Alto vs Uber: What W-2 Rideshare Driving Actually Pays (2026)

Alto driver pay starts at $10.50 to $18.42 an hour depending on the city, as a W-2 employee driving a company car with fuel, maintenance and insurance paid for (Alto, Los Angeles listing, September 2026). Uber's median driver grosses $21.18 per paid trip hour, but every one of those hours runs on the driver's own car. Once you subtract the car, Alto's lower wage is often the better deal. Whether it is for you depends on your city and what your car costs to run.

I've never driven for Alto, and my rideshare experience is a handful of Lyft trips. Most of my gig work is almost 4 years as a Lime LP, 42,000+ tasks, where the vehicle and every mile on it are mine. That's the half of this comparison I know well: what a car costs per mile, and how fast it eats an hourly rate.

Last reviewed: September 30, 2026 · By Brenden Warn, ShiftTracker founder — Lime LP for almost 4 years · 42,000+ tasks completed.

What is Alto, and how is it different from Uber?

Alto is a Dallas-based rideshare company that hires its drivers as employees instead of contractors. Its job listings say it has been doing this "since 2018." Drivers pick up a company-owned SUV at a depot, drive their shift and hand it back. Alto says it finished moving to "an all-electric fleet of 1,000 EVs in 2025" and runs 7 depots (Alto).

Here's the part most people miss: in two of its cities, Alto drivers are on the Uber app. In Alto's words, "In Los Angeles and Miami, Alto vehicles and W-2 drivers operate on the Uber platform through Uber Black, Uber XL, and UberTeen," and "Uber is both our distribution partner and a strategic investor." It's also hiring car-provided drivers in San Francisco at $19.75 an hour (ZipRecruiter). Alto's own rider app only runs in Dallas and Houston.

So "Alto vs Uber" is really a question about employment. You can do Uber trips as an Uber contractor in your own car, or (in those three cities) as an Alto employee in theirs. Uber says in its latest annual report that it treats drivers as independent contractors, a status it is still defending in court (Uber 10-K, filed February 2026).

Alto driver pay by city in 2026

These are Alto's current listings, read September 30, 2026:

The Texas numbers need context. Alto's own app adds an 18% "Service Fee" to every trip, partly to pay "incentive compensation to Drivers," and its help center tells riders they "should always feel no obligation to tip" (Alto help center). In Dallas and Houston, the $10.50 or $12.00 is close to the whole job, plus whatever share of that fee reaches you.

What Alto pays for that Uber drivers pay themselves

Every listing says the same thing: "We handle all vehicle costs, including fuel, maintenance, and insurance." On Uber, all of that is yours, along with depreciation, tires, registration and the rideshare insurance gap.

Then there's payroll tax. As an employee you pay 6.2% Social Security and 1.45% Medicare, and Alto pays the same again (IRS Topic 751). As an Uber contractor you pay both halves yourself, 15.3% self-employment tax, on your profit after expenses (IRS). You also have to make the quarterly estimated payments yourself, because nothing is withheld.

Benefits are listed too: "Basic healthcare coverage, including dental and vision, and 401(k) with up to 4% company match." The listings don't say who qualifies or after how long, so ask before you count on it. If you do qualify, 30 hours a week at the Los Angeles starting rate is $28,735.20 a year, and a 4% match on that is $1,149.41 you wouldn't get from Uber.

The trade-off is the mileage deduction. An Uber driver can deduct 76 cents a mile in 2026 (from July 1; 72.5 cents before that), which is what keeps their self-employment tax low. An Alto driver can't deduct anything, because it isn't their car and unreimbursed employee expenses are no longer deductible (IRS Pub. 529). The 2025 tax law made that permanent (CRS). You don't miss a deduction for costs you never paid, though, and there's no mileage log to keep.

On Uber, that log is worth real money. Write down your odometer at the start and end of every shift: at 76 cents a mile from July 1, 2026, a 100-mile day is a $76 deduction, as long as it's in a mileage log the IRS will accept.

Alto vs Uber pay per hour, after the car

Uber publishes no earnings figure, so the benchmark is Gridwise, which tracks earnings from more than 500,000 drivers. For 2025, the median Uber driver made $21.18 per hour in trip pay ($21.92 with bonuses), counting only "active" hours, meaning time on paid trips (Gridwise, April 2026). Unpaid waiting between rides isn't in that number.

Here's what that leaves once your own car is in the math. The vehicle figure is my car's:

Now the Alto side, where the only deduction before income tax is the employee's 7.65%:

Even before tips, the Los Angeles and Miami wages beat Uber's median in a car like mine. They're also paid for every scheduled hour, including the ones where you're waiting for a ping. Dallas and Houston are closer calls: $11.08 and $9.70 sit inside Uber's range, and Uber has no shift schedule.

Gridwise's own estimate of Uber take-home is higher than mine, "approximately $15 to $18 per hour," though it doesn't publish the costs behind it. A newer, cheaper-to-run car gets you closer to that. Plug in your own numbers with the Uber earnings calculator.

The catches with driving for Alto

• You're on a schedule. You set your availability and Alto builds the schedule. Hiring right now favors weekends in Los Angeles and evenings or weekends in Miami. Time off is unlimited but unpaid, and hours cap at 40 a week in Miami and 45 in Los Angeles.
• The bar to get in is higher. You must be 25 or older and pass a background check, a drug screen and a driving-record review. In Los Angeles and Miami you also can't have a suspension on the Uber platform, and Dallas wants 3 years of driving with no license suspensions in the last 3.
• You can't multi-app. On an Alto shift you drive Alto's car on one app. An Uber contractor can run Lyft or a delivery app in the dead hours.
• Alto's markets have moved before. It left San Francisco in July 2023 (SFGate) and suspended Miami and Washington, D.C. in February 2024 (Axios). Both cities are back, but now through Uber. Alto's homepage now describes the company as building infrastructure for autonomous vehicle fleets, which is worth keeping in mind if you're planning on this for years.

Should you drive for Alto or Uber?

Pick Alto if you're in Los Angeles or Miami, or you don't own a car you want to put rideshare miles on.

Pick Uber if your car is paid off and cheap to run, or you need to log on and off whenever you want. Run your own numbers with the hourly rate calculator first, or see the full breakdown in how much Uber drivers make in 2026.

What does your car really cost you per mile?