"What time do delivery drivers start?" has two completely different answers, and most guides only give you one of them.
If you deliver food through an app, nobody tells you when to start. You pick, and the question becomes which hours are worth showing up for. If you deliver parcels or supermarket shops, your start time is set for you, it is usually earlier than people expect, and choosing your hours is not part of the job.
Food delivery: the peaks are meal times
Food delivery demand tracks when people eat. That gives you two reliable windows on a weekday:
- Lunch, roughly 11:30am to 2pm. Shorter, and it thins out fast once offices have eaten.
- 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 off on most days in most towns. You can work it, but you are competing for a smaller pool of orders, which matters more than the raw order count.
Late evening is a genuine third window in city centres with late licences, particularly Friday and Saturday, and essentially does not exist in smaller towns where kitchens close at nine.
The busiest days
Friday, Saturday and Sunday, in roughly that order, with Friday evening the single busiest block of most weeks. Sunday behaves differently from the other two: the peak 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 platforms boost pay during a peak, they are competing for supply, and the boost is what makes the hour worth working. But if enough riders log on for the same window, the orders get spread thinner and the waiting time between them goes up. A quieter hour with few riders online can pay better per hour than a peak with a queue of riders in the same zone.
You cannot read that from a schedule. It shifts by area and by week, and the only 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 example: heavy rain reliably lifts order volume and reduces the number of riders willing to go out, which is a better combination for earnings than a dry Friday.
Parcel, supermarket and Flex work: the start time is the job
Once you leave food delivery, "best time of day" stops being a choice.
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 rather than until a set finish time. If you want a late start, this is the wrong job.
Supermarket home delivery runs on shift rotas covering roughly 7am to 10pm, and you bid for or are assigned shifts like any other employed role. The trade is predictability: 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 two, three or four hours in advance and the pay for the block is shown before you accept it, currently £14 to £18 an hour. Time of day matters less here than how quickly you can claim the blocks you want, because the good ones go early.
If you are weighing these against each other rather than picking hours within one of them, our comparison of the best delivery driver jobs in the UK covers the conditions and requirements side by side.
What the hours are actually worth
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 |
Those figures are revenue, not wages. Fuel or charging, insurance, vehicle wear and a tax reserve all come out of them. They are indicative, drawn from aggregator and courier community reporting rather than published platform rates, so treat them as a range to sanity check your own figures against, not a promise. And on self-employed work there is no minimum wage underneath a quiet shift: if you log on for four hours and the orders do not come, you have earned nothing.
That last one is why timing matters at all. Employed work sets your hours and puts a floor under them. Gig work does neither, so the hours you pick are doing that job instead.
Remember the 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, which is worth knowing 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 regardless of what an app allows.
Platform minimum ages are separate from the legal ones, and are 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. Check the platform's own rider page rather than a third-party guide, because these change.
"Is now a good time to go full time?"
If you are considering moving from a few evenings to full-time courier work, the number that matters is not what you make on a Friday night. It is what you make on a Tuesday afternoon.
A peak-only rider working Thursday to Sunday evenings is choosing the best block of the week and can look at that figure and conclude the job pays well. Full-time means filling Monday lunchtime and Tuesday afternoon too, and those hours pay what they pay. Before committing, work at least two or three of the weeks you would actually be working, quiet days included, and use that number rather than the peak one.
Then there is cost. Full-time hours mean full-time mileage, more wear, and a bigger insurance bill, and hire and reward cover for a car typically runs £800 to £1,500 a year. Those barely move whether you work 15 hours or 45, so they land much harder on a part-time week.
The short version
On food delivery you are choosing your hours, so choose Thursday to Sunday and work lunch and dinner. Go out when the weather is bad, because orders climb at exactly the moment half the riders decide to stay in. Then stop trusting the general schedule, this one included, and track what you actually earned per hour for a few weeks. The best window in your zone depends on how many other riders are sitting in it, and no guide can tell you that.
On parcel, supermarket and Flex work you are not choosing anything. The depot start is early, the route runs until it is finished, and what you get in exchange is a floor under your pay and a shift that ends.
Neither one is better. Food delivery gives you control over your week; parcel and supermarket work gives you certainty about it. Most drivers already know which of those they want before they know a thing about peak times.
Working out where your hours are worth most? See who is hiring near you and apply once instead of platform by platform.