Side hustlers are hustling a little less but making more when they do.<\/p>\n
About 36% of U.S. adults say they make extra money from a side job beyond their main source of income, according to a survey the consumer finance platform Bankrate released Wednesday. That\u2019s down from 39% last year, when side-hustlers were earning a bit less. The average side gig now nets $891 a month, up 10% since 2023 \u2014 well ahead of inflation.<\/p>\n
The findings add up to \u201ca more positive view\u201d of the side-hustle economy, said Ted Rossman, Bankrate\u2019s senior credit card analyst. But he cautioned that \u201cthings still aren\u2019t great.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout twice as many people are side hustling now versus 2017,\u201d Rossman said, \u201cand it\u2019s alarming that even in a good job market so many people need a secondary source of income.\u201d Even so, the latest survey data looks like \u201cprogress\u201d as inflation cools, he said.<\/p>\n
The Bankrate findings come one day before the closely watched consumer price index will deliver a fresh inflation snapshot for June, marking two years since the latest bout of price increases peaked at 9.1%. Economists expect annual inflation to have cooled to 3.1% last month from 3.3% in May, and <\/strong>the rate has barely budged since last summer. <\/p>\n But workers\u2019 pay has changed for the better, relative to prices.<\/p>\n Average hourly earnings rose 3.9% last month since the year before, federal data shows. And while the labor market is cooling down, there are still more openings than job-seekers looking to fill them after a long-feared wave of mass layoffs failed to materialize.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers that the economy no longer looks overheated and \u201cthe labor market appears to be fully back in balance.\u201d<\/p>\n A little over half of side-hustlers started gigging in 2022, when inflation was running much hotter, Bankrate found. Last year, people with side jobs were more likely to rely on them to subsidize daily living costs than to fund discretionary spending like travel or dining out (33% and 27%, respectively). But today, those shares are roughly equal (36% and 37%).<\/p>\n Dreon Owens, a 32-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, New York, isn\u2019t among those easing up on side-hustling this year.<\/p>\n After scraping by with side projects since getting laid off during the pandemic, Owens finally landed a full-time position managing a housing nonprofit group in late 2022. But in May he took on a human resources consulting contract that he said brings in as much as $2,500 a month on top of the $100,000 annual salary from his day job.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve been beat over the head and kind of gooped into paying these extra prices when it wasn\u2019t necessary,\u201d Owens said, echoing concerns about so-called greedflation, in which some consumer advocates have accused corporations of hiking prices more than their own costs have risen.<\/p>\n \u201cAdditional income is always very helpful under this good old system of capitalism,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Consumers increasingly expect inflation to creep down further in the next 12 months, a New York Fed report found Monday. But consumer sentiment has remained tepid at best this year and many household budgets are still under stress.<\/p>\n After Owens\u2019 father died last fall, he has been sending money home to help out his mother and younger siblings. But his application for a New York City housing program that helps residents find affordable rentals recently moved forward. He\u2019s eager to leave the three-bedroom apartment he shares with two roommates, where his chunk of monthly rent comes to $1,800, but he\u2019s also preparing to pay at least $500 more to live alone in a studio or one-bedroom.<\/p>\n With his freelance gig, Owens said, \u201cI have the ability to hang with my friends, travel a little bit, go back home to see my family without having to cower in a corner thinking: Should I do this? Can I afford this? It brings about that sense of relief.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Side hustlers are hustling a little less but making more when they do. About 36% of U.S. adults say they make extra money from a side job beyond their main source of income, according to a survey the consumer finance platform Bankrate released Wednesday. That\u2019s down from 39% last year, when side-hustlers were earning a <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4894,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-4893","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4893","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4893"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4893\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4894"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4893"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4893"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4893"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}