More Americans take on a second job or side hustle. They come at a cost.
A Google contractor who sells cellphones at Walmart. An English teacher who moonlights at a baseball stadium. An accountant who sells eggs and chickens farmed off her land. A Taco Bell manager who picks up shifts at KFC.
A growing number of Americans have taken second jobs and side hustles, spurred partly by years of rapidly rising prices that have gnawed away at household incomes.
The trend is also the result of a strong labor market that has made job opportunities more plentiful for people seeking to boost their incomes through gig work or earn money off their hobbies.
“It’s pro-cyclical, meaning that you increase the number of multiple-job holders during good times,” said Dean Baker, senior economist at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Some “people may have multiple jobs because they need them. Alternatively, they may have multiple jobs because they’re able to get them,” Baker continued. “And it’s obviously a bit of both.”
Late last year, the share of U.S. workers with more than one job hit 5.3 percent of the workforce, the highest since 2019. Those levels were previously last reached during the Great Recession, according to Labor Department data. In some states, including Wisconsin, North Dakota and Hawaii, the percentage of workers with multiple jobs was roughly double the national average or around 10 percent in 2024.
Multiple-job holders who spoke with The Washington Post said that working extra jobs came at the cost of their sleep, mental health and time spent with their families. A high school English teacher in Prince George’s County, Maryland, said she sleeps four or five hours on nights she sells merchandise at Nationals Park in D.C. A Taco Bell manager in San Jose said that when he is able to get his desired hours at his second job at KFC, he rarely sees his kids.
Naomi Kowald, 37, of Cambria, Wisconsin, started selling fresh eggs to friends and family last spring to bring in additional income and better utilize the 16 acres of land she lives on with her husband and two young children. She has a full-time job at home working for a company that manages pharmaceutical drug trials, as well as a separate part-time gig as a distributor for water ionization systems.
Despite a master’s degree in social work, she described her family as living paycheck to paycheck. “It helps to diversify what we have coming in,” she said.
Economists say the share of workers with more than one job tends to rise when jobs are plentiful, as they have been coming out of the pandemic. Despite some labor market cooling over the past year, workers are better off, by several measures, than they were in 2019, another strong period for the labor market. Job creation last year outpaced 2019, as did the share of multiple-job holders in the labor market.
These days, the reasons people get second and third jobs vary widely, ranging from desperation to opportunity, in a phenomenon boosted by increased availability of remote jobs and gig work on platforms such as Uber and Instacart.
“The pandemic and the increase in remote work are a big part of the story here. People are seeing opportunities to do contractor or gig work from home that maybe wasn’t as visible to them before,” said Tessa Conroy, an economic-development specialist and associate professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Americans used to juggle multiple jobs at higher rates back in the 1990s and early 2000s. Economists say that’s because baby boomers, who outnumber other generations, were in their peak working years.
More recently, smaller shares of working Americans have worked more than one job, although that rate has picked up during periods of low unemployment.
Grace Wilbanks, 25, a public relations specialist at a credit union in Atlanta, picked up extra income pursuing her passion making collage art, which she has sold to friends, family members and local businesses - charging thousands of dollars for larger installations.
“Once I got cushy corporate gig, I had more flexibility and freedom on afternoons and weekends to make art,” Wilbanks said. “The money is nice, but I think the best way to put it is it keeps me sane. If I don’t go to the studio, I will go crazy at work.”
Labor Department data shows that while the number of workers holding two or more part-time jobs declined slightly in December, considered a positive development, the number of people working one full-time and one part-time job has crept up.
“People are taking an additional job to make ends meet,” said Brad Hershbein, a senior economist at the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
Also, data probably underestimates the multiple-jobs trend, economists say, because surveys only capture those with at least one employer. Self-employed people with, for example, a food truck and a lawn-care business, wouldn’t show up in the data.
Laura Norman, an elementary school English teacher for non-native speakers in Baltimore who earns about $62,000 a year, took a second job in 2022 as a house manager at a theater several times a month for extra income for vacations and going out to eat. But having two jobs became a necessity when she had a baby last year. Child care and grocery prices have weighed heavily on her household.
“I know very few teachers that don’t have a second gig - babysitting, nannying to push them over the edge,” Norman, 31, said. “I absolutely find it upsetting.”
A 2023 poll from Maryland’s teachers union with some 75,000 members found that 44 percent of public school teachers work more than one job to make ends meet.
More people working from home has also made it easier for more workers to take on second jobs and side hustles. Thirty-five percent of multiple-job holders reported that they did telework in 2024, according to a Post analysis.
In Springfield, Missouri, Kirn Gill II, who works for a Google contractor analyzing the tech giant’s search results from his home for $14 an hour, picked up a second job this fall as a salesman at Walmart’s wireless-phone sales provider for $13.75 an hour. When the Google contractor cut his assignments, he needed to find another source of income to help pay his bills, including thousands of dollars in medical debt from a recent back surgery.
“I don’t want to have to work two jobs to pay the bills,” the 34-year-old said. “With the cost of living going up … it’s difficult to even stay in place. You’re being constantly dragged down.”
Multiple-job holders tend to be disproportionately represented among the labor market’s more vulnerable workers, particularly women and African Americans. That could be because women are often pushed to cobble together jobs around child care, and African Americans are overrepresented in low-wage industries where full-time hours aren’t available, said Hershbein, the economist at W.E. Upjohn.
In December, 6.1 percent of women and 6.4 percent of African Americans worked more than one job, compared with 5.2 percent of the total population.
“On the positive side, we can see that people have more flexible opportunities to augment their income,” said Conroy of the University of Wisconsin. “We might think of this as a showing of the entrepreneurial spirit. But we also want to consider the quality of work associated with these positions. Are people pursuing multiple jobs because of low wage growth? Do they have stable income? Do they have adequate benefits to support themselves and their family?”
Monique Mcclain, an Uber driver in Nashville, has felt forced to sign up for increasingly more gig-economy apps to pay the rent on her one-bedroom, which has risen from $800 to $1,100 over the past two years. She also works warehouse shifts on several gig-economy platforms and takes on temporary assignments at convention centers for a staffing agency. Sometimes, she works 60 to 80 hours a week.
“I sleep between each of the different assignments - a four-hour window here and there,” Mcclain, 42, said. “I was recently put on medication for high blood pressure and heart problems. These jobs are hard on my body, but I have no choice.”
Kowald, the accountant who started selling eggs last year, has slowly expanded her hobby-farm side hustle to produce chickens for meat, Highland cattle and about 300 dozen eggs. The eggs are healthier than those produced at larger farms that have been susceptible to avian flu, Kowald said. She is adding a second chicken coop with hopes to double production. She also raised egg prices by a dollar recently to $4 per dozen, still less expensive than at nearby supermarkets.
Her business is still in the red from a series of investments, including for fencing and feeders, but she’s hoping it will be profitable over time.
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