By: Kayla Jones
Edited By: Lara N. Tomescu
Work in the United States is increasingly shifting from a single job to a portfolio of income streams. From pursuing side hustles, participating in the gig economy, making money through content creation, or even micro-entrepreneurship, households are diversifying income in response to economic uncertainty, rising fixed costs, and the growing availability of digital platforms. This shift has been accelerated by digital platforms that lower the barriers to earning outside a traditional employer-employee relationship.
A straightforward way to examine this trend is through data on multiple jobholding. In November 2025, multiple jobholders accounted for 5.7 percent of those employed.1 When disaggregated by race, multiple jobholding rates were 6.4 percent for Black workers versus 5.7 percent for White workers in November 2025.2 This gap may reflect differences in job security, exposure to labor market risk, and the need to smooth income when hours or wages fluctuate. At the same time, it is important to recognize that multiple jobholding is only one slice of “polyworking”—many people earn income informally or intermittently in ways that aren’t cleanly represented in standard labor statistics.
The labor market is unbundling
In the traditional job model, a single employer typically bundled together wages, benefits, scheduling, training, and a degree of income predictability. However, the labor market is becoming increasingly “unbundled.” In the increasingly common portfolio model, those pieces are becoming separated. Workers may find flexibility and autonomy, but they also take on more responsibility for managing risk, such as irregular hours, volatile pay, and higher out-of-pocket costs. This can make work more precarious, especially because many elements of the U.S. safety net still depend on having a traditional job.
This unbundling is also part of why the gig economy is hard to measure. “Gig work” can mean many things, such as app-based driving and delivery, freelance professional services, or selling goods online. Therefore, different datasets capture different slices of the same reality. According to the Gig Economy Data Hub, about 10.2 percent of workers (roughly 17.4 million people) rely on alternative arrangements as their main job, and that less than half of gig participants rely on gigs as their primary income.3 Evidence from tax data reinforces this picture, with a recent NBER study showing that platform gig workers nearly tripled between 2019 and 2023, reaching about 5.8 million people in 2023.4 Together, these sources suggest that while participation in platform gig work is increasing, earnings are often supplemental and intermittent. For many workers, gig income functions more like a short-term buffer than a permanent solution to income vulnerability.
Entrepreneurship is rising, but it is not all the same kind of entrepreneurship
Another important workforce trend is an acceleration in new business formation. The Census Bureau’s Business Formation Statistics reported 535,041 business applications in November 2025.5 This data provides meaningful insights into entrepreneurial initiation and formation, even though only a subset of applications ultimately transition into employer firms. However, the rise in applications does not reveal what kind of entrepreneurship is growing.
This distinction matters because different forms of entrepreneurship have different economic consequences. Growth in business applications may indicate opportunity entrepreneurship via innovation and market expansion, but it may also reflect necessity entrepreneurship, which is entry motivated by income insecurity or inadequate earnings in traditional employment. The recent increases in business formation activity likely reflects both forces. The appropriate policy response depends on which is predominant, since high-growth employer firms and solo income-smoothing ventures face different constraints and produce different social returns.
What policies would support a healthier portfolio economy?
Polyworking is earning income through a mix of jobs, gigs and side ventures rather than relying on a single employer. Since it’s becoming a lasting feature of the labor market, the goal for policymakers should be to preserve worker flexibility while reducing the fragility that comes with portfolio income. One widely discussed approach is portable benefits and a safety net designed for multi-job work. When benefits are tied to a single employer, people who piece together income across gigs and short contracts often lose coverage or fall through the cracks. Policies that secure health coverage, expand access to retirement savings, strengthen paid leave, and ensure employees remain protected would better align with today’s labor market.
Second, tax laws should be reformed to better support gig workers. As participation in the gig economy grows, workers need clearer guidance, simpler tools for quarterly payments, and clearer distinctions between taxable business income and non-taxable personal transfers. Simplifying the system would reduce inadvertent noncompliance and lower the administrative burden on workers whose income is fragmented across multiple sources.
Finally, a healthy portfolio economy requires support for entrepreneurship that can grow beyond supplemental income. A surge in business applications raises a key question: how many new ventures have a realistic pathway from side hustle to sustainable business ownership? Policies that expand access to startup capital, technical assistance, childcare, and local small-business ecosystems can help turn informal earnings into a durable enterprise, especially for entrepreneurs without wealth buffers.
Polyworking reflects a broader shift in the organization of work and risk in the U.S. economy. For some workers, a portfolio of income streams expands autonomy and creates new pathways to entrepreneurship. For others, it functions as a stopgap in response to wage stagnation and rising costs. The challenge is to modernize protections so they fit how people actually work now, and to ensure that entrepreneurship supports upward mobility rather than serving as a long-term substitute for economic security.
Work Cited
- Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. 2026. Multiple Jobholders as a Percent of Employed (LNS12026620). FRED. Published January 9. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12026620
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. 2026. A-39. Multiple Jobholders by Selected Demographic and Economic Characteristics. Current Population Survey. https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea39.htm?hl=en-GB
- Gig Economy Data Hub. n.d. How Many Gig Workers Are There? Gig Economy Data Hub. https://gigeconomydata.org/basics/how-many-gig-workers-are-there.html
- Garin, Andrew. 2025. The Evolution of Platform Gig Work, 2012–2023. National Bureau of Economic Research, 2024. https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c15169/c15169.pdf
- U.S. Census Bureau. 2025. Business Formation Statistics. BFS, US. Department of Commerce. November 2025. https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/pdf/historic/bfs_2025m11.pdf
Author Bio
Kayla Jones is a PhD candidate at the Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell University. She is an applied microeconomist specializing in public and urban economics, with research focused on local taxation, public goods provision, racial integration, and place-based policies. Her work examines how shifts in demographics, economic opportunity, and institutional decision-making shape neighborhood change, public services, and inequality. Kayla combines causal inference methods with large administrative and census datasets to study how policy reforms affect communities over time. She is a founding member of the Sadie Collective and is committed to expanding access and representation in economics and policy. She earned her B.S. in Economics from Morgan State University. In her spare time, she publishes essays on her Substack exploring economic trends, labor-market shifts, and public policy with an emphasis on clarity, equity, and real-world relevance.