Lyft Q2 2026 Earnings Call Transcript

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Provided by Quartr
August 6, 2026

Key Takeaways

  • Positive Sentiment: Lyft reported record Q2 performance, including more than 30 million active riders, 262 million rides, and $5.5 billion in gross bookings, up 23% year over year. Adjusted EBITDA increased 37%, while trailing-12-month free cash flow exceeded $1 billion for the fourth consecutive quarter.
  • Positive Sentiment: Management expects rides growth to accelerate in the second half of 2026 across North American rideshare, bikes, and FreeNow. Growth is being supported by faster pickup times, Lyft Teen and Lyft Silver, strong Canadian and European performance, and continued expansion in higher-value ride modes.
  • Positive Sentiment: Partnerships reached a new high, with approximately 30% of North American rides linked to a partner. Lyft said DoorDash, United Airlines, Chase, and other relationships remain early-stage opportunities, while its Waymo partnership in Nashville is on track for a purpose-built depot in October and supply sharing before year-end.
  • Positive Sentiment: Driver supply and engagement remain strong, according to management, with active drivers and driver hours near record levels, driver earnings up about 8% per ride year over year, and Lyft claiming a roughly 30-point preference advantage among multi-platform drivers.
  • Neutral Sentiment: The gap between gross-bookings growth and rides growth reflects business mix, including seasonally stronger bikes activity and the lapping of FreeNow acquisition timing. Autonomous-vehicle operations in London and Nashville are currently expected to have minimal near-term P&L impact, although Lyft believes the long-term unit economics and market expansion opportunity are attractive.
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Earnings Conference Call
Lyft Q2 2026
00:00 / 00:00

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Erin Rheaume
Erin Rheaume
Head of Investor Relations at Lyft

Good afternoon. Welcome to Lyft's Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this conference call is being recorded. On the call today, we have our CEO, David Risher, and our CFO, Erin Brewer. Our prepared remarks are available on the IR website, and we'll use this time to answer your questions. We'll make forward-looking statements on today's call, including statements relating to our business strategy and performance, partnerships, future financial and operating results, trends in our marketplace, and guidance. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied during this call. These factors and risks are described in our earnings materials and in our recent SEC filings.

Erin Rheaume
Erin Rheaume
Head of Investor Relations at Lyft

All of the forward-looking statements that we make today in this call are based on our beliefs as of today. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except required by law. Additionally, today we're going to discuss customers. For rideshare, there are generally two customers in every car. The driver is Lyft's customer, and the rider is the driver's customer. We care about both. Our discussion today will include non-GAAP financial measures, which are not a substitute for GAAP results. Reconciliations of our historical GAAP to non-GAAP results can be found in our earnings materials, which are available on our IR website. With that, I'll pass the call to David.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Thank you, Erin. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Q2 2026 was a quarter of record-breaking performance for Lyft, demonstrating the durable strength of our marketplace. We achieved an all-time high of over 30 million active riders, proving that rideshare is embedded in people's everyday lives. Our results are guided by a simple, powerful strategy built on our relentless focus on customer obsession, operational excellence, and being a world-class partner. This leads to more riders, more rides, and more ways to ride. With 262 million rides in the second quarter alone, we are well on our way to hitting over one billion rides in 2026. Our up strategy continues to gain momentum, with premium modes growing double digits year-over-year for the 12th consecutive quarter, supported by record performance in our TBR chauffeuring business.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

We're also seeing unprecedented success in our ecosystem of partnerships with approximately 30% of North American rideshare rides linked to a partner, a new all-time high, highlighting the scalable impact of our collaborations with leaders like DoorDash and United Airlines. With our out part of our strategy, our global integration efforts are on track as we move toward one unified Lyft app worldwide, with beta testing now live in over a dozen European cities, while our AV roadmap advances with smooth fleet operations in Nashville and strong testing results in London, ensuring we are well positioned for a hybrid AV future. With that, let me turn it over to Erin to take you through a few of our financial highlights.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Thanks, David. From a financial perspective, we delivered accelerating top-line growth with gross bookings up 23% year-over-year to $5.5 billion. Adjusted EBITDA grew 37% year-over-year, reflecting continued cost leverage, driving margin expansion, and our fourth consecutive quarter of over $1 billion in free cash flow for the trailing 12 months. Our team continues to build a business that is both high growth and highly disciplined. With that, let's take your questions.

Operator

As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please click on the raise hand button, which can be found on the black bar at the bottom of your screen. When it is your turn, you will receive a message on your screen from the host allowing you to talk, then you will hear your name called. Please accept, unmute your audio, and ask your question. At this time, we ask that you limit to one question. We will wait one moment to allow the queue to form. Our first question comes from Eric Sheridan with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open. Please unmute and ask your question.

Eric Sheridan
Eric Sheridan
Analyst at Goldman Sachs

Great. Thank you for taking the question. Hopefully, you can hear me okay. I wanted to ask about the rider growth metric you reported in the quarter. Can you unpack the elements of what's driving rider growth and maybe track it back to elements of structural product improvements you're making, including some of the go-to-market partnerships you signed, and how much of it might have been things that were newer into the business, like the California insurance dynamics, World Cup demand, any promotional activity? Just wanted to go a little bit deeper in terms of some of the structural versus maybe some of the transient dynamics around rider growth. Thanks so much.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Hi, Eric. This is Erin. Why don't I start and then David can jump in. As I think about our results across Q2, it's really to your point, it's not one thing. I think about the strength of our North America rideshare business. Our growth foundationally, our continued strong growth as we think about expanding in low-scale markets, Canada, so themes we've talked about repeatedly. We also just had an outstanding quarter within our bikes business. We talked about in our prepared remarks across several of our operated markets just hitting weekly, daily all-time highs. The popularity of e-bikes and sort of the way that those are embedded into people's commutes in certain cities is really impressive. Even Freenow, while granted we didn't have Freenow in the same quarter last year, even if I look at that organically, rides are up there.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

That's great progress in some of the early improvements we've made in delivering great rides across Europe. It's really foundational strength across the business as we think about growing active riders to that record number that we achieved in the quarter. David, I don't know if you want to join in. Obviously, partnerships play a role here, and we had some great results there. I'll turn it over to you.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Yeah. Excuse me. It's an interesting question, and you can, as Erin just did, answer it on so many dimensions, and frankly, see so much strength on so many dimensions. Erin mentioned geography. We're seeing growth in North America, in some of our largest markets like New York and some of our low-scale markets, as Erin said. In Canada, we're continuing to see an extraordinary growth there, almost double now year-on-year. In Europe, we're seeing organic growth, which is absolutely wonderful. This is about almost exactly a year into Freenow, and already we're starting to see real results of some of the technology and some of the product innovation that we've added to that platform, and we're really still just getting started there. That would be one dimension. You asked about sort of the product improvement dimension.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

There you can look at everything from early days of things like Lyft Teen, which is going super well, Lyft Silver, which continue to do super well, and even some of the stuff that you almost take for granted but really shouldn't around marketplace health. Let me give you an example. We now have improved, again, year-on-year, our ETAs, our pickup times. On average, they're up another, down I should say, so faster, anywhere from 0.5%-1%-2%-3%. It depends on the geography and so forth. That at our scale is really quite meaningful. I'll take just a moment to brag for the team for a second.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

If I look at our competitor, we actually pick you up the same or faster than they do 75% of the time right now, which is really quite extraordinary because obviously we have a smaller share. Some of the foundational work really continues to help save money, check Lyft, right? That's another piece now on the marketing side. It's really quite across the board, and maybe that's not satisfying, but I think in a certain sense that sort of says, gosh, the work we're doing and the customer obsessed work we're doing really is working across just about every dimension, even if you take out things like seasonality and World Cup and other things which are obviously nice, but that's sort of a bit of external stuff.

Operator

Our next question comes from Brad Erickson with RBC. Please unmute and ask your question.

Brad Erickson
Brad Erickson
Analyst at RBC

Hi guys. Two questions. One, as you think about kind of where you are on margins on the path hopefully to 4% next year, where do you think you're kind of really outperforming right now as we look forward, and where do you think there's still kind of work to do? Second, just on Nashville, the depot coming online sounds like in October. Can you just kind of give us an update on what the gating factors are there to rolling out as a potential distribution partner? Is that still kind of on time to happen before the end of the year? Thanks.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

That sounds good, Brad. Why don't I start with the second part of the question, then Erin can take the first. I'll answer your question directly and also maybe zoom out just a click. Nashville, yeah, very much on track for a depot opening, as you said. That's the Purpose-built Depot. For those of you who didn't see this, it's about an 80,000 sq ft depot, used to be a USPS facility, outfitted now with four megawatts of power and multiple charging stations and so forth, capable of handling hundreds of vehicles to give you a sense of the size of that. That's kind of where things are on there. Let's back up and then go forward.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

If we back up, the big news in Nashville for us over the last quarter was actually our taking on what was called the temporary kind of depot that Waymo had stood up. This is actually a really important milestone for us because our staff took over, it was actually on June 9th, Our staff took over from the Waymo staff, It was seamless. We got credit from them. It was a bit of a complicated weather day and different things happened. Anyway, we not only picked it up, that we are exceeding all of our SLAs with those guys, which is amazing. That's a great first step. Comes the opening of the depot, the Purpose-built guy, which comes later this year in October or so. To your question, when does supply sharing start?

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

We haven't said anything about that publicly except it'll happen before the end of the year, but it's still very much on track that before the end of the year, you'll have the opportunity to get matched with Waymo on the Lyft app. Very much on track, great partnership with our partner, and I think they also feel great about us.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Yeah, Brad, on your question on the margin side, Q2, obviously we expanded our EBITDA by 37%. Our guide for Q3 calls for margin expansion quarter-over-quarter. We feel great about the trajectory that we're on overall. I would say in terms of what's driving that, it's kind of a lot of the similar themes that you've heard us talking about. First of all, we're in a growing market. There's still great opportunity. We've talked for a number of quarters about low scale markets. Those have continued to grow higher than average. Canada continues to be a very strong market, of course, for us overall.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

You take that very broad market opportunity and you have the foundation of operational excellence, as David said, just continuing to operate more effectively, driving better service for riders, investing as we do against, for example, really smart ways to invest rider incentives. That continues to bring new riders to the platform. They ride more frequently. As we get that scale and that operational excellence, of course, there's natural leverage in the business. Cost discipline is another area that we have talked about going all the way back to Investor Day, being disciplined as we scale. I think we've done a nice job of that and we'll continue to do that as we grow. We've continued to grow very nicely in higher value modes, and that mix as a part of our business has been an important dynamic.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

On so many levels, as I think about where we sit in the market, we've had some great early progress with some new programs, for example, on B2B. Man, on so many levels, we're just getting started there. That's exciting. Partnerships, reaching this milestone where you have almost one in three rides tagged to a partner and what we've talked about historically holds true. Those rides tend to skew more toward higher value rides. Again, much more work to do there as we think about our margin expansion overall. I really like the discipline and the trajectory that we've been on. I think it proves itself out in the numbers that we reported and where we're guiding. Those are really some of the foundational dynamics.

Operator

Our next question comes from John Blackledge with TD Cowen. You may now unmute and ask your question.

John Blackledge
John Blackledge
Analyst at TD Cowen

Oh, great. Thank you. First question on the GB and rides growth gap. There was an 11% gap between GB growth and rides growth. How should we think about that gap in the back half of the year? Would you expect it to close a bit? Then on AV, I thought it was interesting call out the 20% rides growth in San Francisco and the ODD. Just curious if you could talk about that dynamic and kind of just your thoughts on that. Thank you.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Yeah. Hey, John. It's David. I'll start with that, then Erin can pick up the gross bookings piece. Yeah, glad you noticed that. I guess maybe, I think it sort of, proves is probably too strong a word, but it underscores the thesis we have that as AVs enter the market, this will ultimately be great for rideshare, in part because it'll expand the TAM. This is one of those things we've been saying for a while. We're starting to see data that proves it quarter after quarter-after-quarter. Frankly, you also hear it in the anecdotes.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

You hear people who say, "This opens up rideshare for me in a way that maybe I didn't necessarily want to use it in the past, but doesn't necessarily take away from my daily use of rideshare." I'll brag another couple seconds on the team's performance. We've seen growth both in commutes, which is sort of all-time high. Obviously, San Francisco has a big commute market. We also see huge growth on the sort of leisure side. Everything from parties to gyms, actually. It's really interesting. More people are taking rideshare to gyms than ever before.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Anyway, it's sort of an across-the-board growth story, which then layers on top of the AV story, and I think that they feed each other because people get used to taking rideshare, maybe their point of entry is through an AV, then they take, you might say, traditional or driver-driven rideshare back and forth. That's what we're seeing. We see it in a bunch of different places. San Francisco's the area we called out. I think when I look at the transformation this industry's going through, it just makes me more excited, not less, that we've got a huge road ahead of us.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

John, let me try to be helpful by talking a little bit about, for example, what we see as you think about gross bookings and rides and that overall mix as we head into Q3. There are some seasonal impacts, right? Q3 is by far our highest quarter for our Bikes business. Awesome business. Does carry a lower average gross bookings per ride. Obviously, unit economics are super strong, so we love that, but it does have a mixed influence as you think about that gross bookings and rides overall. For Freenow, we're lapping that acquisition, right? We'll have the full Compared to the previous year where we had two months, we'll have the full three months, so you have that dynamic. However, Freenow in the third quarter, sort of with the August holiday season, etc, tends to have a lower rides quarter overall.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Those tend to be higher gross bookings value. You have some of that mix effect with higher Bikes, a little bit less Freenow happening as you're thinking about gross bookings per ride overall. Zooming out a little bit, we provided some color commentary in our prepared remarks. It talks about rides growth in the second half and how we expect that to increase. That's not one factor, but really across our business overall as you think about core North America rideshare or Bikes business or Freenow. That growth is going to come from each of those dimensions. I hope that gives you some helpful color as you're thinking about those dynamics, both in Q3 and for the back half of the year.

Operator

Our next question comes from Benjamin Black with Deutsche Bank. You may now unmute and ask your question. Benjamin Black.

Benjamin Black
Benjamin Black
Analyst at Deutsche Bank

Great. Thank you for taking my question. There seems to be some consternation about the standalone economics of AV ownership and the near-term implications for the P&L. Obviously, you have the Baidu RT6 in London. Can you maybe dig into the expected initial unit economics of your AV deployment there? How does it compare to sort of a standard ride, and how do you expect it to evolve over the next 12-24 months? Thank you.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Yeah, let me try to set some context overall as you think about the economics and really exactly where we are in that overall effort, and obviously, David, please join in where you see fit. We're excited to be on the road, obviously with Baidu in London. A lot of effort across teams to make that happen and getting testing on the road and mapping overall. For where we are today, it's still a relatively small number of vehicles, so the way it's showing up in our P&L is frankly pretty de minimis, and I expect it to remain so as you think about that going forward. Beyond that, we're not going to get too much into what scale looks like in unit economics. Probably when we do get closer to that point in time, I think we'll have more to say.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

I'm not anticipating a significant change in the near-term impact of that overall. I think it's important to set context. Obviously, safety matters, rider experience matters overall, and we're going to continue to be quite deliberate in the way that we roll out this technology in our platform. David, I don't know if you'd add anything to that.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

I think that's well put. Yeah. We like the unit economics long term, and short term, not a significant change. Yeah, just what Erin said. Nothing more.

Operator

Our next question comes from Ken Gawrelski with Wells Fargo. You may now unmute and ask your question.

Ken Gawrelski
Ken Gawrelski
Analyst at Wells Fargo

Thanks so much. Two, please, if I may. First, David, maybe could you talk a little bit about the opportunities beyond Nashville, potentially with Waymo? There's been some press out there around partnerships with Waymo, and maybe even one of your competitors. Could you just talk about the opportunities and the opportunity set for you, and what you need to demonstrate in Nashville to prove yourself as a partner there? That's question one. Question two, maybe Erin, you can touch on the pricing dynamics, especially in the North America rideshare market. It continues to be really robust. Could you talk about how you expect that maybe to continue into the back half or any kind of outlook you could provide? Thank you.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Yeah. Hey, Ken, I'll start. Let's talk about relationships a little bit because let's be honest, you never really know what's going on in someone else's relationship, so I don't want to comment on that. What I will say is I think Lyft is a very, very strong partner, and I want to linger on this for a second because I think it's actually a DNA-level issue rather than a superficial issue. We keep talking about how 30% of our rides are tagged to a partner. That is not a small thing. It's very significantly up from a couple of years ago when we first started talking about it, and it continues to grow. Why? Because what we do when we enter into a partnership is we look for partnerships where both parties benefit. That's why we were able to expand with DoorDash to Canada.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

That's why the United Airlines partnership is off to such a strong start already. Quick parentheses, this has nothing to do with your question, but I was just looking and just with Bilt, a partner that we've had for a while, riders have now spent 1.5 billion Bilt points with us taking rides with us. That's with a company that's a very innovative company. They set very high standards. Ankur is a true innovator, doing all sorts of really interesting things. That partnership continues to evolve. Same with the Chase Sapphire partnership, same with actually a new Chase partnership, Chase Southwest partnership, on and on and on. Our Alaska Airlines partnership, my God, that's been around for a long time. That's such a successful partnership that Ben Minicucci, their CEO, has just joined our board.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

So much evidence that the partnerships that we start tend to flourish for both parties. Now let's look at Nashville. In Nashville, there are two parts to the partnership. There is a fleet management side, where we effectively get paid for availability. We're quite good at this. We have a lot of expertise in that area from our years at Flexdrive. That's going to be one of the ways we have to prove ourselves. Right? The more available the units, the product, the Jaguar or the Ojai, whatever it is, the better we do both financially but also operationally. Super critical, because otherwise, the car can't get dispatched. On what we call supply sharing. Supply sharing, this is a new idea.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

This is not a sequestered, some small number of units that are kind of dedicated 24/7 to Lyft, and then another set of units that are dedicated to Waymo. No. This is a dynamic pool that's constantly being deployed, and obviously we're still in engineering on this because it's quite a complex job to do this well, but constantly being deployed across the network to maximize, again, utilization, throughput, customer experience, pickup times, all the different variables. We're going to be judged on that as well. How well we do supply and demand. Supplying demand. Forgive me for going on in such detail, let's zoom out for a second. If you look at what AV readiness looks like for us, there are four big pillars. Right? There's marketplace health. How healthy is the marketplace?

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

How healthy can we continue to make the marketplace, to oxygenate the marketplace so that AVs are being utilized as close to 24/7 as possible? There are policy issues. In every city we go to, we have different policy issues around local safety issues or time of day issues or operational issues, all sorts of different things. We take a big role there, so does our partner. There are real estate issues. Right? As we know, there's this big depot. We've got to site the depot in the right place. We've got to operate it in the right place, all these different things. I can go into detail. Obviously there's the AV tech. I expect we will be graded to a greater or lesser extent on all of those, particularly on the supply sharing and the fleet operations side. Those are the most direct things.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

We intend to be the absolute best out there. We've said in the past that this partnership is built to scale. Right? We did not do all this work just to do it in one place. Again, let's be super clear. We're still in the very early days, and we're holding ourselves and our partner is holding us, and we are holding our partner to very high standards. That was maybe more information than you really needed, that's the sort of color on the thing.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

All right. Ken, maybe to pivot to pricing for a second. It's important to understand, I think, a couple of things. One is I think about current environment or maybe where things have been in 2026. I would say overall, relatively stable. If you look at Lyft in particular, obviously, earlier we were talking a little bit about gross bookings per ride. That's also going to include mix shifts. Obviously, we've been growing very quickly in higher value modes. We've also talked about our ads business, our chauffeuring business contributing to gross bookings. Again, those don't have an equivalent rides component to it. A few of those things sort of have an influence in that mix overall.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Importantly, though, as we look at our portfolio, we really have a mode for every price point that supports riders exactly where they are, whether it's the bikes business, Bike to Work Week happened recently. We had a significant surge in the way that people are utilizing bikes for commute, for example. Wait & Save remains a really strong piece of our portfolio. We've talked about our growth in high-value modes, right? Delivering value really up to the rider, really up and down that chain of modes and meeting them where we are. It's also important to highlight that we're delivering value in other ways, right? We deliver value without a membership fee to our riders Increasingly through partnerships. David touched on a few of those. United has continued to scale, DoorDash has continued to scale, and that's a really important piece.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Of course, we invest in the form of rider incentives as you think about targeting them to drive loyalty or incentivize riders to try new modes, or as always, balance the marketplace. If you think about that delivered value to the rider, it's coming in a lot of different forms in addition to the mode selector. I think the results kind of speak for themselves. Obviously, we had record growth in active riders number, record rides in the quarter, and really when we look at where people are going, right? It's places where it's clear to us that, we say this word embed. It's really embedded in the day-to-day life. It's no longer sort of necessarily the special occasion. It's work, it's everyday activities. We think that overall positions us well to continue to serve riders really well.

Operator

Our next question comes from Chad Larkin with Oppenheimer. You may now unmute and ask your question. Chad Larkin.

Chad Larkin
Chad Larkin
Analyst at Oppenheimer

Hi. Thanks. It sounds like you're starting kind of the rebrand of Freenow. How do we think about kind of the long-term tailwinds from that? Just kind of near-term, kind of just how rebrands can sometimes work. Is there any kind of impact baked into the third quarter guide? Thanks.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

I'll talk about it sort of big picture. I don't think in third quarter there's anything significant. Yeah. I can actually give you some on-the-ground experience. I was just in Europe a couple of weeks ago and experienced it myself. Here's where things stand. As you say, there is a rebranding effort going on. You can see it very actively, for example, in places like Barcelona, and now in Dublin and Athens, various different places where Freenow has particular strength, where you see quite a few of the taxi cabs saying now Freenow by Lyft. It's actually about a third of the taxi cabs right now in Barcelona alone saying Freenow by Lyft on them, and you can see them all over the city. That's great. That starts to give people a sense of kind of who we are.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Many people actually have a sense of who Lyft is as an American innovative rideshare company, now we're sort of starting to put it a little bit more front and center. By next year, as we said in the prepared remarks, we expect to be fully integrated in the sense that any traveler can open up the Lyft app and be able to order a Lyft kind of natively, let's say, on the app without having to open up a new app. That's going to be obviously a big step forward for all of us, but that's still 2027. In between now and then, you'll start to see little bits and pieces on the rebranding effort. The truth of the matter is, the main action there will be once we have the product ready.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

We don't really want to sort of get people excited about Lyft and then have them open up Lyft and not be able to order a product natively. I'd say that's one very step by step. If you're interested separately, we can talk a little bit about the backend integration, which is quite significant to make Lyft a real true global company, we've just made actually massive progress on that. That's a separate thing from branding. Branding will go kind of step by step as the product gets ready.

Operator

Our next question comes from Michael Morton with MoffettNathanson. You may now unmute your audio and ask your question.

Michael Morton
Michael Morton
Analyst at MoffettNathanson

Hi there. Good evening. I wanted to ask a question about the acceleration in the business. Is it fair to assume directionally that the, I guess, 3.5% acceleration could also be reflected in the U.S. rideshare business? Within the U.S. rideshare market, in the past, you've spoken to some increasing competition in Wait & Save, but haven't heard about that, I think probably in a couple of months. I was wondering any update for the competitive environment there. Lastly, if you could quantify the contribution from World Cup, that would be wonderful as well, but I understand if you can't. Thank you.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

Let me jump in there, maybe I'll take them in reverse order. We made some comments in our prepared remarks across certain of our cities where World Cup showed up, increasing airport rides, some increasing local trips. What I'd say about this is Lyft is great at events, right? You think about major event, Coachella, or we've got Outside Lands coming up in San Francisco soon. We rally around these things, I think World Cup was another event where we rallied around, delivered great services. I put it in the category of similar to how we handle other major events and show up for our customers. As I think about Wait & Save overall, I mentioned a little bit earlier in the call, remains a really important part of our overall portfolio. Customers continue to engage with the product overall.

Erin Brewer
Erin Brewer
CFO at Lyft

It definitely serves its purpose, where you're willing to trade off price for time. I wouldn't highlight any meaningful changes there as I think about our overall business or the way customers are engaging with that feature or that mode in particular. I think your first question, I'll kind of go back to what I said. We gave some color commentary about the back half rides in our prepared remarks, and I'll just reiterate that we see that across our bikes business, our North America rideshare business, our Freenow business. Not excluding anything here. We're seeing that dynamic across each of those areas.

Operator

Our next question comes from Nikhil Devnani with Bernstein. Please unmute and ask your question.

Nikhil Devnani
Nikhil Devnani
Analyst at Bernstein

Hi, thanks for taking the question, appreciate it. Given the improving outlook for rides you've talked about, even your competitor has talked about, would hope to hear a little bit more about how you feel on just driver supply as you think about the balance of the year. Do you feel like the industry's adequately supplied to keep up with this level of improving growth? Maybe can you talk to any of the investments you intend to make to help bridge that gap if needed as well? Thank you.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Yeah. Hey, Nikhil, it's David. We feel great about the driver supply, I actually would maybe zoom out and say feel great about the relationship that we have with drivers and vice versa. Let's start with that. This is something that maybe over the last three years since Erin and I started, have really made a very focused investment on in terms of energy, not just dollars, of making sure that people understand there are two customers in every car, a rider and a driver. Okay, what have been the results? You know some of the ways we've made those investments. We now have a 30% fee cap, which you probably know what that's all about. We have a great rider rewards, or excuse me, driver rewards program that we launched earlier this year. I actually just got new data about that.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

It's paid out $14 million so far to drivers. A bunch of that co-funded, by the way, which is wonderful. We made real investments in the driver supply, and the health of the driver community, I would more characterize it that way, over the last couple of years and even this year. Okay. What's the result? The result is we have very strong supply right now, sort of in the top strongest ever type thing, and that's both in terms of number of active drivers on the platform as well as driver hours. By the way, driver earnings are effectively at an all-time high. These things are always tricky to kind of measure, but if we look at it, certainly again since Erin and I started, they're at the highest ever, up, I think, 8% per ride year-on-year.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Side point, tipping is also up 10%, which is wonderful, and that's, I think, a reflection of great service being driven by the drivers on the Lyft platform. All of those things kind of give us a lot of hope and sort of early indication that our driver supply will continue to be good. Last question that you didn't ask, but I'm gonna answer anyway is you might say, well, how do you compare to the competition? I am pleased to say that right now we have about a 30-point preference gap. When you ask drivers who drive on multiple platforms, which of the two major platforms do you prefer to drive on? We have over 50% of people say they like us, and there's a much, much smaller number of people who say they prefer the other guys. That's nice, too, right?

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

I don't mind being competitive with those guys because it's sort of good for the whole industry to kind of fight over your drivers a little bit, and I think we're doing a nice job, I'd say, winning that fight.

Operator

Our last question comes from Andrew Northcutt with Wolfe Research. You may now unmute your line and ask your question.

Andrew Northcutt
Andrew Northcutt
Analyst at Wolfe Research

Hey, this is Andrew for Shweta. Thanks for taking the question. I want to follow up on partnerships more broadly. As you look at the portfolio of partnerships today, how are you thinking about the incremental opportunity from deepening existing partnerships versus adding new ones? Where do you see kind of the most untapped or runway?

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

Yeah. Thanks for the question, Andrew. I think we would prioritize and are prioritizing deepening our existing partnerships, and it's because they're so kind of untapped in so many ways. Maybe I'll make a general statement, not specific. The general statement I make is there's so much innovation left in this space, and again, gosh, 300 million rides that people are taking in their private car every year, and between us and our big competitors, $3 billion or $4 billion, maybe more. That's in North America. I don't know, $6 billion or $7 billion, something like that across the world. Every one of the other ones is the product isn't yet good enough, or the partnership isn't yet strong enough with a partner that's going to make the ride relevant or whatever it is.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

There's so much general opportunity in the rideshare space, and certainly, we think we're doing very well and very well positioned there. Then within the partnership place, DoorDash, we just expanded to Canada. Gosh, there's a lot more white space out there. The Chase partnerships, we just renegotiated and relaunched our Chase Sapphire Reserve program a couple of months ago, it's about six months ago now. It's been completely reinvigorated thanks to the 5X points, the $10 a month. They just added the Chase Southwest kind of benefit as well, the Southwest credit card benefit as well in a different portfolio, and on and on and on. Each one of the partnerships we have, we think we're sort of in early days. I'll get back to the earlier point I was making.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

I think partnership and being a good partner is in our DNA, and we're seeing that with our partners, that they want more from us and vice versa. I mean more in the most positive way possible. They want to deepen the partnership and go even bigger. I think I'm getting ahead of myself by saying I think there'll be some really more interesting news over time with our existing partners, and stay tuned for that.

Operator

This concludes the question and answer session. I will now turn the call back over to Lyft's CEO, David Risher, for closing remarks.

David Risher
David Risher
CEO at Lyft

You all, as always, thank you so much for your time today, for following us so closely, your continued interest in Lyft. We are firing on all cylinders and super excited for a strong year in the company and strong times ahead. Thanks again. We will see you all next time.

Executives
    • Erin Rheaume
      Erin Rheaume
      Head of Investor Relations
    • David Risher
      David Risher
      CEO
    • Erin Brewer
      Erin Brewer
      CFO
Analysts
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