Do Uber Eats Drivers Pay GST in Australia?

Most Uber Eats drivers do not pay GST, and most of them are right not to. Food delivery sits under the ordinary $75,000 turnover threshold, the same one that applies to any other small business, so a driver earning $30,000 a year delivering has nothing to register for and no BAS to lodge.

The exception is the one that costs money. Carry passengers for a single Saturday night and you are required to be registered for GST from that day, whatever you earn, because ride-sourcing is taxi travel for GST purposes. You have one ABN, and the registration covers everything on it. Your delivery income joins your fare income inside GST, and if you keep delivering as usual for another eight months you will owe one eleventh of all of it, on money you have already spent.

This guide covers when GST starts for delivery, how the threshold is actually tested, and what changes the day you register. It is the same ground we work through with the drivers whose returns we prepare through our delivery driver accounting page.

The short answer, and the one thing that changes it

Delivery is an ordinary enterprise for GST. You register when your GST turnover reaches $75,000 and not before, exactly as a plumber or a bookkeeper would.

Ride-sourcing is not. The ATO’s ride-sourcing registration rules state that “Ride-sourcing is taxi travel for GST purposes. The standard GST registration rule for GST turnover of $75,000 or more does not apply when it comes to ride-sourcing”, and that you must be registered before your first trip.

The line between the two is the passenger, not the app and not the company. Delivering food for the same company that runs a rideshare platform does not turn delivery into taxi travel. Carrying one paying passenger does.

You need an ABN either way

An ABN and a GST registration are two different things, and delivering requires only the first.

You are engaged as a contractor rather than an employee, so you need an ABN to deliver. Entitlement to one turns on whether you are running a business, not on how much you turn over, and the Australian Business Register’s own guidance is that “You may still need an ABN even if you earn below the GST threshold of $75,000.”

What the ABN does bring with it is the return. The ABR is equally direct that most people who hold an ABN have to lodge an annual income tax return, “regardless of whether the business is reporting a profit or loss and above or below the tax-free threshold”. Earning $9,000 delivering does not remove the obligation to lodge.

How the $75,000 test actually works

It is not an annual figure and it does not reset on 1 July. The ATO runs two rolling monthly tests, and meeting either one puts you over.

• Current GST turnover is your turnover for the current month and the previous 11 months.
• Projected GST turnover is your total turnover for the current month and the next 11 months.

Either limb at $75,000, or likely to reach it, means you are required to register. Because both roll monthly, the threshold can be crossed in February as easily as in June.

The ATO’s registration guidance also carries a release valve that almost no guide publishes: “Even if your current GST turnover is at or above the threshold, you don’t have to register for GST if your projected GST turnover will be less than the threshold.” A driver who had one unusually heavy stretch and has since cut back is not locked in by the months behind them.

Two things about the number itself catch people out.

It is gross, not net. GST turnover is your total business income before the platform takes its commission, not the payout that reaches your bank. A driver checking their bank feed is testing the wrong figure against the threshold, and on a platform taking a meaningful cut, the gap between the two numbers is the difference between registering and not.

It is turnover, not profit. Fuel, servicing, the bag and the phone do not come off it. The general mechanics of the threshold, including how it works for a business with more than one income stream, are covered in our guide to the GST registration threshold.

Once you are required to register, the ATO gives you 21 days to do it.

The rideshare crossover, in detail

The trigger is your first passenger trip, not your first $75,000.

Registering is not optional at that point and there is no grace period on the rideshare side: the ATO’s wording is that you must be registered before your first trip. Where you already hold an ABN and start ride-sourcing, you have 21 days from the day you start providing the service.

What surprises drivers is what the registration then covers. The ATO’s guidance on how GST applies when providing services puts it directly: “If you have an existing GST registration and you use the same ABN for sharing economy activities, you will need to report and pay GST for all business income.” One ABN, one registration, all of it.

So the crossover is not that your fares become taxable. It is that your delivery income joins them.

Take a driver delivering steadily at $2,600 a month in gross delivery income, nowhere near the threshold and correctly unregistered. In October they try driving passengers, take $900 of fares over two weekends, and decide it is not for them. They keep delivering exactly as before.

They were required to register for GST from their first passenger trip. From that date they owe GST on everything on that ABN, and because they never added GST to a price, the tax comes out of what they were paid: exactly one eleventh of a GST-inclusive amount. The fares are the small half of it.

That is $1,972 owed on income spent months ago, before any penalties or interest, from two weekends the driver has already decided against.

The way out is not to avoid registering. It is to know the rule before the weekend, so the GST comes out of each payout as it arrives rather than out of next year’s savings.

What changes once you are registered

Registration changes three things at once: what you collect, what you can claim, and what you have to lodge.

You remit GST on your business income. You can claim GST credits on business purchases, but only while registered: the ATO’s condition for claiming a GST credit is that “To claim GST credits in your business activity statement (BAS), you must be registered for GST.” Above $82.50 you need a tax invoice to claim, and anything used privately as well as for work is apportioned.

Your income tax deductions also change shape.

Neither side is better or worse on its own. What does go wrong on a first BAS is claiming both, deducting the GST-inclusive cost and taking the credit on the same purchase, which claims the GST twice. What you can claim either way is covered in our guide to delivery driver tax deductions.

Then there is the BAS, monthly or quarterly. One thing that does not apply here: fuel tax credits are not a reason to register, because fuels used in light vehicles travelling on public roads are not eligible for them.

The platform’s service fee, and the GST on it

When a driver says the platform “charged GST on my earnings”, what they are usually looking at is GST on the service fee or commission charged to them. That is a cost going out, not tax collected out of their income.

If you are not registered, you cannot claim that GST back. The fee is still fully deductible for income tax at the GST-inclusive amount, so nothing is lost on the income tax side.

If you are registered, you claim the GST on the fee as a credit on your BAS and deduct the fee net of GST. The ATO’s sharing economy guidance is explicit that a registered driver “can only claim the remaining amount (expense minus the GST) as a tax deduction”.

Either way, work from the platform statement rather than the bank feed. The statement shows the gross and the fee separately. The bank shows one number that is neither. Platforms label these things differently and change their paperwork without notice, so read the statement you have actually been issued rather than assuming it matches somebody else’s screenshot.

Registering voluntarily, and whether it is worth it

You can register below the threshold if you want to, and there are two real costs to doing it.

There is a lock-in, because choosing to register generally means staying registered for at least 12 months, and there is a BAS every quarter from then on. Against that sits the upside, which is GST credits on everything you buy for the work: the vehicle, the phone, the bag, servicing, the lot.

For most delivery drivers the arithmetic does not favour it. Your income is the same either way, since you are not raising your prices, and the credits on a year of fuel and servicing rarely justify four BAS lodgements. Where it can be worth a conversation is a driver about to buy a vehicle outright, because the credit on a single large purchase can outweigh a year of paperwork. That is a question for your accountant with your actual numbers in front of them, not a rule.

If you should have registered and did not

The ATO’s position is unambiguous: “If you don’t register for GST and are required to, you may have to pay GST on sales made since the date you were required to register. This could happen even if you didn’t include GST in the price of those sales.”

In practice that means one eleventh of income you never charged GST on and have already spent. Penalties and interest may also apply. Backdating a registration is limited to four years, so the exposure has an edge to it, but four years of delivery income is a serious number.

The fix is to register and bring the lodgements up to date rather than wait for the ATO to raise it, because coming forward is treated differently from being found.

Getting the BAS side sorted

A delivery driver’s BAS is one of the simpler ones. Gross income for the quarter, the GST inside it, the credits you are claiming on business purchases, and the net figure.

The work is in having records that support the credits: platform statements for the income, receipts for the purchases, and a defensible business-use percentage on anything you also use privately. Quarterly BAS lodgement with reconciled accounts is a fixed $150 including GST, quoted before any work starts.