What a Side Hustle Actually Pays

How many people have one

This is the first place the numbers fall apart.

Bankrate’s most recent survey — fielded in June 2025 — puts it at 27% of American adults, a little over one in four, and down sharply from 36% the year before. That is the lowest reading Bankrate has recorded since 2017. Omnisend’s March 2026 survey of 1,370 Americans found 28%. Broader gig-economy estimates run to 45% of the workforce, but those count anyone who did any platform work at all, including one rideshare shift in a year.

A nine-point drop in a single year inside one survey’s own methodology is a real signal, and it runs against the cultural impression that side hustling keeps growing. But the range across surveys — 27% to 45% — is definitional, not empirical. It depends entirely on whether reselling a few things on Marketplace counts.

The defensible statement is narrower than most articles will give you: somewhere between a quarter and a third of American adults are doing paid work outside their main job, and that share has probably flattened or fallen over the past two years.

What they earn

This is where the reporting gets genuinely misleading.

Bankrate’s figures: the average side hustler earns $885 a month. The median is $200.

Those two numbers describe the same population. The gap between them is the entire story. A small group earning several thousand a month drags the average up over four times the typical experience. Twenty-eight percent of side hustlers — the single largest earnings bracket — make between $1 and $50 a month.

The $200 median is also down from $250 the previous year, while the average barely moved, from $891 to $885. So the typical side hustle is paying less than it did while the average holds roughly steady, which is what happens when the top of a distribution pulls away from the middle.

Then there’s The Penny Hoarder’s 2026 survey, which reports $1,275 a month and is quoted widely. It surveyed 1,000 adults who already have side hustles — a different denominator, self-reported, and it defines side hustles to include freelancing and contract work, which is closer to a second career than a second job. Not wrong. Just answering a different question, and it’s the number that travels furthest because it’s the most flattering.

When you see a side hustle income figure over $1,000, check whether it’s a mean, and check who was in the sample.

It’s almost always both.

The gender gap is larger than the earnings gap at work

Among side hustlers, men average $1,195 a month against $611 for women. The medians: $247 and $148.

Both sexes participate at broadly similar rates, so this is not a participation story. It’s a composition story — the higher-paying categories skew male, and the categories that fit around caregiving hours skew female and pay less per hour. The ratio is worse than the gap in primary employment, which is the part worth sitting with.

Why people do it has changed

The most durable finding across every survey is a shift in motive.

Omnisend found 80% of side hustlers started for financial reasons rather than fulfillment. 54% wanted extra money for bills or essentials. Only 9% were pursuing a passion or hobby — down from 14% in October 2025. That’s a fast collapse in a soft metric, and it’s consistent across sources: the share citing “to make ends meet” as the primary motivation has climbed steeply since 2021.

Bankrate found 41% of side hustlers put the money toward discretionary spending, but 35% put it toward regular living expenses and 20% toward debt.

So the side hustle has quietly changed jobs. It used to be framed as optional upside — the thing you did to fund a trip or test a business idea. Increasingly it functions as a patch on a monthly budget that doesn’t close.

The honest summary

A quarter to a third of American adults have some paid work outside their main job. The typical one brings in about $200 a month, most spend ten hours a week or less on it, and half earn under $500. A minority earn substantially more, and that minority is who you hear from.

Two hundred dollars a month is not a career change. It is, for reference, most of a car payment, or roughly the gap between having a $400 emergency covered and not. Judged against that, it’s a reasonable thing to want. Judged against the numbers in a thumbnail, it will always look like failure.