserve is treated as zero by the calculator, and zero is the one answer that is certainly wrong. It flatters every single offer you will ever evaluate, in the same direction, forever.
Maintenance and tires are a subscription, not a surprise
The $0.11 default in the maintenance box comes from AAA's Your Driving Costs 2025, which measures manufacturer-scheduled maintenance, wear-item repairs across five years, and one set of tires at 11.04 cents per mile. It is a reasonable starting benchmark and a poor description of a working gig car, for two reasons worth understanding before you accept it.
First, AAA's figure is built on a new vehicle with an extended warranty assumed to be in force. Your ten-year-old commuter has no such backstop: when the alternator, the wheel bearings or the catalytic converter go, the whole bill is yours. Second, that study assumes 15,000 miles a year and one set of tires over five years. A full-time delivery driver can pass 15,000 miles before summer. If you are turning the odometer several times faster than the assumption, then tires, brake pads, rotors, fluids and every other interval-based item arrive several times faster too, and one set of tires across five years will not be your experience.
Working out your own maintenance number
The best figure available to you is your own history, and it takes ten minutes to build. Add up everything you have spent on the car over the last twelve months that wasn't fuel: oil changes, tires, brakes, batteries, wipers, alignments, coolant, the diagnostic fee, the repair you'd rather forget. Then divide by the miles you drove in that period. That single quotient, spend divided by miles, is more truthful than any national average, because it already contains your car's particular habits, your climate, your roads and your mechanic's rates.
If you've owned the car less than a year, use whatever period you have and keep a running total going forward. The number improves every month you keep receipts, and it converts an occasional gut-punch into a predictable line item you were already collecting for.
Insurance: a question for your carrier, not for a calculator
Insurance is deliberately absent from the number this page produces, and the reason is structural: a premium does not change because you drove one more mile tonight. It changes when your coverage or your declared use changes. Marginal cost is about the next mile, so a fixed annual premium belongs in the full-cost picture rather than in an accept-or-decline decision.
That said, a personal auto policy and paid delivery work are not the same product, and the coverage a platform provides is its own separate thing with its own conditions about when it applies. We are not going to tell you what your policy says, because we haven't read it and no calculator has. What your policy covers while you are waiting for an offer, while you are carrying an order, and while you are driving back empty is a question with one correct address: your own insurer or agent, and your own policy documents. Ask them plainly what you are doing and get the answer for your situation before you assume anything either way.
The same route in two cars is two different jobs
This is the point most per-mile rules of thumb miss entirely. Two drivers can take the identical offer, drive the identical route, receive the identical payout, and end the night having earned genuinely different amounts of money — because one of them is running a cheap efficient hatchback and the other is running a thirsty truck. The offer is the same. The job isn't.
It also means borrowed advice is dangerous. When a driver in another city tells you a $6 offer for eight miles is fine, they are telling you it clears their cost in their car at their gas price. Run it through your own number and it may be a clear decline. This is why the whole site asks you to compute this figure once for yourself rather than shipping you a rule.
Where this number goes next
On its own, cents per mile is trivia. It becomes useful the moment it meets an offer or a shift. Tap Use This Cost above and the figure saves into your profile in this browser, where the rest of the site picks it up automatically.
The offer calculator combines it with your hourly target and your pace to answer the only question that matters in a 50-second window: does this specific offer clear your target, or does someone else want it more than you do. The real hourly pay page takes it the other direction, backward across a finished shift, subtracting your miles at your rate to show what the evening actually paid per hour of your life, including the waiting. And because the deduction side runs on a completely different basis, the mileage deduction page keeps the IRS rate separate rather than blending two numbers that mean different things.
What this calculator can't tell you
- When something expensive breaks. Averages describe a fleet over years. They cannot predict your transmission, and a per-mile reserve is a savings habit, not insurance against a specific failure.
- Your fixed costs. Registration, inspection, financing or lease payments, parking at home and insurance premiums do not move with one more mile, so they sit outside this marginal figure by design. They still have to be paid out of what you earn.
- How much life your car has left. Nobody knows that, and the reserve box is your best attempt at pricing the uncertainty rather than ignoring it.
- Your local gas price. The default is a national weekly average, not your corner station. Update it whenever it moves, because it moves.
- Your taxes. Nothing on this page is a tax calculation. Cash cost and deduction basis are different measurements that happen to be denominated in the same units.
What it can do is replace a shrug with a number you can defend — one built from your gas price, your car's real economy, a published maintenance benchmark, and a reserve you chose on purpose. That is a considerably better foundation than a rule someone posted in a forum.
Frequently asked questions
How much does it cost per mile to drive for DoorDash? For accept/decline decisions, use your marginal cost: gas (price per gallon ÷ MPG) plus maintenance/repairs/tires (AAA's 2025 average is 11.04 cents per mile on a new-car basis) plus whatever you reserve for extra wear and earlier vehicle replacement. Worked on this page's own defaults, $4.10 a gallon at 28 MPG plus 11.04 cents maintenance and an 8-cent replacement reserve, that comes to 34 cents per mile; your own number depends entirely on your gas price, your MPG, and what you set aside. AAA's full all-in cost for an average NEW car is 77 cents per mile at 15,000 miles a year — useful context, but it isn't your out-of-pocket decision number.
Is the IRS mileage rate my actual cost per mile? No. The IRS standard mileage rate (76 cents for the second half of 2026) is an optional deduction rate based on average fixed and variable vehicle costs across the fleet of American cars. It is not a measurement of your personal cash spending, which for an older, paid-off car is usually much lower per mile.