Seattle’s gig worker pay law, requiring minimum pay rates for app-based delivery workers, has been one of the most contentious labor experiments in the country for more than two years.
Now the city is pushing back on critics — including delivery giants DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Instacart — with what it calls the most comprehensive dataset ever assembled on the subject.
The takeaways: Workers are earning more, order volume has grown, and demand held steady during the first 18 months of the ordinance, according to the report, which covers 92,000 workers and 15 million offers across the five largest delivery platforms.
Whether it ends the debate remains to be seen. DoorDash, Uber, and industry-backed groups have long said that the law drove down orders, reduced driver earnings, and raised costs for consumers. A Carnegie Mellon study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, reached similar conclusions using data from a third-party driver app.
But the city says those earlier analyses relied on incomplete or self-selected data.
The report shows that “thoughtful public policy can rise to the challenge of ensuring fair compensation for platform workers while maintaining consumer access,” said James Parrott, a senior fellow at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School, in a news release.
The new report draws on records that the five largest delivery companies are required by law to submit to the Seattle Office of Labor Standards (OLS), covering every worker and every offer on their platforms during the 18 months after the ordinance took effect in January 2024.
Among the key findings:
- Average “pay for time online,” the most comprehensive measure of worker earnings after accounting for all logged-in time, mileage, and other expenses, was $15.98 per hour, up from pre-ordinance estimates as low as $3.17.
- Weekly completed offers grew 3.2% over the same period, in contrast with industry claims of a sustained drop in demand.
- Tips and bonuses made up a smaller share of earnings, with base pay now accounting for most of worker compensation. Some companies changed their apps to discourage tipping after the ordinance took effect.
- Network company fees charged to customers averaged 19.3% of total order payments. The ordinance itself imposes no fees, but companies added “Seattle regulatory fees” in response. Demand grew despite the increases.
The report has limitations. The companies were only required to begin submitting data when the ordinance took effect, so there is no pre-ordinance baseline from the same sources. And privacy constraints prevent OLS from tracking individual workers across platforms, meaning hours-per-worker figures may undercount people who use multiple apps.
DoorDash has pushed back on the law’s effectiveness. In a February data release, the company said its Seattle drivers earned more than 20% less per hour on the app in 2024 than in 2023, with the decline reaching nearly 25% by the third quarter of 2025.
The company also said Seattle consumers pay the highest delivery fees in the country, more than 3.5 times the average in comparable cities such as Denver, Portland, and San Francisco.
The Carnegie Mellon study, meanwhile, used data from Gridwise, a third-party earnings-tracking app, covering about 3,700 workers over six months. OLS says that sample is self-selected toward heavier users and represents roughly 4% of the workforce captured in its own report.
OLS plans to continue analyzing quarterly data from the companies, expand coverage to smaller platforms beyond delivery, and conduct qualitative research with workers to understand how they experience the law.
We’ve contacted representatives of DoorDash, Uber, and Instacart for comment on the OLS report and will update this story with any responses.
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