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• How Prevalent Is Holding Multiple Jobs in the Postpandemic Labor Market?

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guests today are Kyle DeMaria and Urvi Neelakantan. Kyle is a regional economist and advisor for workforce pathways, and Urvi is a senior policy economist, both at the Richmond Fed. Kyle and Urvi, thank you for joining me.

Kyle DeMaria: Thanks for having us, Tim.

Urvi Neelakantan: Yes, thanks for having us.

Sablik: We're going to be discussing a recent Economic Brief article that you both published, which looks at how the share of Americans working multiple jobs has changed since the pandemic. What can this information tell us about the health of the labor market and the economy overall?

DeMaria: At the Richmond Fed, we look at a number of different indicators of the health of the labor market. Traditionally, that has been things like the unemployment rate or the job finding rate, or we'll even look at trends in wage growth over time.

The rate of workers who hold multiple jobs is another metric, and I would say that it is perhaps a little less clear than the others. On the one hand, working a second job might be a sign that a worker is having trouble making ends meet, and so they're relying on that second or that third job for additional income. On the other hand, it might signal that a worker is taking advantage of an exciting opportunity to advance their career or explore an interest.

Neelakantan: We found, to my surprise, that the multiple-jobholding rate is actually higher when the economy is doing well. My prior was the opposite — that workers would seek multiple jobs to make ends meet when the economy was doing poorly. But if you think from the perspective of somebody who's demanding labor, in a tight labor market employers are trying to fill capacity by hiring additional workers into part-time positions. So, that's when you see multiple jobholding.

Sablik: Kyle mentioned that this is a trickier question to get at than, say, a metric like the unemployment rate. How did you both go about trying to measure workers who hold multiple jobs?

Neelakantan: We used data from the Current Population Survey, their microdata, starting in January 1994 and going through July 2026. In the CPS, respondents report multiple jobholding.

One thing to note is that the CPS requires that at least one of the worker's jobs be wage and salary employment. So, someone whose jobs are all unincorporated self-employed — if they have no wage and salary job, that is — they would not be counted as a multiple jobholder. That almost inevitably leads to the multiple-jobholding rate being an undercount, since informal work, gig work, platform-based work such as ride-hailing or delivery apps are almost always classified as unincorporated self-employed. So, if that's the only kind of work that someone is doing, they will not be counted as a multiple jobholder.

Sablik: Thinking about how this changes over time, what happened to the multiple-jobholding rate immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic?

DeMaria: The multiple job holding rate dipped. Employment overall also dipped, so the multiple-jobholding rate kind of matched what we saw with national employment trends. There was a dip such that it dropped to 4.1 percent in 2020, which was the lowest it has been in the 30-year period that we looked at.

Neelakantan: In principle, it could have gone either way. You could imagine, for example, that there was a greater demand for food delivery services, which may have been filled by multiple jobholding. But I think the general trend in falling employment that Kyle talked about just overwhelmed anything else during the pandemic, making that rate really low.

Sablik: Thinking about the current labor market, how has this multiple-jobholding rate evolved more recently?

DeMaria: The quick answer is that it's recovered to its long-term trend. But this is where things got really interesting as we were looking at the data.

If you look at this long-term trend in the multiple-jobholding rate, what you'll see is that it's remarkably stable — between 5 and 6 percent — for the last 20 years. It is quite interesting when you think about other common labor market metrics like the unemployment rate, which we know does fluctuate several percentage points over time.

We have seen it recover since the pandemic days. It increased and peaked at close to 6 percent at the end of 2025. Just in July of this year, it had normalized to around 5.5 percent, so it's staying within that 5-6 percent range. For this reason, Urvi and I have been interpreting this more as the rate returning to its long-term trend.

Sablik: Digging into the data a little bit more, do you have any details on which types of workers are more likely to work multiple jobs? Has that composition shifted over time?

Neelakantan: There have been some interesting changes in the composition over time along many dimensions. Multiple-jobholding rates were pretty similar across income groups in 2021. By 2025, the multiple-jobholding rate rose for middle- and high-income families.

If you look instead by education, this has been a longer-term trend where college educated workers have become a greater share of multiple jobholders. They were only a third of multiple jobholders in the 1990s and they're about half of multiple jobholders in 2024.

The rate also varies by who your primary employer is. In the early 2000s, it used to be local and state government workers or those who worked in private nonprofits who had the highest rate of multiple jobholding. You can imagine that that was a "supplement your income" type of story. That has changed now. It's incorporated self-employed workers who have the highest rate — they have an 8 percent rate of multiple jobholding, which is up 2.3 percentage points from the early 2000s. The lowest rate is seen among the workers in the private for-profit sector. Since that's the biggest sector in the economy, that pulls down the overall economy. So, I think there's a little bit of variance depending on who your employer is.

Sablik: So, we've returned to this 20-year equilibrium of 5-6 percent of the workforce holding multiple jobs and that was an increase from the depths of the pandemic. What does an increase in people working multiple jobs mean for the economy as a whole? Is that a boost for consumption?

Neelakantan: We already talked about the fact that we see multiple-jobholding rates go up when the economy is doing well. The income from this additional job is very important for the individual worker — it accounts for about a quarter of their total earnings. But in the aggregate, we've talked about the rate hovering around 5-6 percent. So, combining the fact that it's only 5-6 of workers and this is the income from their second job, that's not enough to boost consumption numbers in the aggregate.

We did a back-of-the-envelope calculation for the period 2020 to 2026, starting from when the rate was at its lowest to when it recovered. We estimated that the number of multiple jobholders grew by about 3.2 million over that period. If you assume that the additional job earns about $20,000 per person and also assume that they spend all of those earnings, that's about $64 million added to consumption in the aggregate. But aggregate consumption is $9.4 trillion, so this is less than 1 percent of that.

DeMaria: So, us economists love our sensitivity analyzes. We were interested in seeing what would happen if we tried a larger multiple-jobholding rate. So, we ran the same back-of-the-envelope calculation with a higher rate of around 10 percent to see what would happen. And what we found was that that additional consumer spending would only amount to about 2.2 percent of consumption growth over that period, so still not a massive contribution there.

Sablik: So, even assuming that your numbers are undercounting the number of multiple jobholders, it still wouldn't be a big difference in consumption.

Are there any other unanswered questions about this topic that you're both hoping to explore in some future research?

DeMaria: One of the things that is hard about this topic is that there are certain data limitations. Urvi already spoke about how the CPS only counts that second job if someone is already engaged in wage or salary work.

There are also limitations with what you can elicit in a survey. If you were to ask someone directly, "Are you working multiple jobs?" they might still even say no, even if they are working multiple gig jobs, because someone might not conceptualize that as an actual job.

That's not to say that there aren't some great resources out there, though. One that comes to mind is the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, which we informally call the "SHED" around here. The SHED casts a wide net in their definition of informal work. They take into account things like whether someone gets money from hanging pictures on a friend's wall or delivering food, so any type of activity that earns money.

The last SHED survey that we have available that asked about gig work was fielded in October of 2024. They found that about 20 percent of adults were engaged in this type of informal work.

Neelakantan: I think another interesting angle to explore is the relationship between the changing nature of work and technology and multiple jobholding. For example, I think remote work makes it possible to do some moonlighting or do a second job on the side. It might be interesting to see if the efficiency and productivity gains from AI make it possible for people to work more than one job. But, of course, there's a whole question mark around the demand side of labor.

Sablik: Yeah, something to keep an eye on for sure.

Kyle and Urvi, thanks so much for joining me to talk about your research.