How Much Does it Cost to Hire a Full Time Personal Driver?

If you want to hire a full time personal driver 40 hours per week in a major US metro area, it will cost between $35,000 and $120,000 per year.  The reason for the huge range is because not all drivers are the same, and not all clients have the same requirements.  Hiring a personal driver on a full time basis is nuanced, and we will try to break apart how you can arrive at your actual predicted cost.  

Experience Matters

While it seems obvious, a rookie chauffeur is probably going to be a lot cheaper than a 20 year veteran of the business.  On the lowest end, you could hire anyone off the street to drive you around for about $15/hr.  This is minimum wage most places, and you will have to really lower the bar on your expectations.  Hiring someone with no track record, no references, and little professional experience of any kind is going to mean more work for you.

As an employer, you will need to train your rookie driver from scratch, and being a professional driver is a skilled craft.  Knowing how to drive comfortably, navigate in unfamiliar places, and communicate professionally and respectfully are learned talents.  Since your time is money, the lower direct cost of your rookie driver may be offset by the lack of efficiency of having a novice in your employ.  

On the other side of the wheel, a veteran chauffeur with security credentials and a protection background can demand a much higher rate (around $55/hr+).  These drivers will require no training, a minimal introduction period, and are skilled and qualified to maintain you and your family’s safety and privacy.  For most individuals and families, this level of protection is probably unnecessary, but it is always an option.

Driver Responsibilities Can be Diverse

Not all clients have the same needs, and determining what it is you need will help you determine how much your personal driver will cost.  The idea that your driver will just be driving you and your car around is generally false.  Most clients are really looking for driver who can double as their personal assistant.  From grocery shopping to making dinner reservations, a great personal driver can improve your life in so many ways.  

In order to maximize your time, you will require a competent professional to take care of the minutiae of your everyday life.  This level of competence has nothing to do with driving skill, so even if you want a rookie driver to save on cost, hiring competence isn’t cheap.  Finding someone with experience in other service industries can be a huge boon to you.  While we can’t put a dollar amount on this type of service experience, you will not find this level of skill for minimum wage.  

You also might think that a black car driver with 20+ years of experience would be a great fit, but you need to keep in mind that they were not generally required to be their clients’ personal assistant.  They may be navigational geniuses, have an impeccable driving record, and have the roadside demeanor of Morgan Freeman (see Driving Miss Daisy), but they may not have some of the other problem solving skills and hustle mindset of a top notch personal assistant.  For many clients, diversity of professional experience is a must, but does not come cheap.  For a true service professional with driving experience, expect to pay around $40-45/hr.

Defining what a Full Time Personal Driver Means

Above, we used a baseline of about 40hours per week, 52 weeks a year to arrive at the cost of your personal driver.  Using this definition, you are hiring an employee to work for You, Inc.  As an employer you are now responsible for a whole lot of new things.  Here is New York State’s primer on hiring a household employee.  To onboard your new employee, you are responsible for checking work eligibility, reporting your new employee to the government, and handling all the associated paperwork.  You can have your accountant do all this (in our experience, this is always the case), but accountants don’t work for free.  We’re guessing human resource compliance isn’t your specialty, so be prepared to pay someone to handle all the reporting.  There’s also payroll tax, workers compensation, and unemployment insurance to pay.  Just more money on top of the salary you’re already shelling out.

Also, if you are looking to add a personal driver as your employee, you need to consider the time cost of recruiting and hiring a driver.  You need to post ads, conduct multiple interviews, and get them up to speed with the flow of your life.  As any employer knows, vetting and hiring new people is no Sunday drive, and will take a big time investment on your part to find the perfect candidate.

Flexibility:  A Luxury Worth the Price

Now that you’ve hired your full time personal driver, you will set up a schedule.  While your life may go from 7AM - 11PM, 7 days a week, asking someone to put in 100+ hours a week.  You’ll need to work out a routine, which means you actually wont have a driver all the time, maybe not even most of the time.  

Additionally, your driver will need days off for vacation, taking sick kids to the doctor, etc.  In our experience, we’ve seen some families have multiple drivers to cover their whole busy lives and to fill in for absence, but this can get very expensive.  If you really want a driver waiting right outside wherever you are, at any time of the day or night, you will need to hire two drivers.

Hire a Driver the Smart Way

While we haven’t covered all the details of how to figure out how much a full time personal driver will cost for you, we have touched on the most important factors.  If you are looking for some alternative ways to get all the benefits at a fraction of the cost,  services like our Full Time Personal Driver program can give you access to a driver whenever you need them, without any time commitments.  If you decide to spend the summer in Copenhagen, you don’t need to worry about paying someone while you’re away.  And since you pay your driver through iDriveYourCar, you also don’t need to deal with any additional taxes or employee filings.

One of the greatest benefits of working with iDriveYourCar is that you can interview your driver, interview a back up, and any time you book, your selected driver will be dispatched.  Or if you don’t have time for all that, we’ll just send you a professional driver.   All drivers in the iDriveYourCar network are screened and rated by clients like you, so you don’t need to go through the time consuming process of vetting your applicants.  Whether you need a driver 10 hours a week or 100, you’ll always be covered.