The familiar silhouette of bike and scooter delivery workers has become part of Paris’ urban landscape. For many city dwellers who rely on them to deliver meals to their door, these precarious workers remain largely “invisible” in surveys and public statistics.Yet, the availability of quality data about online platforms’ delivery drivers is a major issue. Legally, the transposition into French law of the European Directive (EU) 2024/2831 on the legal framework around platform work (which aims to provide better protection to delivery couriers), expected before December 2 2026, makes it essential to have a better understanding of this population in order to shed light on regulatory choices.Where occupational health is concerned, an expert appraisal by Anses (March 2025) exposes an alarming situation, and underlines the lack of available data for understanding the health status of these gig workers and implementing appropriate public policies.It is in this context that France’s Santé-Course project was launched. Led by an interdisciplinary research team from the Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) and the Institut national d’études démographiques (INED), associations working with delivery people (Association de mobilisation et d’accompagnement des livreurs, AMAL; Collectif pour l’insertion et l’émancipation des livreurs, Ciel; Maison des livreurs de Bordeaux; Maison des couriers de Paris; Médecins du monde) and a peer group made up of couriers or former couriers, this project focused on documenting working conditions as well as delivery workers’ physical and mental health, based on a survey conducted among more than 1,000 of them in Paris and Bordeaux.The study also examines exposure to occupational risks, police checks and cases of discrimination. Hereafter, we turn attention to the profiles of these workers and their working conditions, but the full results are available here.What does platform work consist of ?The rise of digital work platforms in France dates back about fifteen years and results from the conjunction of two series of factors: the adoption of new legal norms (notably the Novelli law of 2008 establishing self-employment status), on the one hand, and the generalisation of information and communication technologies as well as the democratisation of their use, on the other. The first point has gradually made the labour market more flexible and paved the way for massive employment of self-employed workers who are taken on by these platforms, while the second one has provided the latter with the conditions for their large-scale deployment. À lire aussi : Requalifier ou réguler ? Les controverses du dialogue social des travailleurs des plates-formes In the food delivery sector, digital platforms play a role as intermediaries between restaurant owners and customers, and between restaurateurs and deliverers. Their operations are based on matching algorithms, pricing, and disconnection that allow them to manage a vast network statutorily independent workforce, without having to resort to traditional company management methods.Delivery drivers’ self-employed status places them outside the occupational health and safety regulatory framework that is applicable to employees. Their situation is similar to a return to task-based work, understood as project-based contractual work between clients and those who carry out the work.As a result, social security contributions, which grant workers social protection and the legal obligations related to protecting workers, are transferred from the client to the self-employed worker. This puts delivery contractors in a highly precarious situation and makes them economically dependent on the platforms, which control access to deliveries and the terms of their remuneration.A population that tends to be off the survey radarInvestigating platform delivery workers involves several methodological obstacles, the main one being admin-related: none of the company directories listing businesses located in France (Sirene, Sirus or Sine), usually used as sampling frames to draw samples from annual business surveys, allows reliable and exhaustive identification of platform deliverers. This makes it, therefore, difficult to know precisely their total number and their geographical distribution in France, thus making any approach by traditional sampling impossible.Another problem is posed by the phenomenon of account leasing, which allows delivery drivers to carry out their activities under a third party’s account. This phenomenon also undermines the use of data from the platforms themselves, which lacks transparency (see the Anses March 2025 report).As a result, only a direct canvassing protocol carried out in public places or community spaces is able to produce reliable data. This is how the Santé-Course project team managed : to meet delivery people at their pick-up destinations in Paris and Bordeaux.The two French cities were selected because a significant part of these workers are concentrated there and they are home to partner associations of the Santé-Course project. In order to fully represent the diversity of situations experienced by delivery workers and, thus, obtain results that best reflect the reality of the entire population studied, an initial mapping survey of meeting points and the number of delivery people visiting them at different times of the day was carried out, which then served as a basis for the deployment of survey interviewers.The survey was conducted during the first half of 2025, among delivery drivers over 18 years old, who had made at least one delivery via a digital platform in the month before the survey and were able to give informed consent. A total of 519 and 485 delivery people were interviewed in Paris and Bordeaux, respectively.Nearly 1 in 2 delivery people spent an entire day without eating in the last twelve monthsThe results paint a remarkably homogeneous socio-demographic picture on several dimensions. The delivery workers are almost exclusively men (98.9%), immigrants (97.8%) and relatively young – their median age is 30 years old.Their level of education, by contrast, is heterogeneous : while one quarter did not go beyond primary level education, nearly one in five went on to higher education, with significant differences between Paris (28.3%) and Bordeaux (9.6%).Most of them recently arrived in France (median since 2020) and are mainly from West Africa and South Asia in Paris, from West Africa and North Africa in Bordeaux. Their administrative status is extremely fragile : nearly two thirds of them do not hold a residence permit.This administrative hardship is coupled with material deprivation. The majority of the workers do not have a place to call their own : in Paris flat shares and lodging with people they know are the dominant trend, while communal supported housing and collective accommodation are more common in Bordeaux.Even more worrying, nearly 18 % report living in unstable housing conditions (emergency accommodation, squats or welfare hotels). Food insecurity is just as significant : nearly one in two delivery people in Paris (48%) and more than one in three in Bordeaux (36.7%) report having spent at least a full day without eating, due to lack of money, over the past twelve months.Nearly 73.5 % work under a third-party accountThose who were surveyed have been in business for some time: three quarters had never worked for a delivery platform before 2021, and more than one third of Parisian delivery workers started in 2024 or 2025.Two platforms, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, largely dominate the market, but the simultaneous use of delivery services with several apps (or “multi-apping”) remains a very small minority, affecting less than 2% of them.Economic dependence on this work is massive: 91% declare that delivery constitutes the bulk of their income, and about 95% do not engage in any other paid activity or are completing training alongside. Dependence on delivery work also appears to be largely constraine: nine out of ten deliverymen without a residence permit say they would cease or drastically reduce this type of work if they regularised their undocumented status.Finally, the phenomenon of account rentals is massive: three quarters of delivery people work under the account of a third person, with a proportion reaching 81% in Paris. This phenomenon, which stems from the administrative precariousness of delivery people, many of whom are undocumented, considerably clouds the statistics produced by the platforms and highlights the need for surveys conducted directly with workers on the ground.On average, 63-hour working weeks at a gross hourly rate of 5.83 eurosThe delivery workers get an average gross monthly wage of 1,480 euros, or 880 euros after tax once all work-related charges are deducted. (including equipment and fuel expenses, insurance costs, taxes and, for three quarters of them, the rental cost of an account, which averages 528 euros per month and absorbs more than a third of gross income on its own).The average gross hourly rate is a meagre 5.83 euros. This is well under France’s minimum wage (11.88 euros at the time of the survey) for significant volumes of work : on average 63 hours per week, six to seven days a week, ten months a year, with even more hours for those who rent an account. At this rate, they clock up 497 miles per month – such mileage is likely to be underestimated due to the omission of certain routes in the platform data.This overview paints a picture of the “working poor”, a population forced to work extremely hard to earn an income after tax that remains well below the poverty line (set at 1,288 euros net per month for a single person).The studies that will be conducted by our team over the coming months aim to shed light on the extent to which this situation affects the health of delivery workers.More than half of the delivery drivers surveyed have already had at least one accident as a result of their work, and 44.8% of them believe that their health status has deteriorated compared to when they started working in the delivery industry.This project received financing from l’Agence nationale de la recherche, l’Institut Convergences Migrations, la Ville de Paris, l’Inserm and l’Institut Paris Public Health at l’Université Paris Cité. 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