Amid mounting criticism, Goyal also clarified why demanding full-time employee benefits like PF, “or guaranteed salaries for gig roles doesn’t align with what the model is built for.”
Here’s Deepinder Goyal’s full statement
1. Goyal informed that in 2025, average earnings per hour (EPH), excluding tips, for a delivery partner on Zomato were ₹102. In 2024, this number was ₹92. “That’s a ~10.9% year-on-year increase. Over a longer horizon also, EPH has shown steady growth,” he said.
He also said that delivery partners earn 100 percent of tips given by customers. “The average tip per hour in 2025 on Zomato was INR 2.6 and in 2024 was INR 2.4 per hour. Tips are transferred instantly, with zero deductions…About 5% of the orders get tipped on Zomato; 2.5% on Blinkit,” he added.
2. Goyal said, “Delivery partners are not overworked on our platforms,” while explaining why demanding full-time employee benefits like PF, or guaranteed salaries for gig roles “doesn’t align with what the model is built for.”
The Zomato CEO said that in 2025, the average delivery partner on Zomato worked 38 days in the year and seven hours per working day, “reflecting true gig style participation rather than fixed schedules.” He said only 2.3% of partners worked more than 250 days in the year.
He further explained that delivery partners are not assigned shifts or geographies. They determine when to log in and log out, and their area of work in a specific city. “Partners also have the freedom to add or remove a desired work area based on their preferences,” he said.
“Once a partner opts into a gig, the only expectation is availability for the duration of that gig; beyond this, there are no participation requirements,” he said, adding, “This shows that gig work is a reliable source of secondary income for delivery partners which is available to them all 365 days of the year. It is used as a flexible, stop-gap earning option, not a long-term lock-in.”
3. In his third point, Goyal told why quick commerce’s 10-minute promise does not put pressure on gig workers or leads to unsafe driving.
He said, “The most common concern is that faster delivery promises translate into pressure on delivery partners to drive unsafely. That isn’t how the system operates.”
“Firstly, delivery partners are not shown customer-facing time promises. There is no “10-minute timer” or countdown in the delivery app,” Goral said.
He added, “10 mins or faster deliveries are primarily due to our stores being closer to customers and not by higher speeds on the road.”
He, however, said, “Road safety, I agree, remains one of the hardest challenges in any logistics ecosystem. Which needs to be solved with shared responsibility across road builders, rule enforcers, customers and delivery partners alike, regardless of the platform they work with.”
4. Gig workers get welfare benefits and long term support, Deepinder Goyal said.
“In 2025, Zomato and Blinkit spent over ₹100 crore on insurance coverage for delivery partners. These premiums are borne entirely by us, and the benefits are administered with record speed without any fuss,” he said, adding that the coverage includes:
>. Accident insurance with coverage of up to INR 10 lakh:
>. Medical insurance with coverage of INR 1 lakh plus OPD coverage of INR 5,000
>. Loss of pay insurance of up to INR 50,000
>. Maternity insurance with coverage of up to INR 40,000
5. Goyal said that beyond insurance, Zomato added other forms of support where gaps are most visible:
>. Period rest days of 2 days per month for women delivery partner
>. Support in filing income tax returns (95,000 delivery partners leveraged this)
>. Access to a gig-variant of National Pension Scheme (54,000 delivery partners enrolled in PRAN under NPS, enabling long-term retirement savings)
>. SOS Service for immediate support in case of emergencies, including accidents, vehicle breakdown, theft etc.
Concluding his statement, Goyal asked, “Now tell me, is this unfair? Especially for an unskilled job, which is largely part-time, and has zero barriers to entry.”
Mounting criticism
The Zomato CEO’s statement came amid several people raising questions over 10-min delivery pressure in gig workers. Earlier, responding to popular YouTuber Dhruv Rathee’s query, Deepinder Goyal had said he would release a fact sheet on average hourly earnings of the company’s delivery partners.
Rathee had pressed Goyal to share the average hourly earnings of Zomato’s delivery workers. “Let people compare if its more than formal entry level jobs or not (sic),” Rathee had commented.
Former Jet Airways CEO Sanjiv Kapoor also asked Deepinder Goyal about the need for 10-minute deliveries. He opined that a system of delivering groceries in 30 minutes instead of 10 could provide a better balance between gig workers’ safety and customers’ satisfaction.
“Deepinder, what I am really curious about is do we really need 10 minute deliveries in our chaotic urban conditions unless for medical emergencies? Would 30 minutes or 1 hour delivery (without so much pressure and need for speed) be the end of the world?” Sanjiv Kapoor posted on X.
