How to make money by sharing your car

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Money is tight right now for a lot of us, but one under-utilised asset could offer a great route to earning some extra income each month.

Despite costing a significant amount of money to finance, run and insure, the average car in the UK sits parked, doing nothing, for 95% of its life.

Car-sharing schemes have taken off significantly in the last few years as smartphone apps have become part and parcel of our daily lives, and signing up to one of these could make your car earn its keep, instead of depreciating as it sits idle.

The biggest player in the car-sharing marketplace is Turo, which has over 100,000 car owners using the platform across the UK and North America. Owners, or hosts, earn £442* a month on average with Turo in the UK, more than double a typical monthly car finance repayment.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the majority of owners (60%) surveyed in Turo’s 2022 Community Survey use their earnings from Turo for their cars’ repayments, while 49% are either building up savings or cover their main living expenses.

The firm has put together the ‘Carculator’ to help prospective hosts work out how much they could earn with Turo. Some car owners have had so much success they have even branched out and turned car sharing into a full-time business, earning significantly more from Turo than their cars cost them in terms of depreciation and other expenditures.

To find out more about Turo and how you could earn money sharing your car, head to our dedicated page on the subject.

*Based on average monthly earnings, including reimbursements for incidentals, from January 2020 to December 2021 for listings with at least 12 completed trips per year with an average approval rating of at least 95% and an average 5-star rating of at least 80%. This figure excludes earnings data from March, April, and November 2020, and January to March 2021, during which time the UK was in national lockdown. Actual earnings may vary.