City Hall bumps pay for NYC delivery workers from $18 to nearly $20 an hour

NYC food delivery workers are getting a new, near 9% pay bump starting Monday, Mayor Adams announced.

Workers for apps like Uber Eats, Grubhub and Doordash will now make $19.56 per hour spent making deliveries, or an increase of around $1.50 every hour.

“Our delivery workers have consistently delivered for us, and today we are delivering for them,” Adams said at a City Hall press briefing alongside delivery workers and Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Vilda Vera Mayuga. “We are leading the nation with this announcement of ensuring that they can receive suitable pay that they deserve in this process. We know that wages have not kept up with the rising costs of living in the city, and everywhere we can make an impact, we’re going to do just that.”

Monday marks the first of two scheduled staggered pay increases that will bring the minimum pay rate to at least $19.96 in 2025. The next increase will go into effect on April 1, 2025.

It’s the latest in a slew of recent city policies aimed at addressing the boom of delivery workers after e-bikes became legal in 2020. A pandemic-era surge in to-go orders, among other factors, has created a flood of delivery workers and bikes the city is now trying to regulate.

The minimum wage — the nation’s first for app delivery workers — started at $17.96 and took effect in December 2023. Before that, workers made an average of $5.39 per hour.

The implementation of the minimum wage has been celebrated by the city’s over 60,000 delivery workers, and, for some, was life-changing money, who now say they can afford to pay for rent and food easily and not resort to riding hazardously to make speedy deliveries.

In recent months, Adams has also announced new charging stations for e-bikes, as well as a new agency called the Department of Sustainable Delivery to regulate trucks, e-bikes, scooters and mopeds.

The city is also pushing forward with the rollout of “deliverista hubs,” or rest stops for delivery workers, although local community boards are pushing back on them.

Ligia Guallpa of the Workers Justice Project, an advocacy group for app workers, emphasized that there’s still work to be done to protect workers and urged elected officials to take action against changes the apps have made since the wage change.

Delivery workers say the apps they work for have retaliated against workers by hiding the option to tip from customers and more readily deactivating workers’ accounts.

“Listen, we know the games that are being played to take away the tips,” Adams said. “But we’re saying, ‘Let’s stop those games.'”