A large share of Rawalpindi households who hire a driver do it for one reason: the children need to get to school and back. Everything else the driver does is secondary, and in a lot of houses it amounts to a grocery run and the occasional family visit. If that describes yours, it is worth asking whether you need a driver all day or only at the two hours of the day that actually matter.
Map the driving week first
Write down every journey for seven days: who travelled, where, what time, and how long the vehicle was actually in motion or waiting.
Most families find the pattern is starkly concentrated. Two peaks — roughly seven to eight-thirty in the morning, and one-thirty to three in the afternoon, varying with school timings — plus a scatter of errands in the evening and a heavier weekend.
Between those peaks, in a lot of households, the car does not move. A full-time driver spends those hours at your house, available, which has value if you use it and none at all if you do not.
What a school-run arrangement looks like
The common structure in Rawalpindi is a driver who works two defined blocks: morning drop, then afternoon pick-up, with the middle of the day free. He is paid for a part-time role rather than a full one, and he typically fills the gap with a second household or with app driving.
Some families extend it slightly — the driver stays after the afternoon run to do the day's errands, or comes back at seven for evening trips. That is a reasonable middle and usually costs a little more than a strict two-block arrangement while covering considerably more of the household's real needs.
What matters is that the blocks are fixed. A driver can build a living around a predictable split day; he cannot around one that changes weekly.
The cost difference, and where it narrows
A school-run arrangement plainly costs less than a full salary. How much less depends on how many blocks you want and how far the school is — a driver doing a twenty-minute run each way in Satellite Town is a different proposition from one crossing to a school in Islamabad every morning through peak traffic.
That last case deserves attention, because a lot of Rawalpindi families send children to schools across in Islamabad. A cross-city school run twice a day is not a short shift; with traffic, it can consume three hours each way of the driver's day in waiting and travel. Priced honestly, that arrangement approaches a full-time role, and families are often better off acknowledging it as one than pretending they have bought a part-time position.
Our driver salary guide provides the full-time anchor; from there, a school-run rate is a negotiation based on hours, distance, and how much of his day the split consumes.
The sharing arrangement, and its real risks
Families in the same neighbourhood with children at the same school frequently share a driver and split the cost. Done well it is the cheapest good answer available. Done casually, it produces the disputes you would expect.
If you share, settle four things in writing before starting: whose car is used and who pays for fuel and maintenance; exactly who the driver answers to when instructions conflict; what happens when one family's child is ill and the run is shorter; and how the cost is split when one family stops using the arrangement. The last one is the one that is always skipped and always needed.
The other thing to settle is insurance and responsibility for children who are not yours. Most families never think about this and probably should, at least to the extent of both families explicitly agreeing the arrangement rather than one family's driver informally carrying another family's children.
What you give up
The full-time driver's real product is availability, and a school-run arrangement does not have it. An unexpected trip to a clinic at eleven in the morning, an elderly parent who needs the car, a delivery to collect, a change of plan — with a split-shift driver, none of those are covered, and the household falls back on apps or on somebody driving themselves.
For households where that fallback is easy, this is not a problem. For households where somebody cannot drive and the apps are unreliable where you live, it is a bigger problem than it looks on paper, and it is the most common reason families move from a school-run arrangement back to full-time within a year.
The months when school is closed
This is the part of the arrangement that people fail to plan and then handle badly. Summer holidays, winter break, exam weeks with altered timings — a school-run driver's work disappears for weeks at a time.
You have three honest options. Pay him through the break, which is what keeps a good driver and is what most families who value continuity end up doing. Agree in advance that the arrangement pauses unpaid, which is clear but means he will likely find other work and may not return. Or convert the holiday weeks into general household driving, which is the arrangement that suits both sides best when the family has enough other travel to fill them.
What does not work is not discussing it and then simply stopping payment in June. The driver you spent months training then belongs to someone else in July.
Safety, which changes with the arrangement
A driver carrying children unaccompanied is a different level of trust from one driving adults, and the checks should reflect it. Verify the licence is current and correct for the vehicle class. Confirm the CNIC against the original document, not a photocopy. Get a permanent address and a reference you actually speak to. And spend a paid trial day watching how he drives with a family member in the car — speed, phone use, lane discipline, how he behaves at a school gate.
Agree the rules explicitly: no phone while driving, no unapproved passengers, no changes of route without telling you, and children handed to a named adult rather than left at a gate. Our document checklist covers what to collect and keep on file.
How to decide this week
If your household's driving is genuinely concentrated in two school blocks and somebody at home can drive for the rest, take the school-run arrangement — it is materially cheaper and you lose little.
If anybody in the household depends on the car during the day, if there is an elderly parent, if the school is across in Islamabad, or if evening travel is frequent, hire full-time. The gap in cost is smaller than the gap in usefulness for those households.
Price the cross-city run separately
If the school is in Islamabad and you live in Rawalpindi, treat that as its own calculation rather than as a school run with extra distance.
Time it yourself, twice, at the actual hours — one morning at seven and one afternoon at the pick-up time. Include the wait at the gate. The number most families arrive at is between two and three hours a day consumed, which is not a short shift by any reading, and a driver being paid a part-time rate for it will not stay.
Also think about what happens on the days the Expressway or Faizabad is blocked, which happens several times a year. A driver whose entire arrangement assumes a forty-minute journey has no slack on those days, and the child waits. Households running cross-city school transport should have a standing fallback — a parent who can go, another family on the same route, or a rule about the child waiting inside the school — rather than improvising each time.
Building a handover if two families share
Shared school-run arrangements survive on paperwork that takes five minutes a week and gets skipped.
Keep one written schedule that both families can see, listing which children are travelling on which days and any known exceptions — exam days, half days, a child staying back for sport. Keep a single point of contact in each family, so the driver is not receiving contradictory instructions from four adults.
Agree a monthly settlement date for the cost split and stick to it, because informal arrangements about money between neighbours are the part that damages the friendship rather than the driving.
And write down what happens when one family leaves the arrangement — how much notice, and whether the remaining family takes on the whole cost or the driver's hours reduce. Every shared arrangement ends eventually, usually when a child changes school, and the ones that end badly are the ones where nobody discussed the ending.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can one driver handle two schools with different timings?
Often yes, if the timings stagger rather than clash and the schools are reasonably close. Map it against actual traffic before assuming — two schools twenty minutes apart with overlapping pick-up times is not one driver's job, and discovering that in week one is expensive.
Should the driver wait at school or come home in between?
If the gap is under about forty minutes, waiting is usually simpler and costs less in fuel than two extra round trips. Longer than that and sending him home, or letting him take other work, is fairer and keeps the arrangement attractive to him.
Is it cheaper to use the school van instead?
Usually, yes — school transport is the cheapest option available and the right one for many families. Families move away from it for reasons that are not about cost: route length, the number of children in the van, pick-up times that are an hour before school starts, and wanting a known person responsible for the child.
What if the driver is late for pick-up?
Agree a rule before it happens: he calls the school office and he calls you, in that order, and the child waits inside rather than at the gate. Most pick-up problems are single incidents handled badly rather than patterns, and having a procedure turns them into non-events.
