How contracts & payouts work
Every contract in Drive Your Way is priced by a consistent set of rules. Once you know them, you can look at any job on the board and see not just what it pays, but why — and whether it is actually worth your time after costs.
The base rate: distance
The foundation of every payout is distance: contracts pay roughly $170 per kilometre of the real route. A 12 km job starts from a base of about $2,040 before anything else is applied. Distance is measured along the actual road route, not as the crow flies — which is why two jobs to equally "far" districts can price differently.
Cargo multipliers
The cargo type then scales the base. Delicate and time-sensitive loads pay more because they are harder to deliver intact:
| Cargo | Typical multiplier | The catch |
|---|---|---|
| Furniture, bulky goods | ×0.9 | Cheap, but eats cargo volume |
| General freight | ×1.0 | The baseline — low risk, low premium |
| Food | ×1.1 | Modest premium |
| Perishables | ×1.15 | Damage-sensitive on rough routes |
| Electronics | ×1.25 | Expensive to damage |
| Fragile goods | ×1.3 | The best regular premium — and the riskiest |
| Special event cargo | up to ×2.0 | Rare, always carried solo |
Which vehicle can carry which cargo matters here — the premium categories need bigger or specialist vehicles. See the cargo guide.
Multi-stop premiums
Simple point-to-point hauls are the baseline. Contracts with more logistics to them pay a premium on top: split deliveries and multi-pickup runs add around 20–30%, and round-trip style jobs — out and back with cargo both ways — can add up to 50%. The premium compensates for the extra planning and the longer exposure of the cargo to the road.
Combine bonuses
Independent of any single contract, you can stack several compatible jobs into one run using the route planner. A combined run pays a bonus of +10% for every additional contract in the group — two jobs together earn 10% extra, three earn 20% extra, and so on. The limits are physical: everything must fit your vehicle at once, and the cargo categories must tolerate each other (fragile loads will not ride with heavy freight, liquids ride alone). Combining is the single biggest lever on your hourly earnings once you know the city — the drag-and-drop planner lets you order the stops and even pick a route style per leg.
Integrity tiers: what you actually collect
The number agreed in the contract is the maximum. What you collect depends on the condition of the cargo at handover:
| Cargo integrity at delivery | Payout |
|---|---|
| 90% or better | 100% of the contract |
| 75–89% | 80% |
| 50–74% | 50% |
| Below 50% | Delivery fails — $0 |
Integrity is lost gradually on risky routes and sharply in accidents (−5% per accident). How to protect it is covered in the integrity & accidents guide.
A worked example
A 12 km electronics delivery:
- Base: 12 km × $170 ≈ $2,040
- Electronics multiplier ×1.25 → contract price ≈ $2,550
- Delivered at 93% integrity → full $2,550
- Delivered at 82% integrity → $2,040 — the fast route just cost you $510
- Delivered at 47% integrity → $0 — and the fuel and wear are still on your bill
Think in net, not gross
The payout is only half the ledger. Against it sit fuel (per-vehicle consumption × $1.50/L), vehicle wear (repairs get expensive in the big classes), and — if a driver ran the job for you — their cut, which for one-off contract drivers is substantial. A heavy truck earning $6,000 gross on a long haul can easily net less than a van earning $3,500 across town. The running costs guide and driver guide give you the numbers for the cost side.
Where contracts come from
The board holds a pool of about 10 contracts at a time, drawn for real places on the map. You can refresh the pool, but refreshes are limited to a handful per half hour — so treat a refresh as a decision, not a nervous tic. As your fleet grows, the skill shifts from picking the one best job to keeping every vehicle on a good one.