Uber and Lyft slashed driver pay in recent years more than publicly reported: Report

It's rough out there for Uber and Lyft contract drivers. And getting rougher.

Based on data from some 14,756 fares, Jalopnik reports that in recent years the ride-sharing services Uber and Lyft have slashed the amount of pay drivers receive by taking a larger portion of each fare.

This amounts to slashing driver pay a lot more than they publicly report, Jalopnik reports.

"Jalopnik asked drivers to send us fare receipts showing a breakdown of how much the rider paid for the trip, how much of that fare Uber or Lyft kept, and what the driver earned."

Excerpt from what they found:

In total, we received 14,756 fares. These came from two sources: the web form where drivers could submit fares individually, and via email where some drivers sent us all their fares from a given time period.

Of all the fares Jalopnik examined, Uber kept 35 percent of the revenue, while Lyft kept 38 percent. These numbers are roughly in line with a previous study by Lawrence Mishel at the Economic Policy Institute which concluded Uber's take rate to be roughly one-third, or 33 percent.

Of the drivers who emailed us breakdowns for all of their fares in a given time period-ranging from a few months to more than a year-Uber kept, on average, 29.6 percent. Lyft pocketed 34.5 percent.

Those take rates are 10.6 percent and 8.5 percent higher than Uber and Lyft's publicly reported figures, respectively.

Uber And Lyft Take A Lot More From Drivers Than They Say [Dhruv Mehrotra and Aaron Gordon]