Guides
Employ a driver, or take one with the van?
Once a van is going out most days, somebody works out that AED 250 a day is six thousand a month and asks whether it would be cheaper to just hire somebody. It often would be. But the comparison people run in their head is a salary against a day rate, and that is not the comparison — because a driver on your payroll comes with a list of things the day rate quietly already includes.
The frame
The charge you can see, and the cost you cannot
A driver charge arrives as one line on an invoice. The cost of employing somebody arrives as a dozen smaller ones, spread across the year, which is why it is almost always underestimated at the point the decision gets made.
That is not an argument against employing a driver. For a business running a round every day it is usually the right answer, and this guide says so plainly further down. It is an argument against comparing the wrong two numbers, which is what produces the decision people regret eight months later when the first annual leave falls due.
So before any arithmetic: what is actually in each option. On our side it is published — a full day of up to nine hours is AED 250, a half day of up to five is AED 150, an hourly booking is AED 60 with a three-hour minimum, and anything beyond the booked period is AED 40 an hour. A loading helper, if the job needs one, is AED 150 a day. The driver page sets out how a day with one of them runs.
What sits on the other side takes longer to list, and that is the whole point of this page.
The real list
What goes on the payroll besides the salary
We are not going to put figures against these, because they vary with the role, the package and the free zone or mainland setup you operate under. But every one of them is a real line, and the list is what people underestimate.
Getting him here and legal to work. Residence visa and work permit, the medical, Emirates ID, and the administration around all three. If the person is already in the country on somebody else’s sponsorship, that is a transfer rather than a new file, but it is still a process with a cost and a timeline.
The package beyond basic pay. Accommodation or an allowance, transport to and from work if that is part of the offer, and medical insurance, which an employer is required to provide. These are the lines that turn a salary figure into a materially larger monthly cost, and they are the ones most often left out of the mental comparison.
What accrues whether you think about it or not. Annual leave, the flight entitlement that goes with it in most packages, and the end-of-service entitlement that builds from the first year. None of that shows up in month one, and all of it is owed eventually. Payroll also has to run through the Wage Protection System, which is an administrative obligation rather than a cost, but it is one more thing that did not exist when the driver was a line on our invoice.
And the part nobody budgets: recruiting the wrong person once. A driver who does not know the city, cannot reverse a long van into a tight bay, or collects fines faster than he delivers is an expensive mistake to unwind, and it is paid for twice — once in the salary and once in the rounds that went wrong.
The gap
One driver is not cover
This is the point we would make even to a customer who is about to stop booking drivers from us, because it is the one that actually bites.
An employed driver is one person. He takes annual leave. He gets sick. His visa comes up for renewal and the medical takes a morning. He may resign with notice, or leave at the end of a contract. On every one of those days the round still has to run, because customers do not reschedule around your staffing.
Businesses that do this well plan for it from the start rather than discovering it in month seven. The usual answers are a second person who can drive when needed, a relationship with somebody who supplies drivers by the day, or both. The day rate that looked expensive against a salary looks quite different when it is the thing keeping a route alive for a fortnight in August.
That is worth saying plainly because it changes the shape of the decision. The honest comparison is rarely “employ somebody” against “book a driver every day”. It is usually employing somebody and having a way to cover him, against booking a driver as needed — and the second option has no gaps in it by definition.
The trap
The licence question, which catches people after they have hired
A driver is not a driver. He is a driver of particular categories of vehicle, and if you hire for today’s van you can find yourself unable to take tomorrow’s job.
An ordinary UAE light vehicle licence covers our panel vans and the 1-ton pickup. It does not cover the 3-tonne class and above, which includes the 3-ton chiller van as well as the 5-tonne and 10-tonne trucks. The licence guide draws that line properly, and it is worth reading before an offer letter goes out rather than after.
The practical consequence: if your work is panel vans today but a quarter of your jobs would be better in a chiller or a truck, employing a light-licence driver quietly closes those off. You either pay to put him through the heavier category, or you keep booking a driver from us for exactly the jobs you hoped to stop booking for.
The reverse is also worth knowing. A driver who holds the heavy category can take anything in our fleet, which makes him considerably more useful than his licence class suggests, and worth more in the market accordingly. If you are hiring for a growing operation, hire for the fleet you expect rather than the van you have.
The number
The arithmetic, in days a month
Work out what a driver costs you all in — pay, allowances, insurance, and a monthly share of the visa, the leave and the end-of-service accrual — then divide it by our day rate. That is how many days a month you need him before employing is the cheaper option.
| All-in monthly cost of employing | Days a month before employing wins |
|---|---|
| AED 3,000 | 12 days |
| AED 4,000 | 16 days |
| AED 5,000 | 20 days |
| AED 6,000 | 24 days |
| AED 7,000 | 28 days |
Put your own figure in the left column rather than guessing at a row. We are not going to publish a salary, because it is not ours to publish and it varies more than any other number in this comparison.
Two things to read alongside the table. A six-day week is about 26 working days, so anything in the bottom rows means you need the driver essentially every day the business is open before the sums turn. And a half-day booking is AED 150 rather than AED 250, so an operation whose round genuinely finishes by lunchtime is comparing against a much lower number than the table assumes.
Finally, the table prices driving. It does not price a person who also loads the warehouse, serves at the counter or does the stock take between rounds — and if that is what you are actually hiring, the comparison stops being about driving at all.
Summer
When the driver is yours, the summer rule is yours too
One obligation transfers with the employment, and it is an expensive one to be casual about.
Between the middle of June and the middle of September, work in direct sun in open areas is stopped in the middle of the day under the midday break set by the Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation. It applies to whoever is doing the work, so when the driver and the loading crew are your employees, the responsibility for keeping them out of the sun in those hours is yours rather than ours. The penalty is set per worker, which means a crew makes it multiply.
Driving between stops is not the problem. Unloading on an unshaded pavement at one in the afternoon is. The operational answer is the same either way — heavy loading before the break or after it — but the exposure sits with the employer, and the driver page sets out the dates, hours and penalty in full.
This is a small example of a larger point. A hired driver comes with his obligations already handled by somebody else. An employed one brings them to you, which is perfectly manageable — it is simply part of what you are taking on, and it belongs in the comparison.
The verdict
Where each one clearly wins
Strip out the edge cases and the decision is not close in either direction.
Employ, when the work is daily and the person is more than a driver. A fixed round five or six days a week, a route that rewards somebody knowing it, customers who recognise the same face, and tasks between the driving that someone has to do anyway. At that volume the arithmetic favours employment comfortably, and the operational case does too: continuity is worth something real on a delivery round.
Book a driver, when the need is uneven. Project work with a start and an end. A seasonal peak. A vehicle class you need occasionally rather than constantly, which is most customers’ relationship with the chiller and the trucks. A week where your own driver is away. And the first few months of any new operation, when you genuinely do not yet know how many days a week the round will need.
That last one is worth dwelling on. Hiring is a commitment made on a forecast; booking is a decision made on today’s actual volume. If you are not yet sure what the round looks like, buying the information first is cheaper than buying the commitment first.
In practice
What most operations end up with
As with the vehicles themselves, the arrangement that survives contact with a real year is usually not one or the other.
A business with a daily round employs for the round and books for everything around it: the peak week, the leave cover, the day a second vehicle is needed, the job that requires a heavy licence nobody on the payroll holds. The employed driver carries the continuity; the booked one absorbs the variability. Neither is trying to do the other’s job.
There is a sequencing point in that too. Starting with a booked driver and employing later is a cheap way to find out what you need. Starting with an employee and discovering the round is three days a week is not.
And if the vehicle side of this is still open — whether a round justifies a van at all, or whether paying per delivery still wins — that question comes first, because it decides whether there is a round to staff at all.
Questions
Driver questions
How many days a month before employing is cheaper?
Divide your all-in monthly cost by AED 250. At AED 5,000 all in, that is twenty days a month; at AED 6,000 it is twenty-four. A six-day week is about twenty-six working days, so the higher your package, the closer to every single day you need him before the sums turn.
Can we book one of your drivers to cover annual leave?
Yes, and it is one of the most sensible uses of the service. Tell us the dates as early as you have them, especially around the summer and the end of the year, and say which vehicle and which licence category the round needs so the right driver is allocated.
Our driver has a light licence. Can he take the chiller van?
Not the 3-tonne one. The 3-ton chiller, the 5-tonne and the 10-tonne all sit above the light vehicle category. Panel vans and the 1-ton pickup are fine. If a heavier vehicle is an occasional need rather than a constant one, booking a driver for those days is usually cheaper than upgrading a licence.
Is there a discount for booking a driver every day?
Regular work is priced differently from one-off days, so tell us the pattern rather than booking day by day. If the round genuinely runs daily we will say honestly where employing starts to beat booking, because quoting you a rate you should not be paying is not a relationship worth having.
Does your driver load and unload?
He drives, secures the load and gives basic help getting items on and off. Carrying furniture up stairs, packing and dismantling are not part of it. If the job needs lifting, add a helper for AED 150 a day, and say how many floors there are and whether a lift is working, so the job is priced beforehand rather than argued about on the doorstep.
Who pays the fines if your driver gets one?
Anything run up while you have the vehicle reaches your invoice whoever was behind the wheel, which surprises people. What an experienced driver changes is how many there are. If one looks wrong, send it over and we will check it against the plate and the date.
Tell us the pattern, not just the day
Say how many days a week you need somebody, which vehicle the round uses and whether the work is steady or seasonal. We will tell you what it costs with our driver and, if employing is clearly the cheaper answer for you, we will say that too.
WhatsApp or the contact page. The hourly, half-day and full-day figures are all on the van with driver page if you want them in front of you first.