Wheelchair Accessible Ride Requests on Uber/Lyft: Data

In short: Very few Uber and Lyft riders ask for a wheelchair accessible vehicle (WAV): about 0.24% to 0.33% of completed app trips each month from September 2025 to August 2026, or roughly 48,000 to 69,000 trips a month. But about 1 in 10 app trips actually runs in a WAV (10.41% in August 2026), because bases can send any rider to a WAV. For a WAV driver, that means most of your trips are ordinary trips, and every trip dispatched to your WAV is paid at the higher WAV per-mile minimum.

All trip numbers below come from TLC's high-volume for-hire (HVFHV) trip records, which TLC Help aggregated. Pay rates come from TLC's Driver Pay Rates page.

The numbers at a glance

Requests and WAV trips by month

TLC's trip records have two flags for this (data dictionary):

• wav_request_flag: did the passenger request a wheelchair-accessible vehicle?
• wav_match_flag: did the trip take place in a wheelchair-accessible vehicle?

The chart shows both as a share of all app trips each month, next to shared rides and Access-A-Ride trips for scale.

The count of WAV-requested trips dipped in winter (47,515 in February 2026) and rose in spring and summer (69,168 in May 2026):

What the gap means. In August 2026, about 20.5 million app trips were recorded (661,080 a day × 31 days, from the dataset trips-per-day-by-month). About 10.41% of them, roughly 2.1 million, ran in a WAV, and 67,987 were WAV requests. So only about 3 in 100 trips in a WAV started as a WAV request (our arithmetic). TLC's FHV accessibility FAQ says bases "may dispatch any trip to a WAV," and more WAVs on the road may explain part of the rise (our reading, not a TLC finding): almost all new FHV licenses issued from February 2025 to January 2026 were WAV-restricted (see FHV license cap statistics).

Response time: what the rule says and what the data can show

Under TLC rule §59B-17(f), a base may meet its accessibility duty through an approved Accessible Vehicle dispatcher. That dispatcher must serve at least 90% of WAV requests in under 10 minutes. Requests the passenger cancels within 10 minutes don't count. If it misses the target, TLC gives it 30 days to fix it. TLC's 2025 Annual Report lists "Wait Time Restrictions for FHVs" as a rule effective March 6, 2025.

The other way to comply, the trip mandate in §59B-17(c), requires that at least 25% of a base's dispatched trips each July–June year be completed by accessible vehicles.

The public data can't test the 10-minute rule:

WAV pay rates

The minimum pay rule (§59D-22) sets a higher per-mile rate for "a trip dispatched to an Accessible Vehicle," whether or not the rider asked for a WAV. Current rates, from rates.json (as of 2026-10-12):

For example, a 5-mile, 20-minute trip inside the city pays at least 5 × $1.601 + 20 × $0.681 = $21.63 in a WAV, versus 5 × $1.283 + 20 × $0.681 = $20.04 in a non-WAV car (our arithmetic; tips are extra). Try your own trips with the Uber/Lyft pay estimator.

What WAV drivers can expect

• Mostly regular riders. In this data, about 97 of every 100 trips in a WAV were not WAV requests. Bases may still send you any trip, and TLC says your WAV should be ready for a wheelchair user "whenever you are on the road" (FAQ).
• Higher per-mile minimum on every app trip in your WAV. The per-minute rate is the same.
• No extra charge to riders. TLC's FAQ says you can't charge more for WAV trips.
• No TLC cash incentive for FHV WAVs. TLC says it "does not provide any financial incentives to own or drive FHV WAVs"; green cab WAVs may qualify for some. The license itself is cheaper: see do WAV owners pay TLC vehicle license fees?
• Any base can dispatch you. A WAV can take trips from any class of base without a formal agreement.

What the data can't tell you

• Unserved requests. Requests with no driver, or cancelled before pickup, are not trip records. That is why the WAV-requested share completed in a WAV is 100% every month in trips-app-wav-fulfilment-by-month. It is not a fulfilment rate.
• Who the rider was. A WAV request flag doesn't prove the rider used a wheelchair.
• Earnings. Trip records show pay per trip, not what a WAV driver earns per week after costs.
• Lag. TLC publishes trip files about two months after each month ends and may revise them.

More: WAV drivers · approved WAV models · new plates with a WAV · accessible taxi statistics · licensed vehicle statistics · tolls on app trips · vehicles hub