Search for how to start an Amazon delivery business in the UK and you will find two kinds of page: Amazon's own, which is a recruitment pitch, and a layer of franchise-broker sites that read like one. Both skip the parts a British operator has to live with from week one.
This is the version with the numbers attributed to where they come from, and the obligations named.
What Amazon asks for
Amazon publishes its requirements, and they are short. To apply you need evidence of £25,000 in liquid assets, a CV covering your full employment history, and an email address that has never been used for Amazon Flex, an Amazon shopping account, or an existing DSP profile.
The process itself is longer than the requirements suggest. Amazon describes an application that includes a background and credit check, a video interview through HireVue or a phone screen, then three further interviews, then training, and only then an offer to launch. Their own estimate from first application to first delivery is three to six months, depending on whether there is an opportunity available in your area.
That last clause is the one to read twice. Passing the interviews does not produce a business. Amazon states plainly that DSP opportunities are not guaranteed and depend on availability.
What the programme is said to pay
Amazon's financials page gives four figures, all of them footnoted as projections for owners running 20 to 40 vans:
| Liquid assets to apply | £25,000 |
| Start-up costs | "as low as £10,000" |
| Annual revenue potential | £900,000 – £1.8M |
| Annual profit potential | £50,000 – £150,000 |
Two things follow from the footnote, and they matter more than the numbers.
The first is scale. A profit range quoted for a 20-to-40 van operation says nothing about what five vans return, and the fixed costs of running a compliant business — the admin, the insurance, the person who answers the phone at six in the morning — do not shrink proportionally.
The second is that Amazon says, in its own words, that building the profit and loss model is your job, not theirs. The programme brochure lists the types of cost. Turning them into numbers for your postcode, your wages and your insurance quote is the work, and it is the work that decides whether the range above applies to you.
The costs Amazon's page does not itemise
Drivers are the largest line, and how you engage them changes both the cost and the risk. Vans come through the programme's leasing deals, which is genuinely cheaper than arranging them yourself, but a leased van still needs insurance, maintenance, MOT, and a replacement for the days it is off the road. Damage carries an excess. Uniforms, devices and fuel are yours.
And then there is the cost nobody models: the morning a driver does not turn up and a route goes uncovered. It does not appear in a spreadsheet as a line item. It appears in the scorecard, and the scorecard is what decides whether you keep the routes you have.
The British obligations
This is where the American material stops being useful, because none of the following exists in the US programme.
Right to Work. Checking that every driver has the right to work in the UK is your responsibility as the employer, and the civil penalty for getting it wrong lands on you, not on Amazon. A correctly conducted check is a statutory excuse; an assumption is not.
DBS. A basic DBS check is available to anyone aged 16 or over working in England and Wales. Standard and enhanced checks are only available where the role itself is eligible, so anyone who tells you which check a delivery driver needs without asking what the role involves is guessing.
DVLA licence checks. You can verify a driver's licence, but not without their cooperation — the check needs the last eight characters of their licence number and a one-time code they generate, valid for 21 days. Obtaining another person's driving licence information without permission is a criminal offence.
Driver status, and the change that arrived in 2026. How you engage drivers decides which set of rules applies to you. Off-payroll working, or IR35, only applies where a driver works through their own limited company; a self-employed sole trader is not inside it at all, and the exposure there is employment status instead. Note also that under the off-payroll rules a small client does not make the determination — the worker's own company does.
The change that did move risk onto operators is a different one. Since 6 April 2026, where an umbrella company employs workers in your supply chain, the agency or end client is responsible for PAYE being operated correctly — and HMRC can recover an underpayment from them. If you plan to source drivers through an umbrella, that liability is now yours.
Payroll. HMRC expects a Full Payment Submission on or before payday, every time. Weekly pay means fifty-two of those a year, which is fifty-two chances to be late.
What the first six months actually look like
Ask an operator a year in and the answer is rarely about vans. It is about people: recruiting drivers faster than they leave, getting them through onboarding and compliance before their start date rather than after, and knowing on Thursday that Saturday is one driver short.
The scorecard compounds all of it. Routes are allocated on performance, so an uncovered route is not only today's problem — it is next quarter's capacity. Which is why the operators who grow are not usually the ones who found the cheapest vans. They are the ones whose admin stopped being a person remembering things.
Before you apply
Three questions worth answering honestly first. Do you have the £25,000 in a form you can evidence? Are you prepared for three to six months with no guarantee of an opportunity at the end? And is your plan built on the 20-to-40 van figures Amazon quotes, or on the number of vans you will actually start with?
If the answer to the last one is the first, model it again.
How WaveGo helps with this
Amazon DSP software for UK operators — five seats free, no card and no contract.