Review of Chase checking accounts shows that earnings for drivers for services like Uber, Lyft, and Postmates dropped from $1,469/month in 2013 to $783 in 2017
More people are working for ride-sharing and delivery companies but on average they're making less. Tweets: @nealkwatra Tweets: Neal Kwatra / @nealkwatra : “On average, drivers who transport people (Uber or Lyft) or things (Uber Eats or Postmates) through an app made 53% less in '17 than they did in '13, according to a new study by the JPMorgan Chase Institute that looks at online gig economy payments into Chase checking accounts.” http://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The JPMorgan Chase Institute's checking-account data put a hard number on gig-work economics: average monthly earnings for app-based drivers fell from $1,469 in 2013 to $783 in 2017, even as more people signed up. Later reporting filled in the mechanism — Jalopnik's analysis of 14,756 fares found Uber and Lyft had been taking a larger share of each fare than they publicly reported, and Postmates workers traced their own drop to an algorithm change that eliminated a $4-per-job guarantee.
The arc since then has inverted on the rider side: by mid-2022, YipitData tracked US Uber and Lyft fares at record highs with roughly 20% fewer riders than pre-pandemic levels. That makes the Chase study the baseline for a longer squeeze — drivers absorbed the early cuts, and riders are now absorbing the correction.
First-order effects
- Drivers on Uber, Lyft, and Postmates saw monthly earnings fall 53% between 2013 and 2017 while participation grew, meaning more workers were splitting a shrinking per-driver payout.
Second-order effects
- Platforms' growing take rates pushed drivers toward third-party optimization tools like Gridwise, which collates earnings across apps so drivers can chase the best-paying platform at any moment.
- As driver supply thinned against suppressed pay, Uber and Lyft were forced into steep fare increases — up 50% between January 2020 and July 2021 per e-receipt data — effectively passing the earlier wage compression back to riders.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, gig platforms face a structural choice between subsidizing driver pay out of margins or repricing rides upward, which narrows the price gap with taxis and traditional delivery that justified the model.
- Documented pay declines across independent datasets give regulators and labor organizers a quantified record of how platform take rates evolve, strengthening the case for disclosure rules on driver compensation.
The trend: Platform labor markets are cycling through a squeeze-and-correct pattern: companies first compress driver earnings via higher take rates, then must raise consumer prices when supply dries up.