So there have been a few drivers asking how the hourly guarantees work for Uber. Last week, Uber cut fares in 48 cities in the US and implemented around the clock hourly guarantees to make sure that drivers are still making money with the fare cuts. This happened last year in a few of Uber’s largest markets and many drivers in these markets are still making money. It is not as good as before the fare cuts but many still drive on Uber.

So in many cities with the fare cuts, they have announced around the clock guarantees. Here is a sample of it:

    Sunday 7am-Friday 5pm – Off Peak – $15 per hour
    Friday/Saturday 5pm-3am – Peak – $20 per hour

Here are the requirements for the hourly guarantees:

    An average of one ride per hour
    Be online for 50 minutes of any hour to get the guarantee
    Acceptance rate of over 90%

Here is how the Uber Hourly Guarantees work:

    You need to work 50 minutes of every hour to get the guarantee. You will need to start right at the top of the hour: 5:00pm, or 6:00pm, etc. If you work from 5:30 to 6:30 and get one trip during that time, you won’t be paid for your guarantee. [Update, according to Kevin and an Uber rep (see comment below), you may not need to do this. You can work from 5:30 to 6:30 as long as you work 50 minutes of that hour. Thanks Kevin!]
    Each portion of the guarantee, you are required to maintain an average of one trip per hour. So between 5pm and 3am, for example, you need to average one trip per hour. So if you got 10 trips within the first two hours and none the rest of the hours, you will still get paid the peak guarantee until you stop working or 3am, whichever comes first.
    The trip requirement resets when it changes from Peak to Non-peak and vice versa. So if you continue to work from 3am to 5am, you will need two trips between that time frame.
    If there is no change from peak to non-peak, then your trip requirements reset at the end of the day. So you work 10pm to 2am on a Monday night and there is no peak guarantee, you will need 2 trips between 10pm to 12am and then another 2 trips from 12am to 2am.
    Make sure to accept every request. You never know what kind of app issue you may have that will cause you to miss a request. Accept every single request. Its a ride an hour.

I will be putting up some tips on how to really maximize these guarantees in my online training course. It’ll go over some strategies I used when Lyft had similar guarantees.