Ease of starting work

How the score works Everyone starts at 100. Every extra thing demanded is a deduction — the twelve requirements, the waiting time, and the access route (base points: fleet −20, mixed −8, direct 0). Six factors carry the score, each with its own slider above — all default to ×1, and the list re-ranks live as you move them. A passport is baseline and costs nothing. Each requirement is shown even when it isn't needed — not needed in green, required in red.

Then two things add points back. Money left over each month after tax, a studio rent, food, health and accident insurance, and a prepaid phone with enough data to run the apps all day, and a 49cc scooter — insurance, plate tax, fuel at roughly 1,500 km a month, tyres and servicing — up to +30 for a good surplus, down to −20 where the work doesn't cover the costs. Platform count — up to +12 for a market with several apps competing, −6 where there's nothing.

On insurance The tax percentage covers payroll contributions only. The health and accident line is what you pay on top of that. In most of the EU it's small, because health cover sits inside the payroll deduction. In Switzerland, the Netherlands and Liechtenstein it is a separate private premium that never touches payroll, and it is large. Tax is not counted twice: it's inside the net figure, not in the friction score.

Schengen badge Schengen no border check on arrival · Not Schengen separate border, and days spent there don't count against a Schengen 90/180 allowance · Open border, not a member no formal accession but no controls in practice. Schengen membership does not affect the ease score — it's a separate axis.

The money row Gross is a full-time courier month at roughly 40 hours a week. The deduction is income tax and social contributions combined. Net is what reaches you. These are rough estimates, not verified payroll figures — use them for ordering, not for budgeting. They also say nothing about rent, which swings harder than the pay does.

Platform bar How many delivery apps operate in that market, and which ones. A full bar is six. More platforms means more fleets competing for you, better commission terms, and somewhere to go when one deactivates you. Platform lists are general knowledge, not verified — apps enter and leave markets constantly.

Freedom to choose your hours What the platform demands back from you. Four obligations decide it: whether you book shifts or slots in advance, whether declining an order is penalised, whether a performance score gates the good slots, and whether multi-apping is tolerated. Each app is scored 0–10 — a badge on every chip — and a country scores the average of the apps operating there. Bolt Food and Uber Eats sit at 9 (log on when you like), Wolt 6, Glovo 5 (slots plus an excellence score), Foodora and foodpanda 4, and the Just Eat family 3, since riders there are often on a rota or employed outright. Employment is a fine thing on other axes; this axis measures only who decides when you work. Platform obligations are general knowledge and vary by city.

The two gates Getting paid for a delivery means passing two separate gates, and both have to be cheap before a market is worth anything. Gate 1 — the state What must be in place before a platform is even allowed to take you on: the tax or personal number, a registered address, insurance proof, and the waiting time attached to all of it. Freedom of movement gets you through the border, not through this gate. Gate 2 — the platform Whether you can reach the platform yourself or must pass through a fleet, and on what terms you work once you are in. Three things decide it: the access route, the engagement model, and how much the apps let you choose your own hours. Engagement model Who you actually are at the bottom of the chain. Partner means self-employed: log in when you like, get paid per delivery, earn more by doing more. Employed means shift blocks booked in advance and an hourly floor paid whether orders come or not — safer, and a hard ceiling on what a fast worker can make. Romania was verified as employed on 03.09.2026: fleets there now sell 2, 4 or 8-hour blocks at roughly 12 lei an hour, and per-delivery earning is no longer on offer. Everything else on this axis is general knowledge and varies by fleet and by city. Your passport Everything below is computed from the document selected at the top of the page. Your own country loses the registration gate completely — the tax number already exists, there is no address to prove to yourself and nothing to wait for. Any EU, EEA or Swiss document is treated alike everywhere else in the zone, which is close enough to true: the agreements put them in the same bracket, and the counter asks the same questions. A document from outside that zone opens only your own country; the rest are marked closed rather than scored, because a delivery job will not carry a work-permit application anywhere on this list. Cost of being legal What a year of holding an invoiceable legal status costs before a single delivery: the registration itself, plus any minimum social-security and health contribution owed whatever you earn. Romania is the benchmark and the only figure verified in person — a PFA owes the health contribution on a minimum base of six minimum wages, so roughly €477 falls due on almost no income. This one does not move with the passport: the floor attaches to residence and activity, not to nationality, so a national and a free-moving foreigner registering the same form owe the same. Every other figure is an estimate. Vehicle you can rent Whether you can get a machine without buying one, scored 0–10 and separate from what a machine costs. It folds in courier e-bike subscriptions, 45 km/h moped rental on an A1 or AM entitlement, and whether the fleets supply one themselves. Where the file's own cost data says there is no rental market, this drops to 1 automatically rather than being asserted twice. How solid is any of this Every card carries a confidence badge, and the coloured dot beside each row in the ranking is the same thing at a glance. Green means verified in person. Amber means checked against sources when the file was built. Red means general knowledge with no source behind the individual numbers — ordered sensibly, but not to be quoted. Most of the list is red, and that is the honest state of it. Setup friction The two gates averaged into a single 0–100 figure, where higher is worse. It is not folded into the overall score — documents, waiting, access and freedom already carry their own weight there, and stacking a composite on top would count the bureaucracy three times. It is a second lens with its own sort order. Markets closed to your document score a flat 100: a closed door is not friction you can push through. The money figures do not move with the passport — rent, food and courier pay are what they are in each place, whoever is living there.