Fares are not earnings. Fuel, data, maintenance and the platform's cut all come out first. Here is how to work out your real number, week by week.
Published 16 September 2026 · 7 min read
Ask a driver what he made last week and he will tell you what he collected. Those are different numbers. The gap between them is where the job is won or lost.
You will find pages claiming Lagos drivers earn some specific figure a month. Ignore them. Earnings swing with the hours you drive, the part of town you work, whether you own the car, the fuel price that week, and what you pay the platform. An average across all of that describes nobody.
What is worth having is a method. Run it on your own numbers once and you will know your real hourly rate — which is the only figure that lets you decide anything.
On a commission this scales with you: earn twice as much and it takes twice as much. On a flat fee it does not move. Muje charges ₦5,000 a week, VAT included, and takes nothing per trip. The calculator shows the difference on your own numbers.
Usually the largest cost, and the one that moves most. Track it for one week: note your odometer and what you spend. Fuel per kilometre is the number that matters, because it lets you price a long trip properly instead of guessing.
This is where drivers fool themselves. A service every few months feels like an occasional expense, so it does not get counted. It is not occasional — it is a weekly cost you pay in lumps.
Take what you spent on servicing, tyres, brakes and repairs over the last year and divide by 52. That is your weekly maintenance cost, whether or not you spent it this week. Lagos roads make it higher than you would like.
Small but constant. A driving app runs GPS all day and eats both data and battery, so count the data bundle and the cost of replacing a phone that ages fast.
If you are paying off a vehicle, that instalment is a weekly cost. If you own it outright, it is still losing value every month you drive it — and one day you will replace it. Drivers who ignore this feel rich for two years and then cannot afford the next car.
Take one ordinary week and write down:
Subtract the lot. Then divide what is left by the hours you actually drove — including the waiting. That is your real hourly rate, and it is almost always lower than drivers expect the first time they do it.
Do not be discouraged by the number. Knowing it is what lets you change it: refuse trips that lose money, work the hours that pay, and judge any platform’s promises against arithmetic instead of a billboard.
Every cost above is yours regardless of which app you drive for. Fuel does not care. The one line you can actually change is what the platform takes.
A percentage grows with your effort. On a good week — the one where you drove fourteen hours and earned well — it takes the most. A flat fee takes the same on your best week as your worst, so the upside of a hard week stays with you.
The trade is real and cuts both ways: on a quiet week a flat fee is the worse deal, because it still costs ₦5,000 when a percentage would have cost you almost nothing. We worked the arithmetic through here, including the point where the two meet.
Naira per hour after costs. Not fares collected. Not trips completed. Not what the app says you earned. A driver who knows that number can tell in ten seconds whether a change is good for him. A driver who does not is guessing, and the guess is usually optimistic.