The Bureau of Labor Statistics Counts Multiple Jobholders. The Number Is Smaller Than the Pitch.

What the Current Population Survey Actually Measures

The Bureau of Labor Statistics derives its multiple-jobholder figures from the Current Population Survey, a monthly household survey conducted jointly with the Census Bureau. The survey asks respondents whether, during the reference week, they held more than one job or business. A person who answers yes is counted as a multiple jobholder, and the BLS publishes the result as a share of total employment.

As of the most recently published annual average figures, roughly five percent of employed adults in the United States meet that definition. The BLS reported the multiple-jobholding rate at approximately 5.0 to 5.2 percent across recent years, meaning that for every hundred people with a job, around five also held a second one. That is a stable, decades-long band — not a rising tide.

The survey breaks the group down further. The largest subgroup consists of people who hold one part-time job in addition to a full-time primary position. A smaller share hold two full-time jobs simultaneously. A third category covers those whose secondary activity is self-employment or an unincorporated business. That last category is the one most relevant to the language of online-earning marketing, and it is also the smallest of the three.

Where the Language Diverges

The gap between the BLS figure and the claims common in online-earning pitches stems partly from definitional precision and partly from what the survey cannot reach. The CPS reference-week methodology captures only work performed during a specific seven-day window and reported by a household respondent. Sporadic or irregular secondary income — a one-off freelance payment, a single Etsy sale, an occasional affiliate commission — may not fall within the reference week at all, or the respondent may not characterise it as a job.

Online-earning marketing routinely cites survey figures from commissioned sources — Adobe, Linktree and similar organisations — that ask much broader questions: whether a respondent has earned any money from a non-primary source in the past year, or whether they consider themselves part of the "creator economy." Those instruments capture a substantially larger population precisely because they do not require a concurrent second job during a fixed reference period. The resulting figures, sometimes cited as forty or fifty percent of adults, are measuring something genuinely different from what the BLS counts.

None of this makes the BLS figure the only valid one, but it is the figure produced by a consistent, decades-long methodology with a published margin of error and publicly available microdata. When a marketing pitch cites a large percentage of Americans earning side income, and then presents a product as the tool to join them, the BLS multiple-jobholder rate offers a useful reference point — one that the pitch rarely mentions.

Income Composition Within the Count

Even among confirmed multiple jobholders, the income composition is not what the pitch implies. The BLS does not publish a dedicated earnings table for secondary-job income alone, but the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking provides complementary data: a substantial share of adults who report gig or secondary income describe it as irregular and insufficient to cover a month of expenses. The BLS data is consistent with that picture — most multiple jobholders hold a conventional second job, not a scalable digital income stream.

The five-percent figure is worth holding in mind as a floor-level anchor. It represents people who, by the BLS definition, unambiguously worked a second job in a given week — and it has not surged in response to the decade-long expansion of online-earning platforms. Platforms grow. Pitches multiply. The share of employed adults actually working a second job, by the agency that has measured it longest, has remained roughly where it was.