New York’s own trip-by-trip records show the platforms’ cut has roughly tripled since 2019 and has leveled off around 23–24 percent. The oft-repeated claim that individual rides run 50–80 percent turns out to be rare — true on about one ride in thirty, not most of them.
Every ride Uber and Lyft dispatch in New York generates a public record. Under rules the city’s Taxi and Limousine Commission put in place in 2019, both companies must report, trip by trip, what the rider was charged and what the driver was paid. USA Times pulled that data directly from the TLC’s own public files — millions of trips a month, going back to February 2019 — to answer a question that has circulated for years among drivers and in advocacy reports: how much of every fare do the platforms actually keep, and is it really as high as some drivers say?
The short answer, measured the same way an independent 2022 UCLA Labor Center study measured it: the companies’ combined cut of every fare dollar has grown from about 8 percent in 2019 to roughly 23 to 24 percent today — a number that climbed steadily through 2024 and has held roughly flat since. That is a real and significant increase. It is also considerably smaller, and more evenly distributed, than the “50 to 80 percent” figure that has circulated in driver-advocacy literature and been repeated in coverage of the industry.
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New York is one of the only places in the country where this can be checked at all. Since February 2019, TLC’s driver-pay rules have set a minimum a driver must be paid per trip, from a formula tied to time and distance. Uber and Lyft must report both numbers for every trip: base_passenger_fare, charged to the rider before tolls, taxes and tips, and driver_pay, what the driver received. The gap between them — what we call the take rate — is the clearest public measure of what the platform keeps. It does not capture every dollar the companies collect (separate in-app booking and service fees aren’t in this record), but it is the one piece of the transaction New York requires both to disclose.
The trend: up sharply, then flat
| Year (April) | Combined NYC trips | Take rate |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 19.9M | 8.1% |
| 2021 | 14.0M | 21.1% |
| 2022 | 17.7M | 21.1% |
| 2023 | 19.1M | 19.8% |
| 2024 | 19.7M | 23.5% |
| 2025 | 19.7M | 23.3% |
| 2026 | 21.0M | 23.4% |
The 2022 figure is worth pausing on. UCLA Labor Center researchers, using a separate sample of about 50 million NYC trips, independently found the take rate had reached 20.7 percent by April 2022. Our figure for the same month, computed from scratch off the city’s public files, came in at 21.1 percent — close enough to treat both studies as measuring the same real thing. What has not been reported before, as far as we could find, is what happened next: the rate kept rising through 2024, then stopped. It has held in a narrow 23–24 percent band for three straight years.
What “individual rides” actually look like
The trend line is an average. It does not describe any single ride — and that is where the dramatic claims (that a platform keeps 50, 65, even 80 percent of a specific fare) come from. Those figures generally trace to driver surveys and advocacy reports, not to the trip-level city data. We tested the claim directly, computing the take rate on every individual Uber and Lyft trip in New York in April 2026 — more than 20 million rides.
| Uber (15.37M) | Lyft (5.60M) | |
|---|---|---|
| Median take rate | 23.0% | 25.8% |
| Top 10% of rides (P90) | 45.8% | 42.5% |
| Share of rides ≥ 50% | 3.4% | 3.3% |
| Share of rides ≥ 65% | 0.01% | 0.23% |
| Share of rides ≥ 80% | 0.00% | 0.04% |
A take rate above 50 percent does happen — on roughly 1 ride in 30. A take rate in the 65–80 percent range that is often cited as typical is, in this data, close to nonexistent. Some survey-based estimates may be measuring something these records don’t capture (the separate app fees, or driver take-home after vehicle costs). But as a description of the median individual ride, the “50–80 percent” framing does not match what the city’s own records show.
One wrinkle cuts the other way. On 17.4 percent of Uber trips in April 2026, the driver was paid more than the fare charged to the rider — almost certainly New York’s minimum-pay formula overriding a discounted or promotional fare. On a meaningful share of rides, in other words, Uber’s own numbers show it absorbing a loss on the base fare, not extracting one.
What this doesn’t show
This data measures margin, not motive, and it measures New York, not the country — most cities don’t require this disclosure, which is why so much of the national conversation relies on surveys rather than records. It also doesn’t address a separate question this newsroom is investigating: whether either company charges different riders different prices for the identical trip at the same moment — algorithmic, or “surveillance,” pricing. That needs a different test — matched, simultaneous price comparisons across accounts — and nothing here should be read as evidence either way on it.
How we did this. We queried NYC TLC’s High-Volume For-Hire Vehicle trip records — the city’s regulator-mandated, trip-level public files — directly from TLC’s public data bucket, computing take_rate = (base_passenger_fare − driver_pay) / base_passenger_fare per trip. Our method replicates the UCLA Labor Center’s 2019–2022 study and extends it through April 2026. Single-company figures before 2022 are unreliable (first-year reporting inconsistencies) and are excluded from company-level claims. USA Times is seeking comment from Uber and Lyft and will update this article with any response.
Sources: NYC TLC High-Volume FHV Trip Records and data dictionary; UCLA Labor Center take-rate study; NELP, “Predatory Take Rates.” Analysis by the USA Times Data Desk.
