If you want to know how to make $500 a week with DoorDash, I’m going to show you how to do it. To many people, making $500 a week with DoorDash might seem difficult. I’ve found that if you break things down into smaller numbers, things become much more manageable.
In this post, I’m going to tell you exactly how to make $500 a week with DoorDash. Let’s take a look at what you need to do.
The Math Behind How To Make $500 Per Week With DoorDash
If you want to make $500 per week with DoorDash, it helps to break it down into a smaller number. $500 per week might seem like a lot. But if you think about how much you need to earn per day, you’ll find it’s much more manageable to hit this target.
To make $500 per week on DoorDash, you need to earn about $71 per day. When you think of it like that, $500 per week seems much more in reach.
If you’re strategic about how you approach DoorDash and dash in an area with high demand, most people should be able to earn at least $20 per hour. I personally average around $30 to $40 per hour by multi-apping and working during peak hours in high-demand areas (more on that in the next section).
Even at $20 per hour, earning $71 in a day would take about 3.5 hours. If you can increase your earnings to $30 per hour, it would only take you about 2.5 hours or so to earn $71 in a day. That’s really not that much time. Work for an hour or so during lunch and an hour or so during dinner and it’s very possible you can earn $71 in a day without having to work that much. If you can get into the $40 per hour range, it’s possible to make $500 a week working 2 hours per day or less.
An Example of Someone Making $500 A Week With DoorDash
Here’s an example of how you can make $500 a week with DoorDash. Let’s say you have a goal of making $500 per week or about $2,000 per month with DoorDash. To do this, you’d need to make about $71 per day.
To reach this goal, you could do the following:
- Work for 1 hour during the lunch break. If you earn $30 per hour, you’d make $30 over the lunch hour.
- Work for 1.5 hours during the dinner rush and average $30 per hour. If you did this, you’d earn $40 during the dinner rush.
If you did that, you’d make $70 per day just by taking an hour over the lunch hour and an hour-and-a-half over the dinner rush. That’d nearly get you to the $71 per day you need to earn.
To earn a good hourly rate though, you need to use some basic strategies, which I’ve outlined in the next section.
Tips For How To Make $500 A Week With DoorDash
Making $500 per week with DoorDash without working tons of hours each day requires you to be strategic. Here are some important tips and strategies you can use to earn more on DoorDash and make $500 per week.
Multi-App
If you want to make $500 a week with DoorDash, you’re going to want to multi-app. So what is multi-apping?
The general gist of multi-apping is that instead of delivering with only one app, you use all of the food delivery apps in your market at the same time. In my market, I deliver using DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub. Whenever I want to do deliveries, I’ll turn on all three apps and accept orders from all of them. My goal is to pick orders going in the same general directions. By doing this I’m able to dramatically increase my earnings.
The math shows you how valuable multi-apping can be. Most of the deliveries I accept pay between $5 and $8. When I’m multi-apping during peak hours, I’m typically able to complete 5 deliveries per hour. You can see the range of income I can earn per hour given these numbers.
If I complete 5 deliveries per hour at $5 per delivery, I’ll make $25 per hour. At $6 per delivery, I’ll increase my hourly rate to $30 per hour. At $7 per delivery, I’ll earn $35 per hour. And at $8 per delivery, I’m able to earn $40 per hour. To figure out how much you can make, figure out how many orders you can complete in an hour and what you think you can average per delivery.
DoorDash is a numbers game. And if you’re only using DoorDash, you’re probably only going to get 3-4 deliveries per hour. But if you can add other apps like Uber Eats or Grubhub into the mix, you can increase your earnings simply by completing more deliveries. The best is when you get orders from the same restaurant all going in the same direction. When this happens, instead of getting paid for one delivery, you could be getting paid for 2 or 3 deliveries.
Work During Peak Hours
A lot of people make the mistake of treating DoorDash like a regular job. But it’s not a regular job. DoorDash is based around two peak times – lunch and dinner. If you want to make the most you can with DoorDash, you need to be working during these peak hours. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time and earning less.
So, if you want to make $500 a week with DoorDash, try to time your dashing times with the peak lunch and dinner periods.
Stay In Busy Areas
Again, this is pretty obvious, but worth mentioning. Stay in busy areas when you’re working on DoorDash. Dense downtown areas and areas with a lot of young people tend to be the busiest places.
Another thing to think about is where your orders are taking you. Ideally, you don’t want to accept orders that take you far from busy areas. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself deadheading back to a busy area – i.e. you’re losing time and money heading back to the city center. The best thing is if you can accept deliveries that stay in busy areas or take you to another busy area.
Be Strategic With The Orders You Accept
I think a mistake a lot of new dashers make is accepting orders without thinking too much about them. Some people approach dashing with a scarcity mindset, where they think that if they don’t accept an order, they won’t get any more orders later.
The fact is, if you’re in a busy area and working during busy times, there will always be orders for you to accept. So, be strategic with the orders you do accept.
I generally consider a few things whenever I get a delivery request.
- Where’s the order going? I only want orders that aren’t going too far and keep me in a busy area of the city. If the order is way out of my way, it’s not worth doing.
- What’s my experience with the restaurant? This takes a bit of experience, but eventually, you’ll learn which restaurants are good and which you should skip. Some restaurants treat dashers with respect, have the food ready, and don’t waste your time. Others are the opposite. Stick to the good restaurants. Avoid the bad ones.
- How much is the order paying? You have to set your own criteria as to whether an order is paying enough for you to accept it. Remember that time is money, so even if an order is paying a lot, if it’ll take a lot of time to complete, you’d be better off taking a lower-paying order than you can compete faster. A good rule of thumb I use is the 50-cent rule. If I can make about 50 cents per minute for an order, it’s worth accepting. So, if an order pays $5, then I’ll accept it if I think I can complete the order in 10 minutes or less.
Think Like A Business
When you’re dashing, you’re an independent contractor, which means you’re essentially you’re own small business. Because you’re a business, you need to act like one.
Approach every delivery like a business decision. Only accept orders that you believe will be profitable. If the order pays too little or will take too long to compete or is going in a direction that isn’t ideal, don’t accept the order. You are the boss of your own little business – so act like it.
Takeaways
It is possible for you to make $500 per week with DoorDash. Indeed, with the right strategies, it can be done with just a few hours of work each day.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy though. But with experience and some practice, it can get easier. And even if you can’t make $500 per week with DoorDash, making anything extra is always a good thing.
If you want more detailed strategies or information about DoorDash, check out my post – DoorDash Dasher: What It’s Like Delivering For DoorDash.
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