Food delivery is contracting, not employment. You need an ABN, nothing is withheld from your payouts, and the tax arrives as a single bill at assessment.
Why is delivery treated as contracting rather than a job?
The platform buys a completed delivery, not your time, so it pays you as a business rather than as an employee. That classification decides everything else: no PAYG withheld, no employer superannuation, no award rate, no workers compensation by default, and an ABN required before you can be paid.
Without an ABN on the account, the payer must withhold at 47% under the no ABN withholding rule, a higher rate than the 45% that applies to wages without a TFN. Our guide to what an ABN is covers when the classification is legitimate and when it is being used to avoid employing you.
How is delivery income actually taxed?
Delivery income is taxed at the working holiday maker rates, at 15% on the first $45,000 and 30% from there to $135,000, exactly as wages are. The difference is timing, not rate: nothing is withheld through the year, so the whole amount falls due when the tax return is assessed.
Wages arrive already taxed, so the money in the account is yours. Platform payouts arrive untaxed, so part of the balance belongs to the ATO and has simply not been collected yet.
When does GST actually apply to you?
GST applies to delivery only once turnover from the work exceeds $75,000 in a financial year, which very few working holiday riders reach. Passenger rideshare is the exception in Australian GST law: driving passengers requires GST registration from the first dollar, regardless of turnover.
The trap is doing both. Driving passengers as well as delivering food pulls your whole gig income into the GST system, so a few Uber passenger trips can change the treatment of a year of delivery work. Our guide to driving Uber on a WHV sets out that boundary.
What can a delivery rider claim?
Deductions are where delivery work becomes worth doing, because the gross figure on a platform statement bears little relation to what you are taxed on. Vehicle, equipment and phone are all partly or wholly deductible, and platform service fees deductible in full.
- Bicycle or e-bike: depreciation over its effective life, repairs, tyres, chains, brake pads, and charging for an e-bike
- Motorcycle or scooter: fuel, registration, insurance, maintenance and depreciation, at the work percentage
- Car: cents per kilometre up to 5,000 km, or the logbook method, which our guide to the 12 week logbook explains
- Equipment: delivery bag, helmet, lights, lock, panniers, phone mount
- Phone: the work share of the plan and of the handset cost
- Platform service fees deducted by Uber, DoorDash or Menulog
The income side of a delivery return is fixed, because platforms report your earnings to the ATO under the sharing economy reporting regime and the data is matched against what you lodge. The deduction side is where anything is decided.
What records make the difference?
The ones that turn a plausible percentage into a defensible one. Platform annual statements establish the income; the kilometre log and the receipts establish everything you subtract from it.
- The annual statement from each platform you rode for
- Bank statements showing the payouts
- Receipts for the bike, the equipment and the phone
- A logbook or a representative period for work use of anything shared with private life
- Total kilometres ridden for delivery
The riders with the worst outcome are not the ones who claimed too much. They are the ones who kept nothing, took the conservative figure to be safe, and paid tax on income they never really had.
Are you covered if you are injured?
Riders with an ABN are contractors, so workers compensation does not apply automatically as it would to an employee. Cover depends on what the platform provides and what you bought yourself, and is generally narrower than an employee would have for the same accident.
Some platforms carry an injury insurance product that operates while you are on an active delivery. Personal accident cover and the bicycle itself are separate purchases. Our guide to workplace injury rights explains where the line falls.
How do the platforms differ for tax?
They pay differently and report identically. Uber Eats, DoorDash and Menulog all report annual earnings to the ATO, so what differs is the fee structure and how each statement presents the numbers. Some show gross earnings before the service fee and some show net, so adding three statements together without checking which basis each uses is a common way to misstate a year.
Riding for several platforms at once, which most riders do, needs one habit: keep each platform's annual statement separately rather than working from bank deposits. Deposits net off fees, adjustments and incentives in ways that cannot be unpicked afterwards, while the ATO holds the gross figures.
What decides whether your year ends well or badly?
Four things, and none of them is how many hours you rode. Whether you set money aside as you went, because the bill lands in one piece. Whether you also had wage income with tax withheld, since that withholding can absorb some or all of the ABN liability. Whether you drove passengers at any point, which changes your GST position. And whether you kept the records that support the deductions.
Setting aside 15% to 25% of every payment, in a separate account, is the difference between a year that closes cleanly and one that closes with a debt you are trying to clear from another country. Our guide to ATO payment plans covers what happens if that is where you already are.