When delivery drivers start depends on what they deliver. On a food app nobody sets your start time: you pick it, so what you need to know is which hours are worth showing up for. On parcels or supermarket shops the start time is set for you, it is usually earlier than people expect, and you do not choose your hours.
When food delivery is busiest
Demand follows mealtimes. On a weekday that gives you two reliable windows: lunch, roughly 11:30am to 2pm, which is shorter and thins out fast once offices have eaten, and dinner, roughly 5pm to 9pm, the longer and busier of the two and the one most riders build their week around.
Between about 2pm and 5pm order volume drops on most days in most towns. You can work those hours, but you are competing for a smaller pool of orders, and the competition affects your earnings more than the raw order count does.
Late evening is a third window in city centres with late licences, particularly on Fridays and Saturdays. In smaller towns where kitchens close at nine it essentially does not exist.
The busiest days
Friday, Saturday and Sunday are the busiest, in roughly that order, and Friday evening is the single busiest block of most weeks. Sunday behaves differently from the other two, with a peak that arrives earlier and finishes earlier.
Monday to Wednesday are the quietest, which is why riders who want a fixed weekly pattern tend to work Thursday to Sunday rather than a conventional Monday to Friday.
The busiest hour is not automatically the best-paid hour
Busy periods attract more riders. When a platform boosts pay during a peak it is competing for supply, and the boost is what makes the hour worth working. If enough riders log on for the same window, though, the orders are spread thinner and the wait between them grows. A quieter hour with few riders online can pay better per hour than a peak with a queue of riders in the same zone.
That shifts by area and by week, so a schedule cannot show it. The reliable way to find your own pattern is to track what you actually earned per hour worked over a few weeks, rather than what the app suggested. Weather is the clearest case: heavy rain lifts order volume and cuts the number of riders willing to go out, a better combination for earnings than a dry Friday.
Start times for parcel, supermarket and Flex work
Multi-drop parcel work starts at a depot, and the sort is early. Depot start times are commonly somewhere between 6am and 8am depending on the operator and the depot, and the route runs until it is done, with no set finish time, so it is the wrong job if you want a late start.
Supermarket home delivery runs on shift rotas covering roughly 7am to 10pm, and you bid for shifts or are assigned them as in any other employed role. You give up choice and get predictability in return: these are employed positions, so the National Living Wage applies, currently £12.71 an hour for workers aged 21 and over.
Amazon Flex sits between the two. You reserve blocks of up to five hours in advance, the pay for each block is shown before you accept it, and Amazon says most drivers earn up to £14 to £18 an hour. The good blocks go early, so how quickly you claim them matters more than the time of day.
If you are still choosing between these jobs, our comparison of the best delivery driver jobs in the UK sets out the conditions and requirements side by side.
Revenue per hour on each platform
Indicative revenue per active hour on the main food platforms, from our food delivery platform comparison:
| Platform | Indicative revenue per active hour |
|---|---|
| Uber Eats | £9 to £15 |
| Deliveroo | £8 to £14 |
| Just Eat | £8 to £13 |
| Stuart | £10 to £16 |
| Amazon Flex | £14 to £18 |
Log on for four hours when the orders do not come and you have earned nothing. Employed work sets your hours and puts a floor under them; gig work does neither, so picking your hours well is the only protection you have against a quiet shift.
Include mileage relief when you do the maths. For tax year 2026/27, HMRC's simplified rate is 55p a mile for the first 10,000 business miles in a car or goods vehicle and 25p after that. Motorcycles and scooters stay at 24p, the rate to use if you are on a moped.
When you are not allowed to work
If you are under 18, the default is that you cannot work between 10pm and 6am. A contract can shift that band to 11pm to 7am, and a few sectors including postal deliveries can run later or start earlier, but midnight to 4am is an absolute floor that no exception breaches. That rules out most late-evening food delivery for under-18s, whatever an app allows.
Platform minimum ages are separate from the legal ones, and usually higher. Deliveroo requires riders to be 18 or over with no exceptions. Just Eat publishes 18 or over. Uber Eats asks for 18 on a bicycle and 19 specifically for delivering by car. These change, so check the platform's own rider page rather than a third-party guide.
Moving from evenings to full-time delivery
A rider who works only Thursday to Sunday evenings is picking the best blocks of the week, and on those figures the job can look well paid. Going full time means filling Monday lunchtime and Tuesday afternoon as well, the quiet hours of the week. Before you commit, work at least two or three of the weeks you would actually be working, quiet days included, and base the decision on that figure.
Costs change too. Full-time hours mean full-time mileage and more wear. Hire and reward cover for a car typically runs £800 to £1,500 a year and barely moves whether you work 15 hours or 45, so it lands much harder on a part-time week.
Which hours to work on each kind of delivery
On food delivery, start with Thursday to Sunday, lunch and dinner, and go out when the weather is bad, because orders climb just as half the riders decide to stay in. After a few weeks, trust your own record of what you earned per hour over any general schedule, this one included: how good a window is in your zone depends on how many other riders are sitting in it.
On parcel and supermarket work the hours are mostly chosen for you, with an early depot start and a route that runs until it is finished. On the employed rounds you get a floor under your pay and a shift that ends. Flex is the exception, since you pick the blocks and the fee is fixed before you go, but no minimum wage sits underneath it. So food delivery gives you control over your week, and parcel and supermarket work gives you certainty about it.