If you've ordered food through DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Instacart, you already know the drill: the person at your door isn't a company employee. They're a gig worker — an independent contractor who picks up jobs through an app, earns per delivery, and receives no guaranteed hours, benefits, or minimum wage protections.
Several cities have tried to fix that.
Seattle moved early. In January 2024, the city enacted a law requiring delivery platforms to pay drivers a minimum rate per task — a formula combining per-minute and per-mile compensation that established a floor of roughly US$5 per delivery.
The intent was simple: make sure the person bringing you your lunch can make a living wage doing it.
We are labor economists who have spent years studying the rise of the gig economy and the policy efforts aimed at providing economic stability to workers in precarious employment. Seattle's new rule gave us a real-world test case worth examining closely.
What we found was striking: despite base pay per delivery roughly doubling, drivers' total monthly earnings barely moved. Competition among drivers intensified, customers placed fewer orders, and tipping dropped sharply. Together, those forces nearly wiped out every dollar of the intended gain.
No change in monthly earnings
To measure the policy's impact, we drew on detailed data from Gridwise, an app gig workers use to track earnings across multiple delivery and ride-share platforms. It gave us an unusually complete picture of what drivers were actually taking home — across all the apps they used, not just one.
Our approach compared Seattle drivers — those who were primarily working in the city before the law took effect — against drivers working elsewhere in Washington state, where nothing had changed. Tracking both groups through the months before and after the policy allowed us to isolate its effects from broader market trends.
Base pay per delivery in Seattle jumped from roughly $5 to over $12. But base pay is only part of what drivers earn. Tips typically represent the majority of a platform driver's income, with customers generally tipping 10% to 20% of their order total.
Once the law took effect, tips fell sharply. Delivery apps passed higher operating costs on to consumers through added fees. DoorDash tacked on a roughly $5 "regulatory response fee" to Seattle orders, and customers responded by tipping less. Uber Eats went further: it removed the tip option entirely at checkout for Seattle customers. The resulting tip decline offset more than a third of the base pay increase.
The other shoe dropped in delivery volume. Starting in the second month after the policy took effect, established Seattle drivers completed roughly 20% to 30% fewer monthly deliveries than they would have otherwise.
Critically, these drivers didn't abandon the apps. They were still logging on and spending roughly the same amount of time working. They were simply receiving fewer offers.
So where did that time go? Into waiting. The share of on-app time spent on actual paid deliveries fell substantially. Average wait times between tasks jumped by about five minutes — nearly double pre-policy levels. Drivers also traveled farther between deliveries, suggesting they were actively positioning themselves near restaurant clusters to stay competitive, burning fuel and time without compensation for those miles.
Add it up — higher pay per delivery, but fewer deliveries and sharply lower tips — and the numbers nearly cancel out. After a brief uptick in month one, total monthly earnings settled back to pre-policy levels.
Why gig markets behave differently
To understand why Seattle's well-intentioned rule fell short, it helps to think carefully about how gig delivery markets differ from conventional employment.
In a traditional job, a minimum wage increase creates a clear divide: workers who keep their positions earn more, while some employers may cut jobs to manage costs. The trade-off is relatively predictable.
Gig delivery doesn't work that way. There's no hiring process, no payroll, no job cuts. Anyone can download the app and start competing for work. Deliveries flow to whoever is online, and the line between "employed" and "not employed" is blurry by design.
When per-task pay rises, the platform becomes more attractive — drawing in new drivers. Meanwhile, apps pass higher costs to consumers through fees, which suppresses order volume and tips. The result: more drivers chasing fewer deliveries, stretching out wait times between tasks.
This dynamic continues until the higher per-task pay is effectively neutralized by longer idle periods between paid work. The market reaches a new equilibrium, but workers aren't meaningfully better off.
Our data confirms this pattern precisely. While existing Seattle drivers saw their delivery counts fall sharply, new entrants flooded in. Within three months, newcomers were handling the majority of Seattle's deliveries.
What this means going forward
None of this is to say gig workers' pay problems aren't real. They are, and the instinct behind Seattle's law reflects legitimate concerns about worker welfare.
But our findings make clear that directly regulating per-task pay is unlikely to solve those problems on its own. As long as platform entry remains open, higher guaranteed pay per delivery will attract more competition until that advantage is eroded away through longer idle time between jobs.
Actually raising take-home earnings in a sustainable way might require limiting how many drivers can actively work at once — something akin to the taxi medallion systems that once regulated driver supply in major cities. The problem is that entry restrictions directly undercut the flexibility that attracts many workers to gig platforms in the first place.
Platform behavior also matters. If apps eventually restore standard tipping features — rather than strategically discouraging tips, as some did in Seattle — the earnings picture for drivers could improve. New York City and some other jurisdictions are already requiring that tipping remain available at checkout.
Still, there may be no policy solution that preserves all the advantages of the current gig model while also guaranteeing meaningfully higher earnings. Those goals may be fundamentally in tension.
That hasn't stopped other cities from moving forward. New York City launched its own minimum pay rate for app-based delivery workers in late 2023. Lawmakers in Chicago, Colorado, Minnesota, and elsewhere have proposed comparable measures. Several more cities are actively considering similar regulations.
Seattle's experience offers a pointed lesson for all of them: proceed with clear eyes about what per-task pay regulations can realistically achieve — and what they can't — when the platform door remains open to anyone who wants to join the queue.
To purchase access to the data used in this study. Brian K. Kovak received funding from the Block Center for Technology and Society at Carnegie Mellon University.