Keep more of the fare. Drive fewer miles to earn it.
247 is a local Bradford office on Spencer Road. Two ways to pay us — a flat 17%, or £125 a week and keep every fare. A published tariff, no card fee, and a circuit dense enough that your next job is usually round the corner.
No sign-up bonus, no promises about what you'll earn. Just the terms you work under, written down so you can hold us to them.
Two ways to pay us — you pick17% of your fares, or a £125 weekly subscription and nothing comes off any job. Both rates are the same for every driver and they don't move without notice. Busy drivers are usually better off on the subscription; part-timers on the percentage. The crossover is around £735 of fares a week — below that the 17% costs you less, above it the £125 does.
A tariff you can memorise£3.50 for the first mile, then £1.10 a mile plus 15p a minute. Published, the same every day, and you can work out a job's value before you accept it.
Card and cash cost the sameWe charge no card fee. The passenger pays the meter whichever way they pay, so nobody argues with you at the end of the journey about a surcharge.
A tight local patchBD1, BD5, BD6, BD7, BD8, BD13, BD14, BD15 and Shipley. Short hops, dense dispatch, and pickups you can reach in a minute or two rather than a couple of miles.
Daytime contract workSchool runs, hospital and social care journeys, and business accounts. Booked ahead, in daylight, at a known rate, on the same roads every day. We bid for these contracts so there is steady daytime work alongside the nights.
Our own driver appYou'll be set up on it on day one. Jobs, navigation and your account in one place — the technology isn't the thing you give up by working locally.
A controller who knows your nameA runner, a spillage, an aggressive fare, a breakdown at 2am. Someone in the office picks up, knows where you are, and sorts it. If there's a complaint about you, it's a conversation, not an automated decision.
Cash settled the same dayCash jobs are yours at the end of the shift, not held and released on someone else's schedule.
Regulars, not strangersThe same faces every week. They tip, they wait, and they don't leave a one-star because it rained.
Five minutes from your bedWorking a patch you live on means finishing near home. Over a year that's several hundred unpaid miles and a couple of hundred hours of your life.
What the two options actually cost
Your fares in a week
On 17%
On £125 a week
Better option
£500
£85.00
£125 (25.0%)
17%
£700
£119.00
£125 (17.9%)
17%
£735
£124.95
£125 (17.0%)
line ball
£1,000
£170.00
£125 (12.5%)
£125
£1,500
£255.00
£125 (8.3%)
£125
The subscription is a flat fee, so as a share of your takings it falls the harder you work — which is the whole point of it. Ask the office to put you on whichever suits the hours you actually do, and change it if your hours change.
We're not the biggest office in Bradford and we don't claim to be the cheapest. What we can put in writing is the tariff, the two rates and the patch — and those are the three things that decide what you take home.
The number that decides your week
Stop counting pounds. Start counting pounds per mile.
Most drivers judge a job by the fare. The fare is revenue; the mile is cost. A job is only good if the gap between them is good — and that gap is where local work and app work part company.
Your running cost
30p
per mile — fuel, tyres, servicing, wear and depreciation. Deliberately conservative: HMRC's own mileage figures work out at about 34p.
Modelled — see how we worked this out
Taxi app
£0.91
reaches you per mile driven, if £100 of pay takes you 110 miles.
Mileage is 247's own estimate, not measured data — see method
247 — on 17%
£1.28
reaches you per mile driven. On the £125 subscription it's £1.54.
Mileage is 247's own estimate, not measured data — see method
Where £100 of a passenger's money ends up
Same £100 paid by passengers, three ways of working. The mileage behind each bar is our own estimate — 82 miles on app work, 65 on our circuit — and the running cost is 30p a mile.
Taxi app, 25% fee — 82 miles Estimate£50.25 left
247 on 17% — 65 miles Estimate£63.50 left
247 on the £125 subscription — 65 miles Estimate£80.50 left
Yours — app workYours — 247CommissionEaten by the car
The subscription bar shows no commission because the £125 is charged weekly rather than per fare — across a £1,000 week it works out at 12.5p in every pound, and at £500 it's 25p. That's why the calculator below asks for your whole week rather than a single £100.
How we worked this out →
The job that looks worse and isn't
Why our £3.50 beats a £4.20.
Two jobs, one on an app at £4.20 and one on our circuit at £3.50. Every instinct says take the £4.20. Here's the whole transaction rather than the headline.
Taxi app job
£4.20
Two miles to the pickup, one mile on the clock. Three miles total.
Passenger pays£4.20
Service fee, at 25%−£1.05
You are paid£3.15
Running cost — 3 mi at 30p−£0.90
In your pocket£2.25
Time used~12 min
247 job
£3.50
Our published first-mile tariff. Pickup round the corner. One mile total.
Passenger pays£3.50
Our commission, at 17%−£0.60
You are paid£2.90
Running cost — 1 mi at 30p−£0.30
In your pocket£2.60
Time used~5 min
Worked example on our 17% option — the less favourable of our two rates. On the £125 weekly subscription nothing comes off this job at all and you keep £3.20. The 25% app fee is the headline rate the largest app publishes; pickup distances and journey times are our own estimates of typical jobs, not measured data. Full method.
£2.60 against £2.25 — and that's on our worse rate. On the subscription it's £3.20, half again as much, for a third of the driving.
The £4.20 was never £4.20. It was £3.15 with a two-mile bill attached. That is the whole argument for working a tight local patch: the fare is what you see, and the miles are what you pay.
Do it with your own numbers
Don't take our word for any of it.
Put in what you actually earned last week and what your odometer actually did. Every box is yours to change — including our assumptions.
On a taxi app
Paid to you—
Running cost—
Left after the car
—
Real hourly rate—
Kept per £1 of fare—
At 247
Paid to you—
Running cost and subscription—
Left after the car
—
Real hourly rate—
Kept per £1 of fare—
—
The boxes are pre-filled with our own estimates of a 50-hour week, not measured data — they are a starting point, not a promise, and we'd rather you overwrote them. Running cost covers fuel, tyres, servicing, mechanical wear and depreciation; it excludes insurance, plate, badge, MOT and road tax, which are fixed whichever way you work but get spread over far more miles on app work. Full method.
What comes off the top
One number a week, and you can predict it.
This is the part of the arrangement we think is worth most, and it isn't the size of the deduction so much as the fact that you know it in advance.
17%Our percentage rate — flat, published, unchanging. Not a range, not variable by job, not adjusted after the fact. You can work out what a shift is worth before you turn the key.
£125Or a weekly subscription, and nothing comes off any fare. Because it's flat, the share it represents falls as your takings rise — a busy week costs you no more than a quiet one. Above about £735 of weekly fares it's the cheaper of the two.
3–49%By contrast, the largest app moved to a variable service fee for drivers outside London under terms reported to take effect on 5 January 2026, with a range running from 3% to 49%. We have not seen the terms ourselves and there is no published data on how often drivers land at each end of that range — so treat the top of it as a possibility, not a typical week.As reported by TaxiPoint, December 2025. The ADCU has campaigned for a 15% cap.
71%Independent analysis of 1.5 million trips by 258 UK Uber drivers between 2016 and 2024 found the median driver kept 71% of what the passenger paid, and that 46% of drivers kept 75% or more.Binns et al., University of Oxford and Worker Info Exchange, 2025
A percentage you can't predict is a business you can't plan. That's the difference we'd point at — not who is greedier, but which arrangement you can do arithmetic on.
Our 17% is directly comparable with an app's service fee. The £125 subscription isn't — as a share of takings it moves with your week, so quoting it as a single percentage would flatter us. That's why the table further up shows it at several levels of takings rather than as one number.
What the miles cost your car
The same money, on a car that lasts longer.
Miles aren't neutral. Every one spends your car's remaining life, and a taxi's biggest asset depreciates by the mile rather than by the year.
Over a 50-week year
990 mi/week
620 mi/week
Miles driven
49,500
31,000
Fuel burnt
£7,593
£4,755
Value driven out of the car
£3,920
£2,455
Tyres, servicing, mechanical wear
£3,430
£2,148
Total spent on running
£14,943
£9,358
Car replaced every
2.4 years
3.9 years
Modelled at 30p a mile on a car bought at £12,000 and worth £2,500 after a further 120,000 miles. The two weekly mileages are 247's own estimates of app work against a local circuit, not measured data. Change the car and the numbers change; the ratio holds. Full method.
£5,585 a year is the gap in running costs between those two mileages — spent on the car, for the same money in your hand.
Fewer miles is one fewer car per decade
Bradford will licence a compliant private hire vehicle until it reaches 15 years old, measured from the date it was first manufactured. That sounds generous until you notice that age isn't what retires a taxi — mileage is. At 49,500 miles a year you put 120,000 miles on a car in two and a half years. At 31,000 you get nearly four. Every purchase avoided is a deposit, a finance agreement and a fortnight of hassle you keep.
Bradford licensing age limit checked against Bradford Council, August 2026.
Hours in the seat
The cost you can't put through the books.
To be clear about what this section is and isn't: the research below is about professional driving in general. None of it is about any particular operator or app, and none of it was carried out on our drivers or anyone else's. We've included it because the risk factors are dose-related — they scale with hours and miles — and that is the one thing a driver has some control over.
54%of taxi drivers report lower back pain, pooled across 11 studies and 5,277 drivers. Neck 38%, shoulder 35%.BMC Musculoskeletal Disorders, 2024
2.5×the odds of low back pain on days longer than 10 hours — the strongest single risk factor across 19 studies of professional drivers, ahead of posture, seating and age.Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery and Research, 2024
20%of collisions have fatigue as a contributory factor, rising to a quarter of fatal and serious ones. The danger windows are midnight to 6am and 2pm to 4pm.RoSPA, 2024
50%more injury collisions among drivers doing over 80% of their annual mileage for work, compared with drivers matched for age, sex and total mileage. That comparison controls for miles, so it isn't only that you're out more.RoSPA / Road Safety Observatory
+57%slower reactions while setting a route on a touchscreen — more than at the drink-drive limit (+12.4%), cannabis (+21%) or texting (+34.7%). Doing it by voice was +36%. Drivers spent 10 to 21 seconds with their eyes off the road.TRL PPR948 for IAM RoadSmart, 2020
Which is the real argument for knowing your patch
On familiar ground the route comes from memory rather than a screen. You know the one-ways, the school run, the bus lane that catches everyone, the estate where the postcode drops you at the wrong end. That isn't nostalgia — on the evidence above, interacting with navigation is among the most demanding things you do behind the wheel, and a driver who rarely needs it is doing a measurably easier job.
It's also the cheapest insurance there is. A bus lane or a box junction you drifted into costs £70 — twenty of those £3.50 jobs. And an at-fault claim doesn't cost you a repair bill; it costs your excess, your no-claims, a renewal that can jump by four figures, and every day the car isn't earning.
None of this is an argument against driving for a living — it's an argument about dose. Earning the same money over 620 miles instead of 990 is the same money earned with a third less time in the seat.
The fair say
What the apps do better.
We'd rather you heard this from us than decided we'd left it out.
Volume, and no phone to answer
A national app has marketing budget we will never have. On a good surge night the money can look excellent, and you never have to build up regulars to stay busy.
Holiday pay and a pension
Uber drivers in the UK receive holiday pay and pension contributions following the 2021 Supreme Court ruling on worker status. Working self-employed on a local circuit, you don't — that's a real difference and you should weigh it.
We're not asking you to believe app work is worthless. We're asking you to measure it per mile and per hour rather than per fare, with your own figures — and then decide.
How we worked this out
Our figures, and how much weight to put on them.
Comparisons are only worth reading if you can check them. Here is every number on this page that came from us rather than from a published source.
Running cost — 30p a mile
Fuel 15.3p (40 mpg at £1.35 a litre), tyres 1.6p (£320 a set per 20,000 miles), servicing 1.8p (£180 per 10,000 miles), brakes, clutch and suspension wear 3.5p (£1,200 a year), depreciation 7.9p (a £12,000 car worth £2,500 after a further 120,000 miles). That comes to 30.2p, rounded to 30p.
Two things to note. It excludes insurance, plate, badge, MOT and road tax — add those and the all-in figure is closer to 41p a mile. And it is deliberately conservative: HMRC's approved mileage rates of 55p for the first 10,000 miles and 25p thereafter blend to about 34p at 34,000 miles a year. If your car is thirstier or fuel has moved, put your own figure in the calculator.
Mileage — 110 miles per £100, and 990 against 620 a week
These are our estimates, not measured data. They come from running a Bradford circuit and from what drivers tell us about app work; we have not audited either figure and we are not presenting them as a survey. They're on the page because the shape of the argument doesn't depend on the exact numbers — a denser patch means fewer miles per pound, and you can test that with your own odometer in the calculator. If your experience is different, your figures beat ours.
Our two rates
These are our actual published terms, not estimates: 17% of your fares, or a £125 weekly subscription with nothing deducted from individual jobs. You choose, and you can switch if your hours change. Ring the office to confirm before you rely on either — rates can be reviewed, and we'd rather you heard it from a person.
The subscription is a flat fee, so its share of your takings depends entirely on how much you take: 25% of a £500 week, 12.5% of a £1,000 week, 8.3% of a £1,500 week. Quoting it as a single percentage would be misleading, so anywhere on this page it appears as a cash figure or across a range of takings.
The service fee we used for app work
The worked example uses 25%, the headline rate the largest app publishes. We have also noted the reported move to a variable 3%–49% fee for drivers outside London; that comes from trade press reporting rather than from the terms themselves, and we have no data on how often drivers experience each end of the range. The calculator lets you enter whatever your own statements show.
What we've deliberately not claimed
We haven't said we're the biggest or cheapest office in Bradford, because we can't evidence either. We haven't put a figure on what you'll earn with us, because that depends on your hours and we won't pretend otherwise. We've left out three arguments we couldn't stand behind: that driving in unfamiliar areas is inherently more dangerous (the research points the other way — route familiarity brings its own risks, which is why the section above is about navigation demand instead); that whole-body vibration harms taxi drivers (the HSE scopes that to off-road machinery); and a widely-quoted claim that every 20,000 miles cuts a car's value by 20%, which we could only trace to a car-buying website.
Bring us last week's numbers.
Your fares, your mileage, your hours. We'll do this arithmetic with your figures in front of you and tell you honestly what we think — including if you're better off where you are. If you're not, you can be on the circuit this week.
Reported move to a variable 3%–49% service fee for drivers outside London, terms effective 5 January 2026 — TaxiPoint / ADCU. Trade press reporting; we have not seen the terms.
Median driver retained 71% of the fare and 46% retained 75% or more — Binns et al., "Not Even Nice Work If You Can Get It", University of Oxford and Worker Info Exchange, 2025
Approved mileage rates of 55p a mile for the first 10,000 miles and 25p thereafter from 6 April 2026 — GOV.UK
Around 50% more injury collisions for high work-mileage drivers, matched for age, sex and total mileage — RoSPA / Road Safety Observatory
Private hire vehicle 15-year age limit, measured from date of first manufacture — Bradford Council, checked August 2026.
Where a figure on this page is ours rather than a published source, it says so beside the figure and is explained in how we worked this out. Nothing here is a promise of earnings — what you make depends on the hours you work.