How do I know if a DoorDash order is worth taking?

Compare the offer against your own numbers, not a folk rule: subtract your vehicle cost per mile (gas, maintenance, wear) from the payout, divide by the realistic minutes the delivery will take, and check the resulting hourly rate against your target. DoorDash gives you 50 seconds to decide, so the practical approach is a pre-computed decline sheet: for each offer amount, the maximum miles at which it still meets your target.

What is a decline sheet?

A personal cheat sheet computed from your cost per mile, target hourly rate, and typical delivery pace. It lists, for each offer amount, the most miles the delivery can be and still meet your target — for example, at 30¢/mile costs and an $18/hour target, a $7.50 offer is worth up to about 3.7 miles. It collapses to one memorizable rule of the form 'decline anything under $3.00 + $1.20 per mile.'

Is This Order Worth It? Live DoorDash Offer Calculator + Your Personal Decline Sheet

Set up and use this tool while safely parked. Do not type while driving.

Your profile — set once, saved in this browser

Your cost per mile (¢) gas + maintenance + wear — work it out here

Target $/hour after vehicle costs, before taxes

Bare-minimum $/hour optional — your walk-away floor

Your pace: minutes per mile starter guess 3 (≈20 mph with stops) — check against your real trips

Minutes per delivery stop wait + handoff — starter guess 10

Pace numbers are starter assumptions, not platform averages — after a few shifts, set them from your own trips and the whole page gets sharper.

The offer

Best suited to restaurant and pickup-ready delivery offers. A shop-and-deliver mode (Instacart/Spark — where item count and shopping time dominate) is planned.

Offer $

Miles (pickup → drop-off)

After drop-off, getting back to a busy area will take…

Tolls / parking $ optional

Minutes auto from your pace

Enter the offer amount and miles

What the verdict means: it compares this offer's estimated hourly — after your per-mile vehicle cost and any reposition miles — against the target you set. It's your model, applied consistently; the accept/decline call is always yours. Estimates lean on your saved pace assumptions.

My Decline Sheet

The 50-second answer (that's the decision window DoorDash's own help pages describe): pre-compute the math, screenshot it, and let your trained gut do the talking in the moment.

My Decline Sheet

…or just screenshot the card ☝︎

Sheet math: offer clears your target when payout ≥ (stop-time cost) + (per-mile cost) × miles, where stop-time cost = target $/hr × stop minutes ÷ 60 and per-mile cost = vehicle ¢/mi + target $/hr × pace ÷ 60. Max-miles figures are always rounded DOWN. Independently re-derived and verified July 2026.

Why "$1 a mile" isn't your rule

The folk rule floating around every driver forum — take it if it pays $1 (or $2) a mile — has a real problem: it prices every driver's time and car identically, and it prices a 2-mile order the same as a 12-mile one. Your car might cost 25¢ a mile to run or 45¢. Your market might support an $18/hour target or a $25 one. And every delivery carries a fixed chunk of time — the wait at the restaurant, the walk to the door — that a per-mile rule can't see. Small offers live or die on that fixed time, not the mileage.

The honest math has three parts: what the miles cost your car, what the minutes are worth against your target, and what the offer pays. Put together: an offer clears your target when it pays more than your stop-time cost plus your true per-mile cost times the miles. That's the whole site in one sentence — the calculator above does it live, and the Decline Sheet does it in advance.

Worked example

Costs 30¢/mi, target $18/hr, pace 3 min/mi, 10 min per stop. A $7.50 offer for 6.2 miles taking ~22 minutes: vehicle cost 6.2 × $0.30 = $1.86, net $5.64, hourly $5.64 × 60/22 = $15.38/hr — below an $18 target (and below the 90% close-call band). The same $7.50 clears $18/hr only up to 3.7 miles — which is exactly what the Decline Sheet says without any typing.

Miles you drive but don't get paid for

A 7-mile delivery that ends next to a busy restaurant strip and a 7-mile delivery that strands you at the edge of the map are not the same offer. This calculator handles that honestly: a drop-off in the sticks doesn't make the route cheaper — it adds reposition miles (and their time) to the cost side. Miles you actually drive always count; a good destination is valuable because it makes the next offer come sooner, not because this one becomes free.

Train the gut, then trust it

Nobody does arithmetic in a 50-second window. The workflow that works: set your profile once, screenshot your Decline Sheet, and use the live calculator between offers and after the shift — punch in the one you just declined and see whether you were right. The history list keeps your last ten so you can watch your instincts calibrate.