Uber data says Uber drivers love driving for Uber

Four in five drivers say they're satisfied with the overall experience

Uber today released survey data to provide a snapshot of its driver workforce, and to show just how happy they are.

The top line finding from the survey? 81 percent of Uber drivers are satisfied with the overall experience of Uber.

In addition, 97 percent of drivers say they're satisfied with the flexibility of their schedule and 91 percent say they're satisfied with the work-life balance they achieve by driving for Uber.

To arrive at this data, Uber hired Benenson Strategy Group to survey nearly a thousand Uber drivers from 24 of Uber's largest U.S. markets, including New York City, Chicago, Denver, and San Francisco. That’s a small fraction of the company’s 400,000 total drivers across the country, meaning the results are probably inaccurate by at least 5 percent in any direction.

With this possibility for error and for the simple fact that Uber both paid for this survey data and (likely) selectively chose which specific points to release, we should take all this new data with a grain of salt.

Here are some of the more interesting data points:

• Most drivers see Uber as a side gig: Given that half of Uber drivers clock in fewer than 10 hours per week on average, it makes sense that 69 percent of them have other full-time or part-time work.
• Flexibility is important: 40 percent of respondents decide when to drive based on their schedule and 38 percent decide based on an earnings goal. This matches previous data we’ve seen highlighting flexibility as the prime attraction for freelancers and other self-employed workers.
• Uber is their first taxi gig: For 2 in 3 drivers, Uber is their first time earning income from driving. This too has been affirmed in another survey, which found an even more striking figure: 80 percent of drivers have been doing so for less than six months.
• More women drivers? Compared to the generic on-demand driver data cited in the SherpaShare study, more women may be driving Uber. Sherpashare found that women made up almost a fifth of the on-demand driving workforce, whereas Uber’s new data says women make up nearly a third of drivers joined in the last three months.

We’ve reached out to Lyft, Uber’s main competitor in the U.S., to see if they have any similar data for their drivers, but haven’t heard back yet.

Purely anecdotally, I’ve spoken with a couple Lyft drivers who say they favor the pink-mustache service to Uber both because they can make more money and because they prefer the clientele.

Last week, Lyft and Uber’s other competitors across the world--Didi Kuaidi in China, GrabTaxi in Southeast Asia, and Ola in India--announced an official partnership to make it easy for their customers to hail rides as they travel around the world. In other words, they want to make it easy for passengers to hail a ride not operated by the behemoth in the space, Uber.

Uber says it has paid over $3.5 billion to U.S. drivers this year.