Minimum pay rules and what they mean for how much rent a driver can carry

A floor on pay, not a promise about earnings

TLC's minimum pay rule sets a per-trip floor on what a High-Volume For-Hire Service has to pay a driver. It is not a guaranteed weekly paycheck, and it is not a rule about what a fleet can charge in rent. The rule applies specifically to trips dispatched by a High-Volume For-Hire Service, the licensing category that currently covers only Uber and Lyft. High-Volume services account for more than three-quarters of daily for-hire vehicle trips citywide, so the rule reaches most trips without reaching all of them; TLC's rules for other bases, the traditional livery and black car service that a real share of trips still run through, do not set an equivalent per-mile or per-minute floor. A fleet with drivers split between app-based trips and a traditional base is, in effect, running two different pay regimes on two different cars, or even the same car on different days.

The current rates

TLC adjusts the per-mile and per-minute minimums periodically, both on a schedule tied to inflation and through separate rule amendments. As of March 1, 2026, the rates are:

Each trip's floor is calculated from that trip's own distance and time. A short trip in heavy traffic and a long trip on an open highway can clear the same formula and still pay very differently, because the formula was never meant to produce the same number twice.

Why the floor is not the same as take-home pay

The table above describes what a company owes a driver per trip, before anything else comes out of it. It says nothing about what a driver actually keeps after fuel or charging, tolls, phone service, and everything else that being on the road costs that day. It also says nothing about how many trips a driver actually gets in a given week, which depends on hours worked, time of day, and demand that no rate table controls for. TLC's own review of the high-volume sector found driver gross weekly earnings, across the twelve months through January 2026, ranged roughly from $1,100 to $1,400 a week: a wide enough spread that two drivers working under the identical rate table can end a week in very different positions. The rule's formula was itself revised in 2025 after an independent study found driver expenses had been outpacing the regular inflation adjustments on their own, a reminder that a per-mile, per-minute floor and a driver's actual costs do not move in lockstep automatically.

What this means for sizing a week's rent

Rent is a claim on whatever a driver has left after the costs the trips themselves created, not on the fare total those trips generated. A pay floor that guarantees a rate per mile and per minute does not guarantee that a given driver clears enough, in a given week, to cover a fixed rent on top of fuel, tolls, and everything else that comes out of the same earnings first.

The conservative approach is to size rent against a driver's own documented numbers: actual weekly earnings, actual costs, actual payment history, not a published rate table or a figure borrowed from another fleet's experience. Two drivers on the same car type, working the same hours, can still net different amounts in the same week, and the rate table was never built to tell them apart. A fleet that checks real numbers, driver by driver and week by week, is answering a different and more useful question than the one a per-mile rate can answer on its own.