Gig Economy Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: David Park, Careers, Work & Education | Last updated: August 5, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
The U.S. government has asked American workers about app-based gig work three times — May 2017, July 2023, and May 2025 — and has published the results zero times. Meanwhile the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ own tables contain a gig headcount 1.6 million higher than the number BLS put in its own headline, and nobody has printed it.
Quick Answer
Counting only sole or main jobs, 11.9 million Americans were independent contractors in July 2023 — 7.4% of employment (BLS, USDL-24-2267). Counting second jobs from the same survey, Axis Intelligence Research finds the true unduplicated figure is 13.5 million, or 8.3%. Just 4% of U.S. adults did app-arranged platform tasks in the prior month (Federal Reserve SHED 2024).
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that 13.5 million Americans were independent contractors in July 2023 — not the 11.9 million BLS reported — once the 1.593 million people whose independent contracting is a second job are added from Table 13 of the same BLS release.
- Axis Intelligence Research calculates the unduplicated share of U.S. workers in alternative work arrangements at 11.3%, versus the 10.1% implied by the headline — 18.2 million people rather than 16.3 million (BLS Contingent Work Supplement, July 2023).
- Four percent of U.S. adults performed short-term tasks arranged through an app or website in the month before the survey, and 41% of them held a non-gig main job (Federal Reserve, Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, fielded October 2024).
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that temporary help agency workers — not independent contractors — score lowest on the Work Arrangement Security Index (WASI) at 65.7 of 100, while independent contractors score 89.0 against a traditional-employment baseline of 100.
- Digital labour platforms operating in the EU must report their headcount, contractual status mix, and average weekly hours to national authorities every six months from 2 December 2026 under Article 17 of Directive (EU) 2024/2831 — the first mandatory platform-workforce disclosure regime anywhere.
How Many Gig Workers Are There in the United States?
Every gig economy statistic you have read rests on a definitional choice that the writer usually did not disclose. The honest answer is that the number ranges from about 6.5 million to about 70 million depending on what you count, and the useful move is not to pick a favourite but to name the instrument.
The most rigorous U.S. measurement is the Contingent Work Supplement to the Current Population Survey, administered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics to roughly 60,000 households. Its July 2023 results, released 8 November 2024 as USDL-24-2267, put 11.9 million people — 7.4% of total employment — working as independent contractors on their sole or main job. On-call workers numbered 2.8 million (1.7%), temporary help agency workers 945,000 (0.6%), and workers supplied by contract firms 862,000 (0.5%). Separately, 6.9 million workers (4.3%) held contingent jobs, up from 3.8% in May 2017.
The Federal Reserve measures something different and arguably more relevant to how people use the word “gig.” Its Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking, fielded in October 2024 among a nationally representative adult sample, found 20% of adults performed some gig activity in the prior month. But the composition matters: 13% were selling things — mostly used clothing they had owned personally — 9% did short-term tasks, and only 4% did platform tasks, meaning short tasks arranged through an app or website.
Four percent. That is the closest thing the United States has to an official measure of the Uber-and-DoorDash workforce, and it sits two orders of magnitude below the headline figures that circulate in trade coverage.
What each U.S. instrument actually measures
| Instrument | Measure | Value | As of | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BLS Contingent Work Supplement | Independent contractors, sole or main job | 11.9M (7.4%) | July 2023 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| BLS Contingent Work Supplement | Independent contractors, second job | 1.9M (22.8% of multiple jobholders) | July 2023 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| BLS Contingent Work Supplement | All alternative arrangements, sole or main job | 16.3M (10.1%) | July 2023 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| BLS Contingent Work Supplement | Contingent workers, sole or main job | 6.9M (4.3%) | July 2023 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| Axis Intelligence Research | Independent contractors, unduplicated people | 13.5M (8.3%) | July 2023 | Axis calculation on BLS Table 13 |
| Axis Intelligence Research | All alternative arrangements, unduplicated people | 18.2M (11.3%) | July 2023 | Axis calculation on BLS Table 13 |
| Federal Reserve SHED | Adults doing any gig activity, prior month | 20% | October 2024 | Federal Reserve |
| Federal Reserve SHED | Adults doing app-arranged platform tasks | 4% | October 2024 | Federal Reserve |
David Park: The comp-band instinct applies here. When a candidate tells me they make “around six figures,” the useful follow-up is not whether they’re lying — it’s which number they’re quoting: base, base plus bonus, or total comp including unvested equity. Gig economy headcounts work the same way. Nobody in this debate is lying. They are quoting different lines on different pay stubs, and the writers repeating them mostly don’t know which line they got.
The 1.6 Million Gig Workers BLS Collected and Never Counted
The July 2023 supplement did something the survey had never done in its previous seven fieldings, going back to February 1995: it asked multiple jobholders about their second job. BLS said so plainly in the release, noting that data users had flagged the absence of second-job information as a particular shortcoming of prior supplements.
Then BLS reported the two populations separately and never combined them.
Table 13 of USDL-24-2267 breaks the arrangement counts into people whose only or main job carries the arrangement, people whose second job carries it, and people counted in both. That last column is what makes the addition safe. Of the 1.916 million people who were independent contractors on a second job, 323,000 were already counted in the main-job total. The remaining 1.593 million appear nowhere in the 11.9 million headline.
The Axis calculation, in full:
Unduplicated independent contractors
= independent contractors on sole or main job
+ independent contractors on second job ONLY
= 11,904,000 + 1,593,000
= 13,497,000 people
Share of total employment (161,878,000)
= 13,497,000 / 161,878,000
= 8.34%
Applying the same logic across all four alternative arrangements — 16.342 million on sole or main jobs plus 1.900 million second-job-only — gives 18.242 million people, or 11.27% of employment, against the 10.1% a reader would compute from the headline.
Axis Intelligence Research estimates the practical effect at a 13.4% understatement of the independent-contractor population and an 11.6% understatement of the alternative-arrangements population in every article, filing, and policy brief that has quoted the headline since November 2024. Both inputs are published BLS values from a single instrument on a single reference week, so the addition carries no methodological mixing — it is arithmetic BLS declined to do in its narrative.
This is not a criticism of the survey. It is a criticism of how the survey gets read. The supplement’s own technical note is explicit that for multiple jobholders with more than two jobs, the status of jobs beyond the second is unknown, so 13.5 million remains a floor rather than a ceiling.
Which Work Arrangements Are Actually Precarious? The Work Arrangement Security Index (WASI)
Gig economy coverage treats “independent contractor” and “precarious” as synonyms. The BLS data does not support that.
WASI — the Work Arrangement Security Index — is an Axis Intelligence Research composite that scores each work arrangement against the traditional-employment baseline on a 0–100 scale, using three components drawn entirely from the July 2023 Contingent Work Supplement. Because every input comes from one instrument, one reference week, and one sample, the components are methodologically compatible and the reading is reproducible by anyone holding the release.
Components and weights:
| Component | Weight | Definition | BLS source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earnings adequacy | 40% | Median usual weekly earnings, full-time, ÷ traditional ($1,132) | Table 11 |
| Coverage adequacy | 35% | Share with health insurance from any source ÷ traditional (84.9%) | Table 10 |
| Job stability | 25% | (1 − contingent share within arrangement) ÷ (1 − 3.64%) | Table 12 |
Each ratio is capped at 100 so that an arrangement cannot score above the baseline on any single component. Traditional arrangements therefore read exactly 100.0 by construction.
WASI reading, as of July 2023 (baseline reading):
| Arrangement | Median FT weekly earnings | Health coverage, any source | Contingent within arrangement | WASI | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional arrangements | $1,132 | 84.9% | 3.64% | 100.0 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| On-call workers | $1,125 | 78.2% | 17.18% | 93.5 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| Independent contractors | $949 | 74.2% | 4.06% | 89.0 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| Workers provided by contract firms | $1,014 | 79.4% | 22.51% | 88.7 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
| Temporary help agency workers | $818 | 60.8% | 54.81% | 65.7 | BLS USDL-24-2267 |
What the reading says. The 34.3-point gap between traditional arrangements and temporary help agency work is more than three times the gap between traditional arrangements and independent contracting. Temp agency workers earn a median $818 a week against $1,132 for traditional full-timers, only 60.8% carry health insurance from any source, and more than half — 54.8% — are in jobs they do not expect to last. Independent contractors score 89.0 largely because their contingency rate is 4.06%, barely above the traditional workforce’s 3.64%. The typical independent contractor is not churning through short engagements; 80.3% told BLS they prefer the arrangement, and 70.7% work full time.
What would move it. Coverage is the component most exposed to policy. If the share of temp agency workers with insurance from any source rose to the traditional baseline, the arrangement’s WASI would climb into the high seventies without a dollar of wage change. Earnings is the slowest-moving component; stability moves with the business cycle.
What it does not capture. WASI scores arrangements, not people, and it uses main-job earnings only — so the supplemental app worker with a salaried day job and the full-time courier land in the same cell. It also excludes app-based platform workers entirely, because BLS has not published the data that would let anyone score them. Which is the next problem.
David Park: The fear I hear at eleven at night is “I took contract work and now I have no floor.” The published medians say something more specific than the fear does. If the arrangement is independent contracting, the floor is $949 a week at the median and four workers in five would not trade it. If the arrangement is a temp agency placement, the fear is calibrated — that’s the requisition where the comp band and the expected duration are both genuinely worse.
Why Is There No Official Count of Uber and DoorDash Workers?
Because the agency that collected the data has not released it.
The July 2023 Contingent Work Supplement included questions on digital platform employment — app-based work — that were deliberately excluded from the November 2024 release. BLS stated it intended to publish additional estimates “in the future, with the exact release date to be determined,” and that the public use microdata file would only follow once all releases were complete.
This is the second consecutive occurrence. The May 2017 supplement carried questions on electronically mediated employment; BLS withheld those results from the June 2018 release too, pending evaluation. A Federal Register notice for the 2023 round confirms the app-based and task-based questions were written specifically to replace the 2017 electronically-mediated items.
BLS fielded the supplement again in May 2025 and, per a Federal Register notice published 10 February 2026, proposed further revisions to the digital labour platform questions for implementation in July 2026, with a comment period closing 13 April 2026. Three fieldings of app-based questions. No published app-based estimates.
The Federal Reserve has been more forthcoming but less consistent. SHED asked about informal earning activity from 2016 through 2021, dropped the questions in 2022 and 2023, restored them in 2024 in a form deliberately aligned to the BLS supplement — and the 2025 SHED report, published 13 May 2026 from an October 2025 fielding, carries no gig work section at all. Its employment chapter covers job quality and generative AI adoption instead.
Axis Intelligence Research therefore treats the Federal Reserve’s October 2024 platform-task figure of 4% of adults as the most recent authoritative U.S. measurement of app-arranged gig work available as of August 2026, and notes that the Government Accountability Office recommended in 2023 that federal agencies coordinate their definitions of gig and nonstandard work precisely because this fragmentation was already visible.
What the platform-task population looks like
| Measure | Platform-task workers | All gig-activity doers | Adults doing no gig activity | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Doing okay or living comfortably | 55% | 65% | 75% | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Paid all prior month’s bills in full | 71% | 79% | 85% | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Savings to cover three months | 42% | 50% | 56% | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Has health insurance, any source | 86% | 88% | 92% | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Has a non-gig main job | 41% | 51% | 57% | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Says it lets them work flexible hours | 78% | 55% | — | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Wishes the pay were more consistent | 61% | 49% | — | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
| Wishes it came with benefits | 42% | 28% | — | Federal Reserve SHED 2024 |
The flexibility finding and the consistency finding are both the highest in the table, from the same respondents. Platform work delivers on the schedule promise more completely than any other gig category and disappoints on the pay-predictability promise more completely than any other gig category. Ninety-six percent of everyone doing gig activities spent under 35 hours a week on them; 70% spent under five.
What Is the Gig Economy Worth? Platform Revenue and Worker Earnings
Market-size estimates for “the global gig economy” come from commercial research firms whose methodologies are not independently audited, so Axis Intelligence Research does not publish one. Company filings are auditable, and they establish the floor.
Uber reported $193.5 billion in full-year 2025 gross bookings across 13.567 billion trips in its fourth-quarter results filed with the SEC on 4 February 2026 — an average of $14.26 of gross bookings per completed trip, on Axis Intelligence Research’s calculation from the two disclosed figures. Monthly active platform consumers reached 202 million in Q4 2025. Uber’s own definition note states plainly that gross bookings exclude tips earned by drivers.
DoorDash reported generating over $20 billion in earnings for Dashers during 2025 and nearly $75 billion in sales for local merchants across more than 40 countries, alongside Q4 2025 marketplace gross order value of $29.7 billion on 903 million orders.
| Metric | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Uber gross bookings | $193.5B | FY2025 | Uber 8-K/EX-99.1, SEC |
| Uber trips | 13,567M | FY2025 | Uber 8-K/EX-99.1, SEC |
| Uber gross bookings per trip (Axis calculation) | $14.26 | FY2025 | Axis calculation on Uber filing |
| Uber monthly active platform consumers | 202M | Q4 2025 | Uber 8-K/EX-99.1, SEC |
| DoorDash earnings paid to Dashers | $20B+ | FY2025 | DoorDash Q4/FY2025 results |
| DoorDash marketplace GOV | $29.7B | Q4 2025 | DoorDash Q4/FY2025 results |
| DoorDash total orders | 903M | Q4 2025 | DoorDash Q4/FY2025 results |
Two of the largest gig platforms on earth disclose worker-side economics at completely different resolutions. DoorDash publishes an aggregate earnings figure; Uber publishes bookings and explicitly excludes tips from it. Neither publishes an hourly rate, a utilization rate, or a headcount by activity level in its financial statements. That asymmetry is exactly what the EU is about to legislate away.
What Changes on 2 December 2026? The EU Platform Work Directive
Directive (EU) 2024/2831, signed 23 October 2024 and published in the Official Journal on 11 November 2024, must be transposed into national law by all member states by 2 December 2026. Its headline provision is the rebuttable legal presumption of employment: where facts indicate direction and control, the relationship is presumed to be employment, and the burden of proving otherwise falls on the platform. Article 5(6) confirms the presumption applies only from that date forward, including for contracts already running.
For anyone who counts gig workers for a living, Article 17 matters more.
From the transposition date, platforms must make available to competent authorities and worker representatives: the number of persons performing platform work, disaggregated by level of activity; their contractual or employment status; the general terms applying to those relationships; and, on request, average duration of activity, average weekly hours, and average income. The information must be given for each member state separately and refreshed at least every six months.
That is a mandatory, disaggregated, six-monthly workforce census of the platform economy — the thing that has never existed anywhere.
Two jurisdictions, one month, opposite directions
The United States moved the other way in the same window. Section 70432 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed 4 July 2025, retroactively repealed the American Rescue Plan Act’s phase-down of the Form 1099-K reporting threshold. The IRS confirmed in IR-2025-107 on 23 October 2025 that third-party settlement organisations need not file a 1099-K unless payments exceed $20,000 and transactions exceed 200. Section 70433 separately raised the 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC threshold from $600 to $2,000 for tax year 2026.
The $600 threshold would have generated an information return for essentially every serious platform earner. The restored threshold generates one for a small minority.
| Jurisdiction | Change | Effective | Direction of visibility |
|---|---|---|---|
| EU | Platform headcount and status reporting to authorities, six-monthly (Art. 17) | 2 Dec 2026 | Increases |
| EU | Rebuttable presumption of employment (Art. 5) | 2 Dec 2026 | Increases |
| US | Form 1099-K threshold restored to $20,000 / 200 transactions | Retroactive, TY2025+ | Decreases |
| US | Form 1099-NEC and 1099-MISC threshold raised $600 → $2,000 | TY2026 | Decreases |
On the 43 million figure. Nearly every article about the directive states that 43 million people do platform work in the EU. That number is a projection, not a measurement. The European Council’s own infographic attributes it to the Commission’s December 2021 impact assessment, which measured 28.3 million platform workers in 2022 — 2 million employed, 26.3 million self-employed, roughly 5 million of the latter likely misclassified — and projected 52% growth to 43 million by 2025. Axis Intelligence Research treats the 43 million figure as an unvalidated five-year-old projection and cites 28.3 million (2022) as the last measured EU value. The Article 17 returns will settle it, and 2027 is the first year anyone will be able to check the projection against a count.
David Park: Attrition data taught the workforce field this lesson twenty years ago. You cannot manage a population you refuse to count, and every organisation that says it lacks the data usually means it declined to collect it. The EU decided to collect it. The US decided that fewer information returns is a feature.
Methodology
Collection. All figures were retrieved from primary documents during the production session on 5 August 2026: the BLS Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements release for July 2023 (USDL-24-2267, published 8 November 2024) including Tables A, 5, 9, 10, 11, 12 and 13; the Federal Reserve’s Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2024 (May 2025) and in 2025 (May 2026); Directive (EU) 2024/2831 as published in the Official Journal; the European Council’s digital platform workers infographic; IRS release IR-2025-107; Uber’s Q4/FY2025 results as filed with the SEC; and DoorDash’s Q4/FY2025 results. Every prose figure has a row in the accompanying CSV with source organisation, document, URL, and retrieval date.
WASI formula. WASI = (0.40 × earnings ratio) + (0.35 × coverage ratio) + (0.25 × stability ratio), where each ratio is the arrangement’s value divided by the traditional-arrangement value from the same BLS table, expressed as a percentage and capped at 100. The stability ratio uses (1 − contingent share within arrangement) ÷ (1 − 0.0364), where 0.0364 is the contingent share within traditional arrangements (5,296 ÷ 145,536 from Table 12). All arithmetic was verified computationally before publication. The July 2023 reading is the baseline reading; no prior readings exist and none are implied.
Unduplicated headcount formula. Unduplicated arrangement population = (people with the arrangement on their sole or main job) + (people with the arrangement on their second job only), both taken from Table 13 of USDL-24-2267, which reports the both-jobs overlap explicitly. Shares use total employment of 161,878,000 from Table 1.
Deliberate exclusions. Axis Intelligence Research does not publish a global gig economy market size, because the circulating figures originate with commercial research firms whose methodologies are not independently auditable and whose definitions of the market differ materially. We do not merge BLS arrangement data with Federal Reserve SHED data into a single headcount: BLS surveys employed people about job arrangements, SHED surveys all adults about earning activities in a calendar month, and the universes are not compatible. We report both and say which is which.
Data flagged as older. The BLS Contingent Work Supplement reference period is July 2023. It is flagged [older data] in the CSV because it remains the most recent published federal measurement of U.S. work arrangements; the May 2025 fielding has not been released. The EU’s 28.3 million platform-worker figure carries a 2022 reference date for the same reason.
About This Dataset
Contents. 90 observations covering U.S. work arrangement counts and shares (July 2023), U.S. gig activity participation and economic outcomes (October 2024), WASI component values and readings by arrangement, EU platform work population and regulatory milestones, U.S. tax reporting thresholds, and platform financial metrics from SEC filings.
Provenance. Every row carries source_org, source_document, source_url, retrieved_date, is_primary, axis_calculated, and, where Axis-calculated, a method_note pointing to the formula disclosed above.
Licence. CC BY 4.0. Free to reuse, redistribute, and build on with attribution. No email required.
Citation line: Axis Intelligence Research, Gig Economy Statistics 2026, 2026.
Update policy. This page is revised when the data changes, not on a calendar. Triggers: BLS publishes the digital platform employment estimates from any Contingent Work Supplement fielding; BLS releases the May 2025 supplement; the Federal Reserve restores gig questions to SHED; EU member states begin filing Article 17 returns after 2 December 2026; or the IRS changes an information-reporting threshold.
Corrections. Errors reported to [email protected] are corrected with a dated note on this page. See /corrections/.
Cite This Research
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Park, D. (2026, August 5). Gig economy statistics 2026: How many gig workers there actually are. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/gig-economy-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research, and David Park. “Gig Economy Statistics 2026: How Many Gig Workers There Actually Are.” Axis Intelligence, 5 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/gig-economy-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and David Park. “Gig Economy Statistics 2026: How Many Gig Workers There Actually Are.” Axis Intelligence, August 5, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/gig-economy-statistics/.
BibTeX:
@techreport{axis2026gig,
title = {Gig Economy Statistics 2026: How Many Gig Workers There Actually Are},
author = {{Axis Intelligence Research} and Park, David},
institution = {Axis Intelligence},
year = {2026},
month = {August},
url = {https://axis-intelligence.com/gig-economy-statistics/}
}
Frequently Asked Questions
Does a second job driving for a delivery app make me an independent contractor in federal statistics?
In the July 2023 Contingent Work Supplement, yes — but only in Table 13, not in the headline. BLS classified 1.916 million people as independent contractors on their second job, 22.8% of all multiple jobholders, and reported them separately from the 11.9 million counted on sole or main jobs. Axis Intelligence Research finds 1.593 million of those people appear in no other count, which is why the unduplicated total is 13.5 million.
Why do gig economy headcounts differ by tens of millions between sources?
Three variables drive almost all of it: whether second and supplemental jobs count, whether the reference period is a week or a year, and whether the universe is employed people or all adults. BLS counts arrangements on a specific job during a reference week among the employed. The Federal Reserve counts earning activities in a calendar month among all adults. Annual-participation surveys count anyone who did any paid independent work in twelve months. None is wrong; they answer different questions.
Is independent contracting more precarious than a regular job?
Less than the coverage implies. On the Work Arrangement Security Index, independent contractors score 89.0 against a traditional-employment baseline of 100, driven mainly by lower median earnings ($949 versus $1,132 weekly, full-time) and lower health coverage (74.2% versus 84.9%). Their contingency rate — the share who do not expect the job to last — is 4.06%, only marginally above the 3.64% for traditional arrangements. Temporary help agency work scores 65.7 and is the genuinely precarious arrangement in the federal data.
Will I still get a 1099-K from a gig platform in 2026?
Only if you exceed both thresholds. Under Section 70432 of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, confirmed by the IRS in IR-2025-107 on 23 October 2025, third-party settlement organisations file Form 1099-K only when payments to a payee exceed $20,000 and transactions exceed 200. The planned $600 threshold never took effect. Income remains taxable whether or not a form is issued — the threshold governs paperwork, not liability.
What does the EU Platform Work Directive require platforms to disclose, and when?
From 2 December 2026, Article 17 requires digital labour platforms to make available to competent authorities and worker representatives the number of people performing platform work disaggregated by activity level, their contractual or employment status, the applicable general terms and conditions, and the intermediaries used — provided separately for each member state and updated at least every six months. Average duration, weekly hours, and income must be supplied on request.
Are most platform workers doing it as their main job?
No. Federal Reserve data from October 2024 shows 41% of people doing app-arranged platform tasks held a non-gig main job, and across all gig-activity doers only 21% considered the activity their main job. Ninety-six percent spent under 35 hours a week on gig activities and 70% spent under five hours.
Which measure should a journalist or researcher cite for the US gig workforce?
State the instrument alongside the number. For work arrangements as a labour-market structure, cite BLS USDL-24-2267 and use the unduplicated 13.5 million rather than the 11.9 million headline, since second-job independent contracting is exactly the population most stories are about. For app-based gig work specifically, cite the Federal Reserve’s 4% of adults, and note that no federal agency has published a direct app-based headcount.
When will the US publish an official count of app-based gig workers?
No date has been announced. BLS collected app-based work questions in July 2023 and stated the release date was to be determined; it fielded the supplement again in May 2025; and a Federal Register notice published 10 February 2026 proposed revised digital labour platform questions for a July 2026 implementation. This page’s review trigger fires on the day any of those estimates publish.
Why does this page not give a global gig economy market size?
Because the circulating dollar figures come from commercial research firms whose methodologies are not independently auditable and whose market definitions differ materially from each other. Publishing one would be compilation dressed as measurement. Company filings are auditable, so this page reports those instead: Uber’s $193.5 billion in FY2025 gross bookings and DoorDash’s $20 billion-plus in 2025 Dasher earnings, both from SEC-filed documents.
Axis Intelligence Research is the data journalism and research division of Axis Intelligence. This analysis is based on published primary documents — federal statistical releases, EU legislation, IRS guidance, and SEC filings — retrieved and read on 5 August 2026. No hands-on testing underlies this page; all quantitative claims trace to the accompanying dataset.8.