This Is How Much You Need To Drive For Uber Or Lyft To Make $50,000 A Year

There's been a disparity between how much ridesharing companies like Uber say their drivers can make, and how much drivers say they're making.

NerdWallet, a startup focused on financial education and empowerment, crunched some numbers to figure out how many rides drivers would have to give to earn $50,000, $75,000, and $100,000.

After looking at the numbers, NerdWallet had a few big takeaways:

• Based on their data, drivers can, on average, make more working for Uber than for Lyft and Sidecar in most places. Uber drivers make an average of $15.97 per ride with Uber, as opposed to Lyft ($11.48) and Sidecar ($13.35).
• In order to make $50,000 a year, an Uber driver must provide 60.21 rides every week. A Lyft driver would have to provide 83.76 rides, and a Sidecar driver would have to provide 72.03 rides.
• To make $100,000 a year, drivers have to give 120.42, 167.52, and 144.05 rides every week on Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar, respectively.

Here's a summary of NerdWallet's findings:

NerdWallet used data from SherpaShare, which lets drivers track their expenses and income, to figure out how many rides drivers have to accept in order to make $50,000, $75,000, and $100,000 in pre-tax income.

The study looked at 14 of the biggest US markets for the three ridesharing services: Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

This is what NerdWallet has to say about how drivers can make $50,000. It all has to do with where and when you're driving:

"Driver utilization" for New York City's yellow cabs is about 50%, which means that for each hour drivers work, they are ferrying passengers 50% of the time. SherpaShare's per trip fare data for Uber shows that the average driver would have to drive 20.47 hours each week to make $50,000 a year. However, from anecdotal evidence and investigative reports, it is likely that the average driver utilization for ridesharing is much less than 50%.

Of course, the study has some caveats. NerdWallet chose to focus only on UberX and ignore UberBLACK or Uber SUV. And the information from SherpaShare - trip fare, distance and time data - comes from just a fraction of all Uber, Lyft, and Sidecar drivers on the road. But nonetheless, it's an interesting glimpse into what drivers need to do in order to in order to make a livable wage.