Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
An in-house pizza delivery driver costs roughly $6 to $23 a delivery once you add wage, payroll tax and mileage, on our arithmetic, from a tip-credit driver in Pennsylvania making two runs an hour to a California driver making one. The number that swings it most isn’t the wage. It’s how many runs your driver makes an hour. A California driver at the state’s $16.90 minimum doing two six-mile runs an hour, reimbursed at the IRS’s 72.5 cents a mile, costs about $13.45 a run before insurance. Against DoorDash’s 25% Plus commission, that driver only wins on orders above about $54.
We compared channels on one order in the delivery math nobody does. This is the driver line itself, input by input, so you can swap in your own.
Your state sets the wage floor, and the gap is huge
Federal law lets you pay a tipped employee as little as $2.13 an hour in cash wages, taking up to a $5.12 tip credit, if the worker gets more than $30 a month in tips. If tips plus wages fall short of $7.25 in a week, “the employer must make up the difference.” Where state law is stricter, the stricter rule wins.
The Labor Department’s state table, revised July 1, lists cash wages for tipped workers of $2.13 in Texas, $2.83 in Pennsylvania and $5.50 in Ohio for larger employers. California, Washington, Oregon, Minnesota, Nevada and Alaska allow no tip credit at all. California drivers get the full $16.90 before a dollar of tips.
For a market rate, the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics occupation page we could open, from May 2023, put driver/sales workers at restaurants at $13.95 an hour on average across 217,280 jobs. BLS counts tips as pay in that survey, so it’s what drivers took home, not what the shop paid.
Payroll tax and mileage come on every hour
On top of the wage, you pay 6.2% for Social Security and 1.45% for Medicare, 7.65% together, known as FICA. For a tipped driver, it applies to reported tips too, though the FICA tip credit may return some of it. Unemployment insurance and workers’ comp are also legally required, but they vary by state and carrier, so add yours to the math below.
Then the car. The IRS rate for 2026 is 72.5 cents a mile, based on a yearly study of what it costs to run a car. It’s a budget number, not a legal safe harbor. A 2020 Labor Department opinion letter called the IRS rate “presumptively reasonable” but not required. In March 2024, the Sixth Circuit (the federal appeals court for Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee) rejected both the IRS rate and a “reasonable approximation” as automatic answers in Parker v. Battle Creek Pizza. The test is whether reimbursement “bore a demonstrable relationship” to drivers’ actual costs. That matters most for the $2.83 driver, where an underpaid mile can push pay below the minimum.
Insurance is the line nobody will price for you
If your drivers use their own cars, you need hired and non-owned auto coverage (HNOA, a policy that protects the business when an employee drives a car the business doesn’t own). Rob Hoover of the brokerage Risk Strategies told Pizza Today that a driver’s personal policy may not cover business use, and that putting a delivery sign on a car can change it. On price, his answer was blunt: “It is truly carrier by carrier.”
We found no published HNOA premium for pizzerias. Get a quote, divide it by a year’s deliveries, and add it to the callout.
Your driver isn’t paid by the delivery. You are. Every idle half-hour on the clock gets billed to the next run out the door.
The order size where your driver beats the app
Commission is a percentage of the ticket. Your driver is a flat cost per run. Divide the cost by the rate and you get the order size where they cross.
At $13.45 a run, the line sits at about $54 against DoorDash Plus and $45 against Premier’s 30%. Against the 15% Basic plan, it’s about $90, though DoorDash pitches Basic as a plan designed for local exposure. The Pennsylvania driver at $5.87 wins on anything above about $23.50 at 25%.
Two levers move the line fast. The first is the delivery fee you charge. Collect $3.99 and the California driver’s net cost drops to $9.46, which puts the break-even near $38. The second is runs per hour. At one run an hour, the California driver costs $22.54, more than a 25% commission on any order under about $90. That’s the slow Tuesday problem, and labor by daypart is where you find it.
One trap: Uber Eats still charges a 15% self-delivery fee when your drivers carry its orders. Add it to your driver’s cost.
Then run your numbers through the delivery breakeven tool.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
Prime cost, labor, delivery and rent, each with its source and a blank for your shop’s number. Enter your email and the download opens right away.
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The limitation: runs per hour is the biggest input here, and nobody publishes a benchmark for pizzeria drivers. Our two-an-hour figure is an illustration. It also overstates idle cost for shops whose drivers fold boxes and prep between runs, since some of that hour is kitchen labor you’d pay for anyway. And the reimbursement law is still moving. The Sixth Circuit sent its cases back without a formula. California’s labor enforcement office has accepted the IRS rate as reasonable under its own reimbursement law since 1993, but that opinion also says an employer may not require an employee to buy insurance at their own cost.
Common questions
How much does an in-house pizza delivery driver cost per delivery?
It depends most on how many runs a driver makes an hour. In our example, a California driver at $16.90 an hour doing two six-mile runs an hour costs about $13.45 a delivery after FICA and mileage at the IRS rate. A tip-credit driver in Pennsylvania at $2.83 an hour costs about $5.87. Insurance comes on top.
Do I have to reimburse pizza drivers at the IRS mileage rate?
Not automatically. The 2026 IRS rate is 72.5 cents a mile, but federal law cares whether reimbursement covers drivers' real costs so pay doesn't drop below minimum wage. A 2024 federal appeals ruling said the IRS rate alone doesn't settle that. Ask an employment lawyer.
At what order size is my own driver cheaper than DoorDash?
Divide your cost per delivery by the commission rate. At about $13.45 a run and DoorDash's 25% Plus rate, your driver wins on orders above roughly $54. Charge a $3.99 delivery fee and the line drops to about $38.
What insurance do I need if my drivers use their own cars?
Hired and non-owned auto coverage, which protects the shop when an employee crashes a car you don't own. A broker told Pizza Today that pricing is truly carrier by carrier, and a driver's personal policy may not cover delivery.
