One Cent a Kilometre

🔔 What the App Shows You

The screen is friendly about it. "Nice work! Twelve more trips to unlock your bonus." Underneath, in smaller print: a distance rate, a base fare, a per-minute rate. Sixty-eight cents a kilometre sounds like a real number — until you put it next to a real number.

The Canada Revenue Agency publishes one every year: what it actually costs, on average, to put a kilometre on a car — fuel, maintenance, insurance, depreciation, all of it. For 2026, that's 67 cents for a driver's first 5,000 km in a year, and most gig drivers clear that threshold before spring.

📋 The Rate Card

The per-kilometre rate isn't the whole story — it's barely a third of it. Underneath it sits a base charge per trip and a per-minute rate, and that's where whatever profit exists actually comes from. Not the distance. The time.

🌙 The Part the Math Doesn't Show

Somewhere past midnight, a passenger in a navy overcoat asked me the question everyone eventually asks: "So, is the money any good?" He was thinking about doing it himself, he said — weekends, the car's just sitting there anyway. I told him it depends.

He tipped zero dollars. That's not a complaint — it's just what the receipt said, next to everything else the receipt said.

At the end of that day: two hours, fifty-eight minutes of paid time, out of roughly twenty-one hours on the road. The video below walks through the whole shift, numbers included.