On New Year’s Eve, India woke up to gig workers logging off en masse, turning a day of celebration into a flashpoint over wages, incentives and the true cost of app-based work.
The strike finally failed to really take off, as many riders chose to work after Swiggy and Zomato rolled out special incentives. Zomato offered peak-hour payouts of ₹120– ₹150 per order and waived penalties for refusals and cancellations, enabling riders to earn up to ₹3,000 in a day, according to a letter reviewed by Mint. Swiggy, on its part, had dangled incentives of up to ₹10,000 for 31 December-1 January, with peak-hour earnings touching ₹2,000, its communication to partners showed.
The strike, however, did manage to rake up a discussion on gig workers' payouts and work environment. This triggered a public face-off between platform executives and worker unions, one anchored in sharply different readings of the same question: how much do India’s app-based workers really earn?
In a series of posts on X following the protests, Eternal chief executive officer Deepinder Goyal cited internal platform data to outline how delivery partner earnings are calculated. He said the average earnings per hour for the company's Zomato delivery partners in 2025 was ₹102, excluding tips, based on all logged-in time, including waiting periods. According to him, partners who choose to work close to full-time around 10 hours a day for 26 days a month can earn roughly ₹26,500 a month in gross income. After accounting for expenses such as fuel and vehicle maintenance, which he estimated at about 20%, net earnings would be around ₹21,000 a month, broadly comparable with entry-level pay in sectors such as retail and banking, financial services, and insurance (BFSI) in large cities.
But the workers' unions do not agree with this math. According to Shaik Salauddin, president of the Telangana Gig and Platform Workers’ Union, this is not the real picture, and said that on the ground, things are fairly different.
Mint spoke to gig workers from various platforms and union representatives and accessed earnings dashboards of various platforms to better understand how much a gig worker actually earns.
Based on the earnings dashboard, one of the Zomato delivery partners earned a total of ₹19,756.94 in December 2025, completing 345 orders over 124 hours and 55 minutes of active delivery time. This works out to roughly ₹158 per hour during active deliveries. Weekly earnings, however, fluctuated sharply: the first week saw ₹5,614, the second ₹4,780, the third ₹5,598, before dropping to ₹1,893 during 22-28 December and ₹1,870 in the final days of the month. The average gross daily earning by week ranged from about ₹800 a day in the busiest weeks to under ₹300 during the slowdown, showing how income can vary even for a single worker, depending on order flow and incentives.
According to the earnings dashboard, a Swiggy delivery partner earned ₹844 on 31 December 2025, completing 22 trips while remaining online for 12 hours and 58 minutes. This translates to roughly ₹65 per hour based on total logged-in time, which includes periods waiting for orders as well as active deliveries. The average earning per trip was about ₹38.
“This is the money I earned, given the spike in payouts. Every week, I also need to spend about ₹2,000 for maintenance of my e-bike, so ₹8,000 goes for that in a month. I am left with, let’s say, around ₹17,000 per month if I earn about ₹25,000,” said the worker who delivers orders for Swiggy.
Similarly, according to an earnings dashboard of a partner on Amazon Now, they offer a weekly login bonus of up to ₹600 and an order-based payout that rises with volume, ranging from ₹50 per order for fewer than 48 deliveries per day to a maximum of ₹7,776 for completing 108 orders, six days a week.
“I don’t have fixed monthly earnings anymore,” said a beauty services partner who has worked with Urban Company since 2018. “When I started, I used to earn ₹55,000-60,000 a month, but last month I earned only ₹13,000. Earlier, services were priced at around ₹1,400; now they are closer to ₹800, even as the cost of beauty products and travel has gone up sharply. The commissions have also increased. Earlier, out of ₹600, about ₹30 went as commission; now nearly ₹59 goes as convenience fees and what used to be a ₹30 cut has become ₹100," the service provider said. "Also, earlier, I had the choice to accept or reject a service but now I am forced to take jobs even when I don’t want to. If I cancel five services, my ID gets blocked.”
The time shown as “online” or “active” on the platform does not translate into paid work for the entire duration. It also includes waiting time spent logged in without being assigned an order, during which the delivery partner does not earn any money. As a result, being online for 10-12 hours does not mean the worker was continuously delivering orders for that entire period, with earnings dependent only on the trips actually completed, rather than the total time spent being available on the platform.
A report by Paigam—a Delhi-headquartered labour rights collective and action-research network for gig and platform workers—titled Prisoners on Wheels, highlights that a significant portion of gig workers’ working day is consumed by unpaid waiting time, particularly for app-based delivery workers. Around 43% of delivery partners said they are forced to wait idle for at least an hour every day for orders, while another 34% reported waiting for two hours daily. The burden is even higher in large metros: in Delhi alone, over half of delivery workers said they spend at least two hours a day waiting for orders to be assigned. This waiting time is largely unpaid and often spent in informal, undedicated spaces near restaurant clusters during peak meal hours.
Workers’ testimonies in the above cited report, funded by the University of Pennsylvania, point to poor social conditions while waiting, with many being asked to stand outside restaurants, barred from using lifts in gated communities, and denied access to basic amenities such as drinking water. The report argues that such idle time constitutes “uncounted labour” and recommends that platforms treat workers as employees and compensate them for all logged-in time, not just active deliveries. It also calls for greater transparency in algorithmic order allocation and the creation of designated waiting zones with access to water and hygienic restrooms, noting that the lack of information about how orders are assigned leaves workers waiting in uncertainty for long stretches of the day.
For delivery partners, order payouts refer to the base earnings paid for each completed delivery. This typically includes the per-order fee calculated based on factors such as distance travelled, time taken, and the number of orders completed, and forms the core, relatively predictable part of a worker’s income.
Incentives, on the other hand, are additional payments offered by platforms to encourage higher activity. These can include bonuses for completing a certain number of orders in a day or week, working during peak hours, accepting consecutive orders, or operating in high-demand zones. Incentive earnings tend to be variable and are often time-bound.
The earnings of a gig worker are shaped less by fixed wages and more by a constantly shifting balance of supply and demand.
“This is purely developed by supply and demand,” said Balasubramanian Anantha Narayanan, senior vice-president at TeamLease. “Platforms try to have just the right amount of supply for the demand that is there, and the demand can vary very significantly from day to day,” he said.
As a result, earnings can span a wide range. “Broadly, it could be ₹20,000-30,000 a month. Some people may even fall around ₹40,000,” Narayanan said. He, however cautioned that gross earnings do not reflect what workers actually take home. “You have to pay for fuel or charging, maintenance and other costs. After all expenses, they may end up making ₹20,000-25,000 take-home (for the top bracket),” he said, adding that even this figure is an estimate and can fall below ₹20,000, depending on the market.
According to Narayanan, payouts vary sharply based on several factors: the number of hours worked, the specific platform, the locality they operate in, and the incentive schemes available at a given time. “Depending on these factors, the payout can significantly vary. It’s a very wide range, and it’s very hard to bring it down to one hourly number,” he said.
Queries on gig workers' compensation emailed to Swiggy, Zomato, Big Basket, Zepto, Amazon and Flipkart on 6 January remained unanswered until press time.
According to the report quoted above, app-based delivery work in India is marked by long hours and low, uncertain pay. The study found that over 83% of drivers work over 10 hours a day, nearly 60% work over 12 hours, and about 31% spend more than 14 hours a day on the road, even as 43% of respondents earn less than ₹500 a day after deducting costs such as fuel and food. Around 32% reported net daily earnings of ₹201-400, while over one-third of the delivery workers earn less than ₹10,000 a month after expenses. Most workers earn between ₹21 and ₹35 per delivery and typically complete 11-20 deliveries a day.
The report also highlights non-wage stressors: 41.5% of delivery workers said they had faced violence at work, and a majority reported receiving no support from platforms when such incidents occurred, underscoring the precarious nature of app-based delivery work.
There are other issues too. “The algorithm on the app shows a certain distance and time before a delivery partner accepts an order, but once the order is picked up, the kilometres and time often increase while the payout remains the same as what was shown earlier,” said Salauddin of the Telangana workers’ union. “Similarly, food aggregators rely on third-party logistics partners during periods of high demand or delivery shortages, and there have been several instances where these third-party riders earn more per delivery than full-time workers on the app. These practices are unfair to workers who depend on these platforms for their livelihood.”
While the recent strikes have focused on gig wages, Narayanan argues that pay is only one part of a broader issue. “The problem we are facing right now is not just about wages,” he said, pointing to the lack of long-term progression in delivery work. Unlike formal jobs, gig roles offer little scope for salary growth over time, regardless of experience.
“There is no growth path at all,” he said, adding that safety risks and the absence of social security compound workers’ concerns. Gig workers’ core demands, according to Narayanan, include health insurance, life cover, accident cover and retirement benefits—protections that formal employees typically receive but gig workers largely don't.
At the same time, Narayanan noted that gig work has expanded rapidly because it offers immediate income in an economy where informal work dominates. About 85% of India’s workforce is informal, he said, and organized gig work, now estimated at over one crore workers, did not exist at scale five decades ago. “If this model was fundamentally not attractive, there is no way we would have more than a crore people operating in it,” he said.
Even as the debate rages on, the country's policy architecture around gig work is seeing a shift. In the draft rules notified under the Code on Social Security, gig and platform workers are, for the first time, being formally recognized in law and brought within the ambit of social protection.
Food delivery partners and ride-hailing drivers could become eligible for insurance and welfare benefits, subject to minimum work thresholds, while platforms are expected to contribute to a dedicated social security fund. How these provisions are enforced will determine whether the gig economy remains a low-cost flexibility model or evolves into a more durable framework of work.