How much an Instacart shopper makes: about $6 an hour net

The numbers

Assumptions: gross is the 2025 median for batch pay, tips and bonuses from Gridwise’s tracking of 20,538 Instacart shoppers. Costs are our assumption of 6 miles an hour at the IRS standard mileage rate of 76¢, plus $0.50 an hour for the phone. Tax is 15.3% self-employment tax plus an assumed 10% income tax on the part that isn’t tips. Figures are rounded to the cent. The title rounds to the nearest dollar.

A typical Instacart shopper grosses about $12.50 an hour and keeps about $6 after the car, the phone and tax. Instacart publishes no average hourly, weekly or annual figure. Its shopper earnings page explains how each batch is priced but never says what that adds up to, so every per-hour figure you’ll find, this one included, comes from a third party or from someone’s own arithmetic.

None of this is tax, legal or financial advice. It’s arithmetic with the assumptions written down.

Instacart doesn’t pay by the hour

Full-service shoppers (the ones who shop and then deliver) are paid per batch. A batch is one or more orders accepted as a single job. An hourly rate is what you get when you divide pay by time, and Instacart doesn’t guarantee one anywhere unless a local law requires it.

Instacart’s earnings page lists what goes into one batch:

• Batch pay. Based on expected effort: the drive to the store and then to the customer, how many items there are and how heavy, and the expected shopping time. The amount shown up front “will never decrease as long as the batch is completed as accepted.” Shoppers offered the same batch at the same time see the same pay.
• Heavy pay. At least $2 when items of 8 lb or more add up to 50 lb or more.
• Tips. You keep 100%. On batches with more than one shopper, the tip is split evenly. Customers can raise a tip for up to 14 days after delivery but can’t lower it after 2 hours.
• Promotions and boosts. Added when demand is high or there aren’t enough shoppers. Instacart publishes no amounts.

Two rules affect your hourly rate. You aren’t penalized for declining a batch, and if a customer cancels after you’ve started, you’re paid for your time. Instacart also says pay “may differ by region due to state or local laws,” which is covered further down.

Other sites still quote minimum batch figures. Those trace back to a 2021 Instacart post and aren’t confirmed for today, so they aren’t used here.

Per batch and per hour: the full spread

Gridwise’s 2025 tracking is the best data available. Everything below is before gas and other costs.

Pay per mile averaged $3.46 (median $2.84). The average batch took about 62 minutes. Top-10% shoppers took about 48.

What the numbers say:

1. A median batch pays about $12.79, including its tip.
2. Gridwise puts tips at about 42% of total trip pay, so close to half of what you earn depends on customers, not on Instacart’s pay formula.
3. The top 10% earn $19.04 an hour against a median of $12.51, which is 1.52 times as much. They also finish a batch about 14 minutes faster than average and complete 1.25 batches an hour against an average of 0.97.

Instacart’s company-wide figures aren’t a pay rate. It says shoppers across North America have earned more than $24 billion in total, and that about 600,000 shoppers completed at least one order in the month ended June 30, 2025. That count includes anyone who did a single batch that month, so dividing one figure by the other says nothing about hourly pay.

Assumptions

Swap in your own where they differ:

1. Gross is $12.51 an hour, Gridwise’s 2025 median including bonuses.
2. You drive 6 miles per hour worked. Gridwise’s averages imply about 3.7 paid miles an hour ($12.93 ÷ $3.46). We round up to 6 to cover miles nobody pays for: the drive to your first store, repositioning between batches and the drive home. This is our assumption, not a measured figure.
3. Each mile costs 76¢, the IRS standard mileage rate for miles driven July 1 to December 31, 2026 (it was 72.5¢ from January 1 to June 30). We use it as a stand-in for gas, maintenance, tires, insurance and depreciation. If you know your real cost per mile, use that.
4. The phone costs $0.50 an hour. We assume $40 a month of your phone bill goes to the app, spread over 80 hours of work a month.
5. Self-employment tax is 15.3%, applied to the whole net figure. That slightly overstates it, because IRS rules let you deduct the employer-equivalent portion.
6. Income tax is an assumed 10% on net pay minus tips, since tips can be deducted under the no-tax-on-tips rule (details below). Many students will owe less. State income tax isn’t included.
7. Your hours are Gridwise’s hours. Extra logged-in time spent waiting for offers lowers your real rate. The sensitivity table shows by how much.

Worked example: a four-hour Saturday

At the median, with the assumptions above:

Gross:              4 h x $12.51            = $50.04
Miles:              4 h x 6 mi              = 24 mi
Car cost:           24 mi x $0.76           = $18.24
Phone:              4 h x $0.50             = $2.00
Net before tax:     $50.04 - $18.24 - $2.00 = $29.80
Self-employment:    $29.80 x 15.3%          = $4.56
Tips in the shift:  4 h x $5.11             = $20.44
Income-tax base:    $29.80 - $20.44         = $9.36
Income tax:         $9.36 x 10%             = $0.94
Kept:               $29.80 - $4.56 - $0.94  = $24.30
Per hour:           $24.30 / 4              = $6.08

That Saturday will feel like more than $24.30, because about $50 shows up in your account and most of the car cost doesn’t. That cost comes later, as tires, oil changes, repairs and a car that’s worth less. The mileage rate counts it in today’s numbers.

Gridwise projects $500 to $700+ a month gross for 10 to 15 hours a week on weekends. At our $6.08:

10 h/week x 4 weeks x $6.08 = $243.20 a month kept
15 h/week x 4 weeks x $6.08 = $364.80 a month kept

Full-time, Gridwise projects about $488 a week gross for 40 hours at the median, or roughly $25,400 a year. On our assumptions, 40 × $6.08 = $243.20 a week kept.

What changes the answer

Net per hour before tax, changing one thing at a time:

Waiting time

A NerdWallet writer who worked as a full-service shopper in a small Maryland town earned $80.29 (of which $32 was tips) in just under 7 active hours. That’s $11.47 an hour. Counting the roughly 10 hours that included waiting in parking lots, it fell to about $8. That’s one person in one town, not data, but the drop was about 30%, which is where the last row comes from. In that row, gross and miles are multiplied by 0.7 and the phone cost stays at $0.50 per logged-in hour.

Where you live

Three places have pay rules worth knowing:

• New York City. Since January 26, 2026, grocery delivery apps including Instacart have been covered by the city’s delivery-worker minimum pay. From April 1, 2026 that’s $22.13 an hour before tips, and it rises every April 1. In response, Instacart has limited how many shoppers can be online at once since April 1, and it tightened the limits on July 1 (when you can go online, how long you can stay online without accepting, and when you can be sent offline). Offers now arrive one at a time with a time limit to accept, there’s an acceptance-rate metric, and eligible shoppers get a weekly NYC bonus. You get a higher hourly floor and less freedom over when you work.
• California. Prop 22 guarantees app delivery workers 120% of the local minimum wage for time on an active job, plus $0.37 a mile in 2026. Tips don’t count toward it. Instacart’s own California page still shows an outdated $0.30 a mile, so go by the current state rate.
• Seattle. The 2026 minimum for app-based workers is $0.47 a minute plus $0.80 a mile, or $5.34 per offer, whichever is higher. The city’s page doesn’t name the companies covered, so check with Seattle’s Office of Labor Standards before you count on it for Instacart batches.

How often you shop

Instacart’s Cart Star program ranks shoppers into Diamond, Platinum and Gold tiers based on quality score, completed orders and customer rating, and higher tiers get priority access to batches. Instacart doesn’t publish the cutoffs. Because completed orders count, a shopper who works a few hours a week will probably sit lower in the queue. That’s our inference, not an Instacart statement.

The store matters too. The chain-by-chain breakdown of Instacart pay runs similar math by retailer.

Compared with

Our figure is below Gridwise’s mainly because we charge every mile at the full IRS rate and include a phone and tax. If your car is cheap to run, you’ll land closer to their range. The BLS line is an employee job with different terms, so treat it as context rather than an option you can compare directly.

For minimum wage, look up your own state’s rate, since it varies. A wage job doesn’t make you pay the employer-equivalent half of Social Security and Medicare tax or supply your own car, and those are exactly the costs in this article. For other apps on the same basis, see Uber vs DoorDash driver pay after costs and weekend side hustles ranked by net pay per hour.

Getting paid: deposits, Instant Cashout and the card

• Weekly direct deposit is free. It covers Monday through Sunday and usually arrives Wednesday to Friday.
• Instant Cashout makes batch earnings available within minutes of delivery, and the full amount including the tip after 2 hours, for what Instacart calls “a small fee.” In June 2025, Instacart put the fee for cashing out to an outside bank at $1.50 and said it would change once the new card was available, so check the current fee in the app. Articles quoting $0.50 predate that figure.

What the $1.50 fee costs, assuming 5 cashouts a week over 12 hours of work:

5 cashouts a week x $1.50 = $7.50 a week
$7.50 / 12 hours a week   = $0.63 an hour
$0.63 / $7.45 net         = about 8% of net pay

• Shopper Rewards Card. A Mastercard business debit card run by Branch and issued by Lead Bank (Member FDIC). It pays out free and automatically after every batch, with no annual fee and no credit check. The US rollout was planned for October 2025 and April 2026. It gives 1% cash back on gas and EV charging (3% base for Diamond tier), capped at $100 a month, so $100 of gas earns $1 for most shoppers. The first 8 Allpoint ATM withdrawals a month are free, then $3.50 each. Instacart says it “may charge a payout fee at any time with notice.”
• Records. Keep your weekly deposit records and your own mileage log. You may not get a year-end tax form (see below), so these are what you’ll file from.

Tax on the $12.51

1. Report all of it. The IRS says gig income must be reported even if you don’t get a 1099.
2. 1099-NEC threshold: $2,000 or more for tax years starting after 2025, up from $600. Getting no form doesn’t mean you owe no tax.
3. Self-employment tax: 15.3% (12.4% Social Security plus 2.9% Medicare), owed once net self-employment earnings reach $400.
4. Students claimed as dependents still have to file if they had $400 or more of net self-employment earnings, whatever their total income.
5. Estimated tax is generally required if you expect to owe $1,000 or more. The quarterly due dates are April 15, June 15, September 15 and January 15. At our $1.37 of tax per hour ($1.14 + $0.23), Instacart alone reaches $1,000 owed at about 730 hours ($1,000 ÷ $1.37).
6. Mileage: 72.5¢ a mile for January 1 to June 30, 2026, and 76¢ for July 1 to December 31. Keep separate mileage totals for each half of the year.
7. No tax on tips. You can deduct up to $25,000 a year of qualified tips for tax years 2025 through 2028, whether or not you itemize. It phases out above $150,000 of modified AGI ($300,000 joint), requires a valid SSN, and can’t exceed your net income from the work. Final rules published April 13, 2026 added app or platform-based delivery workers under occupation code 804, and tips paid through an app count. It doesn’t reduce self-employment tax, so the 15.3% still applies to your tips. At the median, tips are $5.11 of every $12.51.

Tax situations differ. Run your own numbers with a tax professional or IRS guidance before you rely on ours.

Students, complaints and risks

College students need to be 18 or older, with a valid driver’s license and a Social Security number, and to pass criminal and motor vehicle record checks run by partners including Checkr. In some areas you can start in as little as an hour. Plan on needing a car: Instacart checks for a license, and no official source confirms a car-free option. You set your own hours and declining a batch costs nothing. The weekend math above, about $243 to $365 a month kept, is the realistic range. For how that compares with campus jobs and other options, see ways to make money in college, ranked by net pay.

International students on F-1 visas need DSO approval and a USCIS work permit to work off campus. Unauthorized work can end in a terminated SEVIS record and having to leave the US. At least one university international office lists driving for Uber or Lyft as unauthorized employment. Talk to your DSO before signing up.

Most forum complaints about pay come down to the numbers above: low offers, slow hours and unpaid waiting. You can decline low batches without penalty, keep your miles per hour down and skip cashout fees you don’t need. On tip baiting, where a customer promises a big tip and then removes it: tips can’t be lowered after 2 hours, and if a customer removes a tip without reporting a problem with the order, Instacart covers it up to $10.

Risks that cost money:

• Insurance. Shopper Injury Protection is accident insurance for US full-service shoppers, covering up to $1 million in medical costs plus disability and survivor benefits. It covers your injuries, not your car. Ask your own auto insurer whether your personal policy covers delivery driving.
• Scams and deactivation. Instacart tells shoppers never to share login details, access codes or financial information, and doing so can get you deactivated. It has removed more than 1,200 accounts selling bots or similar services, and buying or selling batches gets you removed. Account sharing is also against the rules. If you’re deactivated, you can appeal to Instacart’s Trust & Safety team with evidence.

Sources

• Gridwise: Instacart shopper earnings, 2025 data
• Instacart: shopper earnings
• Instacart: Shopper Rewards Card announcement
• IRS: standard mileage rates
• IRS: no tax on tips deduction
• NYC DCWP: delivery workers
• Also used: IRS self-employment tax and estimated tax pages, IRS Form 1099 instructions, IRS Publication 501, Seattle Office of Labor Standards, Study in the States (DHS), Instacart’s Cart Star, integrity and security posts, the NerdWallet shopper test (via KXAN), and BLS Occupational Outlook data.

Verdict in one number

$6.08 an hour. That’s what the median Instacart shopper keeps after car, phone and tax on our assumptions: fine as flexible pocket money, weak as a wage, and clearly better only under a local pay floor or at top-10% speed.