Dead miles are eating your gig pay — here's how to count them

You get paid for the miles with a passenger or an order in the car. You do not get paid for the miles to the pickup, between jobs, repositioning to a busier area, or driving home empty. Those unpaid miles are called dead miles, and they still cost you fuel and wear on your vehicle.

That is why two shifts with the same pay can leave you with very different profit. The shift with more dead miles cost you more to do.

What counts as a dead mile?

• Driving to your first pickup
• Driving between drop-off and the next pickup
• Moving to a busier area while waiting for work
• Driving home empty at the end of a shift

Paid miles come from the gig app. Dead miles are everything else you drove for work. A simple way to find them: note your total miles for the shift, subtract the paid miles the app shows, and what is left is your dead miles.

Then turn dead miles into money. Work out your own cost per mile: add up what your vehicle costs you over a month — fuel, maintenance, tyres, insurance — and divide it by the miles you drove that month. Multiply your dead miles by that cost per mile, and you get what those unpaid miles actually cost you.

Do that for a week and the picture changes. Add your dead miles across all your shifts, work out their cost, and subtract it from your gross pay along with fuel, tolls, parking, and food. What is left is much closer to your real profit — and it often points to different decisions, like skipping a far pickup or ending a shift instead of chasing one more job across town.

You do not need a spreadsheet to keep this honest. You just need the same few numbers after every shift: pay, total miles, paid miles, and your other costs. Tracked shift by shift, dead miles stop being invisible.

That is the kind of subtraction ShiftLog is built for. It is a free Android app for gig workers and drivers that records each shift's pay and costs so you can see your real net profit, not just the gross number. It works offline and needs no account.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.shiftlog.app