What the Federal Reserve's Survey Found When It Asked About Side Income

What the Survey Measures

The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, conducted annually since 2013, asks a nationally representative sample of American adults about their financial lives — income sources, savings, credit, and economic resilience. Unlike platform-published figures, which are calculated from the top of an active-user distribution, the SHED captures the full spread: people who tried gig work and stopped, people who earn occasionally, and people who earn nothing at all despite participating.

The most recently published SHED report, covering 2023 and released in 2024, found that roughly one in five American adults reported receiving income from gig or contract work at some point during the prior year. The survey defines gig income broadly, encompassing app-based delivery and ride-hailing, freelance services, and online marketplace sales — categories that span everything from Upwork contract billing to selling on Etsy. That one-in-five figure is a participation rate, not an earnings rate; it counts anyone who received any gig income, regardless of how much or how consistently.

What the Earners Actually Reported

Among those who reported gig income, the SHED found that for most respondents it was supplemental rather than primary. A substantial share of gig-income households reported that the work covered less than half their total household income, and a meaningful proportion described it as occasional rather than regular. The Federal Reserve does not publish a single median gig-income figure in isolation — the survey's income questions are structured around sufficiency and role in the household budget rather than raw dollar amounts — but the pattern the data shows is one of relatively modest supplemental earnings for the majority of participants, with a thinner upper tail of respondents for whom gig income is more substantial.

That framing matters because it sits in direct contrast to the income figures most commonly cited in platform marketing. Platforms and coaching programmes routinely feature earner testimonials drawn from the high end of their own distributions — figures that are statistically accurate for someone, while being unrepresentative of typical outcomes. The SHED's population-level lens shows what those distributions look like when they are not curated: most people who engage in gig or side work earn amounts that supplement rather than transform household income.

This is consistent with data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics on multiple jobholders, which as of recent Current Population Survey readings counted multiple jobholders at roughly four to five percent of the employed workforce — a considerably narrower slice than the gig-participation figures the SHED records, partly because the BLS measure requires a second formal job rather than any supplemental income activity.

Context the Platform Numbers Leave Out

The SHED also records why adults turn to gig work. In recent survey years, the Federal Reserve found that meeting regular living expenses was among the most commonly cited motivations — not building a business, not replacing a salary, but covering recurring costs. A secondary cluster of respondents cited the desire for extra spending money. The income-sufficiency framing the survey uses consistently shows that a notable share of gig workers reported that their income was not sufficient to cover expenses even with gig earnings included.

None of that appears in the headline CPM ranges a video platform publishes, or in the revenue-share percentage a marketplace advertises to prospective sellers. Those figures describe gross rates available to active earners; the SHED describes what earners actually reported receiving and what role that income played in their financial lives. The gap between the two is partly mathematical — platform rates apply to volume, and low-volume earners see low absolute returns — and partly structural, in that platforms surface their most successful participants most prominently.

The Federal Reserve's survey does not adjudicate whether any particular platform's published rates are accurate. What it provides is a denominator: the population of adults who engage with gig and side income, what they typically earn relative to their other income, and why they sought it in the first place. Read alongside the FTC's earnings-claim enforcement record, the SHED data suggests that the representative earner looks considerably less like the testimonial and considerably more like the survey respondent.