I Started Doing Uber Eats on the Sunshine Coast. Here's Everything I Wish I'd Known.
It's winter in Queensland, I already have a remote job that runs from midday to eight, and casual shifts that finish before noon basically don't exist. So I signed up for Uber Eats.
Delivering for Uber Eats in Australia on a working holiday visa is one of the few jobs where you decide when you work, down to the hour. Here's what it actually takes to get started, what the sign-up costs, what I earn per delivery, and the insurance problem that almost nobody warns you about.
The short version
| What | Detail |
|---|---|
| Prerequisite | An ABN, about 15 minutes to get |
| App | Uber Driver app, not a separate Uber Eats one |
| Sign-up checks | Background check and VEVO check, around $42 |
| Time to apply | 30 minutes to an hour if your documents are ready |
| Typical earnings | Around $17 for a 25 minute delivery |
| Best real run so far | $22 for 27 minutes, with a second order picked up on the way |
| Tax | Nothing is withheld. You are a sole trader, set it aside yourself |
| Insurance | Your standard policy probably does not cover you while the app is on |
Why did I pick Uber Eats over casual shifts?
Two reasons, both fairly specific to my situation.
The first is timing. I already work remotely from midday to eight in the evening. Finding a casual job that fits neatly into a morning, and that lets you disappear at 11:45 every day, is close to impossible.
The second is the season. We are on the Sunshine Coast in the middle of the Australian winter, which is a beautiful time to be here but not the busiest time for hospitality and casual work. If you have landed somewhere quiet in the off season, the local job market is a lot thinner than the Facebook groups make it sound.
Uber Eats solved both. You go online when you want, you go offline when you want, and nobody is putting you on a roster.
There was also a sign-up promotion when I started: complete 80 orders within 50 days and get an extra $500. Promotions like this are region specific and they change constantly, so check what is actually showing in your own app rather than assuming you will get the same one.
What do you need before you can sign up?
An ABN. This is the blocker. You cannot deliver for Uber Eats without one, because you are signing up as a contractor and not an employee. It is genuinely quick, around fifteen minutes, and the only part that makes people hesitate is the entitlement questions on the application form. I have written up how to answer the ABN entitlement questions separately, because getting those wrong is the one way to turn a fifteen minute job into a problem.
Your documents. If you are a foreigner with no Australian driver licence and you want to deliver by car:
- Your passport
- Two proofs of identity, credit cards work fine
- Your home country driver licence
- Your vehicle registration certificate
- Proof of insurance, with you as the policyholder or a named driver
On the registration certificate: if you have just bought a car, you may not have it yet. I used the receipt from the registration transfer instead and it was accepted. If you are in Queensland and have not done that part yet, the paperwork overlaps almost exactly with what Uber asks for, and I have listed every document you need to buy a car in Queensland.
How do you actually sign up?
Download the Uber Driver app. This confuses people, including me at first, because the App Store listing reads as though it is only for driving passengers. It is the same app for Uber Eats delivery.
Then you fill in your details and upload your documents. Uber runs a background check and a VEVO check on your visa status, which cost around $42 between them, and the form asks for a lot of information. Budget about ten minutes just for that part.
All in, if your documents are ready, applying takes somewhere between thirty minutes and an hour on your side. Then you wait for Uber's verification. Mine took about two hours.
The insurance part nobody tells you about
This is the section I would want someone to have written for me, and it is the reason I would read this article before signing up rather than after.
What Uber requires. According to Uber's own Australian requirements, your car must be road registered, have CTP in your state or territory, and be insured for a minimum of third party property damage, with you as either the policyholder or a named insured driver.
What your policy probably says. Most standard Australian car insurance policies are written for social, domestic and pleasure use, and they exclude what insurers call "hire and reward". Delivery work is hire and reward. That means the moment you accept a paid delivery, a claim can be refused.
The gap is worse than it sounds, because it is not just about crashes during a delivery. The window where you are online and waiting for an order, before you have accepted anything, is typically the least covered of all. Uber's own cover, where it applies, is narrow and mostly protects other people rather than your car.
So the practical checklist is:
- Open your PDS and search it for "hire and reward" and "delivery"
- If you find an exclusion, call your insurer before your next shift
- Ask specifically whether they offer a hire and reward extension or a business use endorsement, or whether you need a specialist food delivery policy
Personal experience I signed up before checking any of this myself, and I still have not checked my own policy. I am sorting it now, which is exactly why this section exists: check first, then sign up, not the other way around.
How does it work once you're approved?
The app is straightforward. You press GO and you are online, which means you can receive orders.
When there is an order for you, it appears with the estimated earnings, the estimated time, the pickup point and the delivery point. You get a few seconds to accept or decline.
Once you have accepted, you can also be offered additional orders to pick up along the way, for a bit more money. Those are sometimes worth it and sometimes not, depending on whether the detour is real.
Personal experience On my second delivery they offered me $5 to pick up a second order that was literally on my way. It added about three minutes. I ended up with $22 for 27 minutes of work in total, which is good money by any standard. That is the best case, not the average. The offers that look like $5 for nothing are usually the ones where the second restaurant is in the opposite direction.
When to go online matters more than how long you stay online. Demand clusters around lunch and dinner. Two hours across the evening rush will almost always beat four hours spread through a quiet afternoon, and you burn less fuel doing it.
Declining orders is fine. You are not obliged to take everything. A delivery that pays $8 for a twenty minute round trip into a residential area you then have to drive back out of is worse than waiting five minutes for the next offer.
How much do you actually earn per delivery?
Around $17 for a 25 minute delivery, from what I have seen so far. My best single run was $22 for 27 minutes with a second order stacked on.
With the 80 order promotion, the extra $500 works out to an additional $6.25 per delivery, which is a meaningful bump while it lasts.
Now the honest part. Extrapolate $17 per 25 minutes and you get about $40 an hour, and that is the number you will see repeated on every blog and in every Facebook comment. It assumes you go straight from one delivery into the next, with no waiting, no driving back toward a busy area and no dead time. That does not happen. The gaps between orders are what separate the per delivery rate from what actually lands in your account, and the quieter your town, the bigger the gaps.
The per delivery figure is real. The hourly figure is a ceiling, not an average.
In my first month I did 80 deliveries across 40 hours online and earned $1,293 from deliveries, plus the $500 sign-up bonus on top. That is $16.16 per delivery, in line with the range above, and $32.33 an hour from deliveries alone, or $44.83 an hour once the one-time bonus is counted in. The bonus will not repeat next month, so $32.33 an hour, not $44.83 and nowhere near the $40 an hour some blogs quote, is the number I would actually plan a budget around.
How does tax work when you're on an ABN?
This is the part I got wrong myself, so it is worth being careful.
You're not an employee. With an ABN you are a sole trader running a business, and Uber is a client rather than an employer. Three consequences follow.
Nothing is withheld. No tax comes out of your payments. Every dollar that lands in your account still has tax owing on it, and you are the one who has to set it aside. This is the single biggest difference from a normal casual job where the tax is gone before you ever see the money.
Your gross income is more than what you receive. For tax purposes your income is the full customer fare, before Uber takes its service fee. You then claim that fee back as a business expense. So a $22 delivery where Uber keeps $7 is declared as $22 of income and $7 of expense, not as $15 of income.
You can deduct your costs. Fuel, phone and plan, tolls, insulated bags, parking, and a proportion of your car running costs. The catch is substantiation: without a logbook and receipts you cannot claim any of it. Start the logbook on day one, because reconstructing it in June is miserable and mostly guesswork.
On GST there is a distinction worth knowing, because it trips people up constantly. Rideshare drivers, meaning UberX and similar passenger services, must register for GST from their first dollar with no threshold at all. Food delivery is treated differently: Uber Eats and similar delivery platforms use the standard $75,000 turnover threshold, so most part time couriers never need to register. But if you ever do both passenger driving and delivery on the same ABN, the rideshare rule wins and GST then applies to your delivery income too.
You can download your annual tax summary from the driver app at the end of each financial year.
What I'd tell my past self I assumed my tax would work like a normal job, roughly 15 percent taken out automatically because that's the working holiday maker rate. That's not how it works on an ABN. Nobody takes anything out. If you spend everything as it arrives, you will get a bill you weren't expecting, and you'll get it at the exact moment you were planning to go travelling.
I am not an accountant and this is not tax advice, just what I have worked out for my own situation. The rules for working holiday makers running a business are more specific than any general guide can cover, so check the ATO site directly or pay an accountant once. If you have not got your TFN yet, that is step one, and I have covered it in the guide to sorting out your paperwork when you arrive.
What I'd do differently
Check the insurance before signing up rather than after. Everything else on this list is admin you can fix in an afternoon. That one is the only thing that could turn a small mistake into a genuinely expensive one.
I would also start the logbook from the first delivery instead of a few weeks in.
Is it worth it?
For my situation, yes. It fills the mornings, it works around a remote job, and it does not require me to commit to a roster in a town where the winter shifts are not there anyway.
It is not a replacement for a proper job if you are trying to save hard, and the hourly rates you will read online are optimistic. But as a flexible way to earn while you work out the rest of your year, it does the job.
Where you are based changes this a lot, because delivery demand in a small coastal town in winter is nothing like a city. I have written about choosing your first city on a working holiday visa, and if you are weighing up whether you need a car at all, here is how we bought ours in our first week.
Written in August 2026, one month into doing Uber Eats deliveries. Uber's vehicle and insurance requirements checked against uber.com/en-AU/drive/insurance in August 2026. Tax information is general only, check ato.gov.au or an accountant for your own situation.