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Uber Eats Tax Calculator: How Uber Eats earnings impact your taxes

Whether you deliver for Uber Eats and others as a side hustle, or it's one of your main sources of income, there always comes a time when you have to address that elephant in the room:

What about taxes?

If it's tax season, maybe you're getting a bit uneasy. Or maybe it's just time to think ahead and plan for what you have to save. What am I going to owe come tax time? Will I get a refund? CAN I get a refund? How bad is this going to hurt?

There are too many moving pieces for me to try to tell you what you'll have to pay or if you'll get a refund. Everyone is different. Every situation is different.

In this article, we'll help you try to figure out the tax impact of your Uber Eats earnings. How much more will you have to pay, or how much less will your refund be? We'll discuss:

This article will have important information about how the tax article works and why we created it the way we did. However, if you want to just jump ahead, you are certainly welcome to do so.

Long oval blue button with silver trim that says Use the Calculator.

Important information about this article and this Uber Eats Tax series.

Before we go any further, the following is really important when it comes to understanding taxes with Uber Eats.

tax impact from Uber Eats earnings as illustrated by an asteroid impacting planet Earth.
Sometimes the tax impact from Uber Eats income can feel pretty catastrophic. Maybe not as catastrophic as a this, but it can feel like it.

One: This is not tax advice. Do NOT use this as tax advice. Your tax situation is different than anyone else's. If you need specific advice for your taxes and finances, tax professionals can help you much better than an article like this. This is for informational purposes only.

Two: This is about taxes in the United States. Every country has its own tax laws. Many things are similar and many can be very different.

Three: This Uber Eats tax calculator focuses on Uber Eats earnings. However, much of this is similar for other gigs like:

  • Being a food delivery driver for other gigs like Doordash, Grubhub, Instacart etc.
  • Uber Drivers, Lyft drivers and other rideshare drivers

You may find that one of these articles in our Uber Eats tax series may be a better fit for what you're looking for:

This is the tax calculator part of our series. It's where we help you determine the tax impact of your Uber Eats earnings, as well as for other similar gigs. We are not going to dive as much into how taxes work. What we've done instead is created a series of several articles that go into detail about several aspects of taxes. If you're looking for information on how taxes work, you might try one of the following:

Preparing for Uber Eats Taxes: Understanding the tax impact of your Independent Contractor Earnings.

In the end, you want to have put aside enough money by the time you file your tax forms that you won't need to pay in. As April 15 draws closer, you want to have an idea how different taxes are because of your earnings.

That's what this tax calculator is for. It's to help you understand how much more you would have to pay in taxes due to your Uber Eats earnings, or how much less your refund will be. We call it tax impact.

This is not to estimate your total income tax bill or to figure out if you will get a refund. That's all part of the overall income tax process.

You can read more about how much to save for Uber Eats taxes. This calculator is a tool that can help you understand how it works. Knowing your tax impact can help you prepare and plan.

Two important facts about Uber Eats Taxes

Uber Eats tax calculator illustrated by a calculator with the word TAX showing on the display and by rolls of money earned delivering for Uber Eats.

As I mentioned, we're not trying to cover the entire tax process. For that reason, we go into more detail on these things elsewhere in the articles listed above. The first article is our overview of how Uber Eats taxes work.

With that said, there are some important things you must understand. We'll look at the TL;DR with these three facts:

1. As an independent contractor, taxes are based on profits, not total money received from Uber Eats and others.

This is the first thing you need to understand. It's also good news.

Your additional taxes are calculated based on what's left over after expenses. It's your earnings from Uber Eats and others minus expenses, business miles, etc.

The reason it's good news is, you can claim those business expenses whether or not you itemize or claim the standard deduction. All of that gets figured out on a form called Schedule C.

When you understand this, you realize that the greatest thing you can do to keep your taxes down is to keep track of your miles and expenses and keep detailed records..

2. We're actually talking about two different Federal taxes.

You are self-employed when delivering for Uber Eats and other gigs. As a result, we're not just talking about Federal income tax. There's also something called Self-Employment Tax.

This is not an additional tax. Self-Employment tax is the gig worker's version of Social Security and Medicare. Since Uber doesn't take taxes out for you, you're on your own to cover those taxes, and Uncle Sam wants you to pay them when you pay your income tax.

We go into more detail here about how Self-Employment taxes work for Uber Eats contractors.

How the tax impact calculator works:

What the tax impact calculator is going to do is follow these six steps:

  1. Estimate your business income (your taxable profits).
  2. Use business income to figure out your self-employment tax
  3. Add other income you received (wages, investments, etc) to figure out total income
  4. Subtract deductions and adjustments to get total taxable income.
  5. Figure out the income tax impact from your business profits
  6. Add self-employment tax to income tax impact to get your total tax impact.

Infographic entitled 5 Steps in the Uber Eats Tax Calculator including Estimate business profit, determine your tax bracket, estimate self-employment tax, estimate your income tax impact, and add self employment and income tax impact = total tax impact.

Remember that this isn't about your entire income tax picture. We're trying to determine how your earnings from Uber Eats and other gigs will impact your tax return. How much more do you have to pay on tax day because of them? Or, how much less will your refund be?

Here are the six steps we'll walk through in the calculator below.

1. Estimate your business income (your taxable profits).

As we mentioned earlier, your taxes are based on your profits, rather than the gross income you receive from Uber and others. Here are the steps we'll take:

  1. Add all income from Uber Eats (and from other gigs if you work multiple platforms)
  2. Subtract the standard mileage amount (65.5 cents per mile for business miles driven in 2023, 67 cents per mile in 2024).
  3. Optional: Subtract other expenses (hot bags, part of your cell bill, etc).

Those steps will give you your business profit. At tax time, you'll do this in much more detail, as you'll fill out a form called Schedule C. On that form, you'll list your income, and then total expenses by category. The profit from Schedule C, not gross income, is what you enter as income on your 1040 tax form.

You can learn more about how Schedule C works for Uber Eats drivers here.

2: Determine your income tax bracket

Your income tax payment rate varies based on income. The more you make, the higher your tax rate gets. The tax rate is determined by your total income (adding up all forms of income) and then subtracting adjustments and deductions (such as your standard or itemized personal tax deductions).

A simple way you can estimate your bracket is to follow these steps:

  1. Multiply business PROFIT (from step 1) by 72.35%. We'll explain why further down.
  2. Add that result to any other income you (and your partner, if filing a joint return) made.
  3. Subtract the appropriate standard deduction from that total income amount. In 2023, it's $13,850 for single filers, $27,700 for married/joint returns, and $20,800 for Head of Household.
  4. See where the final number fits in the chart below

There may be a lot more things involved in figuring out your tax bracket. You may find that itemized deductions are much higher than the standard deduction. If so, you can substitute that total for the standard deduction amount in step 3.

Chart of the various tax brackets for 2023 that shows earnings threshholds for 10%, 12%, 22%, 24% 32%, 35%, and 37% tax brackets listed by filing status, and information about how the steps work.

As we describe in the chart, tax brackets are not flat rates, but are progressive. The first so many dollars of taxable income are taxed at 10%, the next several dollars at 12%, then at 22% and so on.

Our tax calculator won't be quite that nuanced. What we suggest is to choose the tax bracket that your income fits into and estimate your entire gig work income tax based on that bracket. We do that for a reason: most Uber Eats drivers have other forms of income. Because it's added to other income, we'll assume that most of your Uber Eats and gig work income will be taxed at the higher bracket. We also do this because it's better to overestimate your tax bill than to underestimate it.

3. Estimate your Self-Employment Tax bill.

This one is pretty simple: Multiply your business profit by 14.13%.

That amount will confuse some people, because the Self-Employment tax rate is actually 15.3%. However, the IRS lets you deduct 7.65% of your profit before applying that 15.3% total, which comes out to 14.13% of your profits.

Self-employment tax is charged against every dollar of profit. Unlike income tax, it doesn't adjust up or down based on income, and it's not reduced by your personal tax deductions and income adjustments. The only real exceptions to this are:

  • You won't owe self-employment tax if your business profit is less than $400
  • Self-employment tax at the full 15.3% is only charged on the first $160,200 in profit (for the 2023 tax year). Any income over that amount is only taxed at 2.9% for Medicare.

4. Estimate your income tax impact.

Multiply business profit by 72.35%, then multiply that total by your tax bracket percentage. If you were in the 12% bracket and made $20,000, it would look like this:

  • 72.35% of $20,000 is $14,470
  • 12% of $14,470 is $1,736.4

Why do we adjust it first by 72.35%? There are two special tax deductions you can take when self-employed:

  • QBI deduction (Qualified Business Income) which is 20% of your profit
  • Self-employment tax deduction, which is 7.65% of your profit

You'll remember the 7.65% deduction before calculating self-employment tax. That also happens here. However, the QBI deduction does not come off for self-employment tax, it's only for income tax purposes.

You can take both deductions even when taking the standard tax deduction. You can read more about Self-Employment Tax and QBI deductions for Uber Eats contractors.

As we mentioned when talking about picking your tax bracket, the income tax total we come up with here won't be as precise as the self-employment tax. That's because of how tax brackets and deductions work. In most cases, if the numbers you input are accurate, the income tax impact will be lower than what the calculator says.

5. Add self-employment tax to your income tax impact to get your total tax impact.

Using the hypothetical example above with the driver with $20,000 income in the 12% tax bracket, it would look like this:

  • $2,826 self-employment tax
  • $1,736 income tax impact (rounded)
  • Total tax impact = $4,562

Remember that this is tax IMPACT, and NOT what their final income tax amount would be. All this does is tell us that this driver would either pay $4,562 more in taxes because of his $20,000 delivery income, or he'd receive $4,562 less in tax refunds, or some combination of the two.

The Uber Eats Tax Calculator

We're almost there. Here we'll talk about the numbers you enter. Most of this should be self-explanatory but we'll put a few notes down just the same.

We have to add our disclaimer here: This is all an estimate and is not guaranteed. We don't account for all of the different factors here, and also rely on the accuracy of the numbers you enter. Remember that the purpose isn't to determine your total tax numbers, but just to help you get an idea how much your Uber Eats earnings will impact your tax results. How much more will you pay, or how much less of a refund will you get?

Tax Year

What year did you earn your money and drive your miles for this calculator? This is important because the mileage allowance for driving varies from year to year. In 2023, it's 65.5 cents per mile, and 67 cents per mile in 2024

Total Payments Received.

This one is tricky when it comes to Uber Eats. That's because Uber Eats calculates income and does their 1099 forms differently than other delivery companies. They will report that you made more money than you actually did. You can read more about it in the link earlier in this paragraph.

Uber provides monthly and yearly tax documents that show both what they report as pay (called Gross Payment) and the amount you were actually paid (called Net Payout). It's much simpler to use the net payout total, or what you received from Uber.

If you do choose to use the gross pay, make sure you add the Expenses, Fees and Tax portion listed on your tax document to the business expenses later in this calculator.

Total Business Miles Driven

If you use your car for Uber Eats deliveries, you can reduce your taxable income considerably by claiming the cost of driving. You are allowed to do that regardless of whether you take the standard tax deduction.

You can choose between the mileage allowance (65.5 cents per mile for 2023) or figuring the actual cost of driving. We'll use the mileage allowance in this calculator because it's almost always going to be the better deduction. Enter the number of business miles you drove for the tax year.

You can learn more about what miles you can claim for Uber Eats, and also more about how to write off car expenses as an Uber Eats contractor.

Additional Business Expenses

Here's where you would include any other costs of running your delivery business. You might include certain supplies such as delivery bags, etc. You can learn more about other things you can write off for Uber Eats.

If you entered the gross pay from Uber's tax documents or 1099 forms in the payments received field, be sure to include the expenses section from their tax report in this section.

What Tax Bracket You Expect to Be In.

Earlier in the article, we talked about how the tax brackets work. You can scroll up to see a chart with the 2023 tax brackets. Estimate your taxable income (after adding all forms of income and subtracting your standard or itemized tax deductions) and see where that puts you on that chart. For this calculator, we'll assume at least a 10% bracket.

What Tax Year is This For?
Total Payments Received (Including Tips) - See note above on Uber tax reports and 1099s
$
Total Business Miles Driven
Additional Business Expenses (supplies, phone costs, etc)
$
What Income Tax Bracket do you expect to be in?
Press Calculate to See Results

About the Results

Here are a few notes about the results of the calculator:

  • Gross income is the amount that you entered as payments received.
  • Standard mileage allowance is the miles driven multiplied by the mileage rate for the year you selected.
  • Total Business deductions is the mileage allowance added to other business expenses.
  • Total profit is what's left over after subtracting Total Business Deductions from Gross income.
  • Self-Employment tax is 14.13% of total profit
  • Income tax impact is 72.35% of profit multiplied against your tax bracket.
  • Total tax impact is income tax impact and self-employment tax added up.

Remember that these are estimates and may not factor in other things that can influence your tax results. It's meant to give you an idea how much more you'll pay (or how much less your refund will be) because of your Uber Eats income.

The income tax portion can vary considerably. Some drivers will have less total income than their personal tax deductions and may actually be at a 0% tax bracket. If you think that's you, you can use just the Self-Employment Tax result of these results. Understand that even if you have a 0% income tax bracket, you will still be responsible for self-employment tax if you had more than $400 of profit.

Ron Walter of Entrecourier.com

About the Author

Ron Walter made the move from business manager at a non-profit to full time gig economy delivery in 2018 to take advantage of the flexibility of self-employment. He applied his thirty years experience managing and owning small businesses to treat his independent contractor role as the business it is.

Realizing his experience could help other drivers, he founded EntreCourier.com to encourage delivery drivers to be the boss of their own gig economy business.

Ron has been quoted in several national outlets including Business Insider, the New York Times, CNN and Market Watch.

You can read more about Ron's story,, background, and why he believes making the switch from a career as a business manager to delivering as an independent contractor was the best decision he could have made.

red button labeled read Ron's story.