More of your Uber fare is going to the company than the driver, according to a new study.
Uber’s “take rate,” or the percentage of each fare that the company hangs on to, has risen above 50% this year in some cities, according to an analysis by Len Sherman, an executive in residence and adjunct professor at Columbia Business School.
That’s well above the 15% to 20% share of each fare that Uber took about a decade ago, Sherman found. Uber does not regularly report its take rate.
Sherman’s analysis examined nine years of ride-hailing data for three Uber drivers in different cities — Dallas, Miami, and Tampa. Collectively, the drivers have completed about 50,000 Uber trips in that time.
The findings show one reason many Uber drivers say it’s become harder for them to make money through the gig in recent years.
Sherman said the growing take rate in its ride-hailing business is powering Uber’s forays into new verticals, like hotel bookings. In a separate study last year, Sherman argued that Uber’s rising take rate, driven by its upfront pricing model, made the company’s financial turnaround under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi possible.
“This is still the profit engine for Uber,” he told Business Insider last week.
Uber has pushed back on Sherman’s past estimates of its take rate. In a January blog post, Uber said it kept 21% of each fare on average in the third quarter of 2025, less than half of what Sherman estimated.
It’s also “false” that Uber became profitable “by raising prices while taking an ever larger share of the pie,” the blog post said.
Uber’s ride-hailing business is its largest and most profitable, with gross bookings growing 18% to $29.7 billion in revenue in 2025 and accounting for roughly 90% of its adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization — a measure of profitability — for the year.
Uber’s take rate doubled over the time frame of the study
For the study, the drivers requested and received the information from Uber. All drivers used the earnings analysis app GigU, which connected them to Sherman.
The drivers worked in different markets and turned to gig work at different times — one took nearly two years off from driving after the start of the pandemic, for instance.
Still, Sherman said, a similar pattern emerged for each. About 10 years ago, Uber took no more than 20% of each fare, and its payouts to drivers moved in lockstep with the fares it charged passengers.
That relationship between rider fares and driver payouts began to diverge in 2019, when Uber cut driver payouts. That decoupling became particularly pronounced in 2022, after Uber began using upfront pricing, a system that sets fares and payouts individually for each trip rather than charging a set amount based on time or distance.
Uber’s 50% take rate is higher than that of other digital marketplaces, Sherman wrote in his report. Secondhand marketplaces, such as eBay and Etsy, say that they keep between 10% and 15% of each sale, for instance.
The study did not examine the take rate at other ride-hailing companies, such as Lyft, and the companies don’t regularly disclose that figure.
Uber uses its algorithms to price trips and determine payouts based on market conditions, Sherman said. That has allowed the company to increase its average share of each ride, though it isn’t always clear to drivers and riders, he said.
“Whether Uber gets to stay there is now a question for riders, drivers, and regulators who, at long last, have the numbers in hand to consider their choices,” Sherman wrote.
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