Ask most rideshare drivers what a mile costs them and they'll tell you the price of gas. That's true, but it's a small piece of the real number. A mile driven for rideshare wears your tires, ages your brakes, and puts your car a little closer to needing its next major repair, all before you factor in that every mile is also depreciation the car is losing in resale value whether or not you ever notice it happening.
What actually goes into a mile
Fuel is the most visible cost and the one every driver already tracks in some form.
Maintenance covers the obvious stuff (oil changes, tires, brakes) but scales with mileage in a way that's easy to underestimate. A driver putting 40,000 rideshare miles a year on a car is going to hit tire replacement, brake service, and routine maintenance intervals far more often than the mileage-per-year the manufacturer's maintenance schedule was really designed around.
Depreciation is the quiet one. A car loses value as it accumulates miles, independent of whether anything breaks. High-mileage rideshare use accelerates that loss compared to a car driven normally, and it's a real cost even though nothing about it shows up as a receipt.
Insurance often costs more once you're covered for rideshare use, on top of whatever your baseline personal policy costs (more on that gap in DriveLens's guide to rideshare insurance).
Why the standard mileage rate exists
This is exactly the reasoning behind the IRS's standard mileage rate for tax deductions: rather than tracking every one of these costs individually, it bundles a reasonable estimate of all of them into a single per-mile figure. That's a useful shortcut for taxes, covered in DriveLens's mileage rate guide, but it's also a useful way to think about a ride's real cost even outside of tax season.
Why this matters for evaluating a ride
A ride that pays $0.90 per mile might look reasonable against a gas cost of $0.15 per mile. But once you account for the fuller cost, wear, depreciation, and everything else, a more realistic all-in cost per mile is often closer to $0.30 to $0.50 depending on your vehicle, which changes what "reasonable" actually means. This is the entire reason effective $/mi scoring matters more than the raw payout: it's comparing a ride's worth against the real cost of driving it, not just the price of the gas it burns. See how DriveLens scores a ride offer for how that comparison actually works.
The takeaway
You don't need to calculate your exact per-mile cost down to the cent to benefit from thinking this way. The useful shift is simply remembering that gas is the visible cost, not the whole cost, and that a ride's true profitability depends on the fuller number, not the one that's easiest to notice at the pump.