To find out how much side hustles actually pay, I built The 2026 MoneyPantry Side Hustle Real Wage Index.
Across the 15 popular side hustles I studied, real hourly pay ranged from about $2 to $50 after fees, car costs, and unpaid time were counted.
That is often much less than the rate you see advertised. An app might show $20 an hour, for example, but that usually counts only active work, not waiting, driving between jobs, or unpaid screeners.
To account for those hidden hours and costs, I ran the same formula on every hustle, from Uber and DoorDash to freelance writing, AI training, plasma donation and online surveys.
Plasma donation had the highest real pay at about $20 to $50 an hour. DoorDash and Instacart landed in the bottom half, while survey sites came in last at about $2 to $5 an hour.
I’ve earned more than $20,000 from surveys since about 2005, a few dollars at a time, so I know firsthand how quickly unpaid time and screen-outs can cut into the advertised rate.
But surveys were only one part of what I found!
Key findings
- The hidden cost: With the typical side hustle, you lose about a third of your pay to fees, car costs and unpaid time
- Best pay ($20 to $50 an hour): Plasma donation, with the top end coming from new donor offers.
- Worst pay ($2 to $5 an hour): Online survey sites.
- The bottom tier: 5 of the 15 hustles can drop under $10 an hour, and 4 can dip below the $7.25 federal minimum wage.
- Car costs drag down drivers: All four driving hustles rank in the bottom half once car costs are counted.
Fast facts about this study
- 15 side hustles analyzed
- 3 gig categories covered: driving, online, and in-person
- 6 government and university sources
I rechecked every figure in September 2026. Each source is linked on the sentence it backs up, and the complete dataset is available as a downloadable spreadsheet.
The 2026 MoneyPantry Side Hustle Real Wage Index
Each hustle gets two numbers, both before income tax:
- Gross Est.: Typical pay for the time you’re actually working, before car costs and unpaid time.
- Real Pay: What you keep after platform fees and car costs, spread across every hour you gave it, paid or not.
The table is ranked by the middle of each Real Pay range. Many ranges overlap, so treat hustles that sit close together as roughly even.
| Side Hustle | Gross Est./hr | Real Pay/hr | Biggest Pay Drain |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plasma Donation | $53 to $67 | $20 to $50 | Capped at 2 visits a week |
| Local Task Gigs (TaskRabbit) | $20 to $35 | $17 to $30 | Travel time, slow start |
| Freelance Writing (Upwork) | $18 to $37 | $15 to $30 | Unpaid proposals |
| AI Training (DataAnnotation, Outlier) | $25 to $30 | $17 to $25 | Work droughts |
| Usability Testing (UserTesting) | About $30 | $15 to $26 | Unpaid screeners |
| Pet Sitting & Dog Walking (Rover) | $30 to $34 | $14 to $20 | Unpaid travel between walks |
| Reselling & Flipping (eBay) | About $22 | $12 to $20 | Unpaid sourcing trips |
| Mystery Shopping | $15 to $35 a shop | $7.50 to $20 | Unpaid prep and report writing |
| Online Tutoring (Preply) | $15 to $25 | $10 to $17 | Commission and free trials |
| Rideshare Driving (Uber, Lyft) | $20 to $22 | $11 to $15 | Gas and car costs |
| Grocery Delivery (Instacart) | $11 to $13 | $10 to $11 | Dead time between batches |
| Package Delivery (Amazon Flex) | $18 to $25 | $7 to $13 | Long routes, high mileage |
| Food Delivery (DoorDash, Uber Eats) | $12 to $15 | $6 to $12 | Tip dependence |
| Online Research Studies (Prolific) | $10 to $18 | $5 to $7 | Time spent waiting for studies |
| Survey Sites | $5 to $10 | $2 to $5 | Frequent screen-outs |
Data sources: Gridwise, Glassdoor, PayScale, ZipRecruiter, worker reports, and each platform’s own pay and fee pages. Rechecked September 2026.
Note: mystery shopping gross is per shop (about an hour on site), and plasma gross is per hour of donating.
How I worked out each side hustle’s real hourly pay
These numbers only help you if you trust the math, so here’s exactly how I built them.
I used the same formula for every hustle:
Real Pay = (what you earn after platform fees, minus car costs) ÷ every hour you put in, paid or not.
Say you earn $40 in two paid hours, spend $6 on gas, and wait another hour for orders. Your Real Pay is $34 ÷ 3 hours, or about $11 an hour.
Here’s where each piece comes from:
- Gross Est.: Each platform’s own pay page where one exists, Gridwise’s driver data for driving apps, and wage sites like Glassdoor, PayScale and ZipRecruiter where a platform publishes nothing.
- Platform fees: Taken out wherever a source reports pay before the platform’s cut.
- Car costs: 30 to 50 cents a mile, Gridwise’s figure for gas, tires, brakes and oil changes on most sedans. I used Gridwise’s pay-per-mile data for each app to turn that into an hourly cost, and took it out of the four driving gigs.
- Unpaid time: Screeners, dead time between orders, sourcing trips and report writing all count as work hours. Where no source measures that time, I estimated it from my own research and experience, checked against first-hand accounts from workers on Reddit and forums. I say so in that hustle’s section.
Where pay sources disagreed, I used the more cautious number.
Gas is the biggest car cost. Gridwise found fuel ate 17.4% of rideshare drivers’ gross hourly pay in the first quarter of 2026, up from 13.2%. On Uber’s $21.92 median, that’s about $3.80 an hour in gas alone.
The more miles a gig takes, the more it loses. That’s why Instacart loses the least and Amazon Flex loses the most.
Why I didn’t use the IRS mileage rate:
- The new rate: The IRS made a rare midyear increase to its standard mileage rate, 76 cents a mile for July through December 2026, up from 72.5 cents for the first half of the year.
- What it covers: That rate also includes things like depreciation and insurance, so it runs higher than the gas-and-wear figure I used.
- Why the driving numbers are a best case: With the IRS rate, they’d drop by several more dollars an hour.
Now let’s start with the gigs most people try first: driving.
Driving gigs: what Uber, DoorDash and Instacart really pay per hour
Driving gigs gross about $11 to $25 an hour depending on the app. After car costs, you might keep roughly $6 to $15.
Your city matters a lot. A 2024 UC Berkeley study of more than 52,000 trips in five metro areas found the median California rideshare driver made about $5.97 an hour without tips once costs were counted, well under the state’s $16 minimum wage. That study used older trip data and focused mostly on California, so treat it as a warning about the low end, not a number that fits every driver.
How much Uber and Lyft drivers make per hour
- Gross Est.: $20 to $22 an hour
- Real Pay: $11 to $15 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Gas, upkeep, and empty miles between rides.
The median Uber driver grossed $21.92 an hour in 2025, and the median Lyft driver grossed $20.38, based on Gridwise’s driver data.
Gridwise’s pay-per-mile data puts Uber drivers at about 23 miles an hour and Lyft drivers at about 19. At 30 to 50 cents a mile, Uber drivers spend roughly $7 to $11 an hour on their car, and Lyft drivers about $6 to $10. Take that out of each app’s median and both land at about $11 to $15.
One thing that surprised me is how little tips add here. Gridwise puts them at under 10% of Uber pay and about 5% of Lyft pay.
The top complaint from drivers is dead time. You’re paid per trip, so every minute waiting for the next ride pays $0. That’s why many drivers run both apps at once and take whichever ride comes first.
DoorDash and Uber Eats pay per hour after gas
- Gross Est.: $12 to $15 an hour
- Real Pay: $6 to $12 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Tip dependence.
Gridwise says the average DoorDash driver earned $12.43 gross per active hour in 2025, at about 1.5 deliveries an hour. That counts only active time, so the wait between orders isn’t in it. Uber Eats drivers had a median of $15.03 an hour.
Couriers cover about 11 to 14 miles an hour, based on Gridwise’s pay-per-mile data. At 30 to 50 cents a mile, that leaves DoorDash drivers about $6 to $8 an hour and Uber Eats drivers about $9 to $12.
Why delivery pay swings so much from shift to shift:
- Tips: In its 2026 report, Gridwise found tips make up roughly half of delivery pay per trip, so a few no-tip orders can drag down a whole shift.
- Timing: Many couriers work the dinner rush and skip orders that pay less than they’re willing to drive for. Those are two of the best ways to earn more on DoorDash.
If you deliver in New York City, your floor is much higher. The city sets a minimum pay rate of $22.13 an hour before tips for app delivery workers, and grocery apps like Instacart and Shipt are covered too.
Instacart vs. Spark: grocery delivery pay per hour
- Gross Est.: $11 to $13 an hour on Instacart, higher on Spark
- Real Pay: $10 to $11 an hour on Instacart
- Biggest pay drain: Dead time between batches.
Gridwise puts the median Instacart shopper’s pay at $12.21 an hour, below Uber Eats. A lot of each shift goes to walking the aisles and waiting for batches.
The upside is less driving. Shoppers cover only about 4 miles an hour, so car costs take about $1 to $2 an hour, which leaves roughly $10 to $11.
Walmart’s Spark app had a median of $22.57 an hour in Gridwise’s data, about $10 an hour more than Instacart. If you have a Walmart nearby, run both apps and let Spark fill the gaps.
How much Amazon Flex pays per hour
- Gross Est.: $18 to $25 an hour
- Real Pay: $7 to $13 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Long routes that burn a lot of miles.
Amazon Flex lists $18 to $25 an hour, and Gridwise tracked a median of $21.35 gross, right in that range. Amazon Flex driver pay comes per block, and Amazon shows what you’ll earn before you schedule one.
Flex covers the most miles of the four driving gigs, and here’s what that costs you:
- Miles: Gridwise says routes can cover 80 to 150 miles per block, and the median driver finishes about one block every four hours. At the middle of that range, that’s about 29 miles an hour.
- Car costs: At 30 to 50 cents a mile, that’s roughly $9 to $14 an hour.
- What’s left: About $7 to $13 an hour.
Gridwise’s own after-cost estimate runs higher, at about $15 to $19 an hour, so treat my range as the cautious end.
Online side hustles ranked by real hourly pay
Online hustles skip the gas bill, but they lose pay to unpaid time instead. Real pay ran from about $2 to $30 an hour, with freelance writing and AI training near the top.
How much freelance writers make on Upwork
- Gross Est.: $18 to $37 an hour
- Real Pay: $15 to $30 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Unpaid proposals.
Upwork’s own rate data puts blog writers at $20 an hour for beginners and $41 for intermediate writers. PayScale puts the average freelance writer at $30.28 an hour.
Upwork charges a freelancer fee of 0% to 15% per contract. My Gross Est. takes out about 10%, the rate Upwork uses in its own examples.
The unpaid part is winning the work. Each proposal costs “Connects,” which Upwork sells at 15 cents each, and you don’t get them back if the client picks someone else. Once you count that pitching time, writers might keep roughly 80% to 85% of their after-fee rate.
Opening each proposal with a few lines about the client’s exact project can help you win more of the jobs you pay to pitch.
What AI training jobs pay on DataAnnotation and Outlier
- Gross Est.: $25 to $30 an hour for general work
- Real Pay: $17 to $25 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Work droughts and a one-time entry test.
DataAnnotation’s own FAQ page lists general projects starting at $25 to $30+ an hour, and coding, STEM and professional projects starting at $50 to $100+ an hour. Outlier doesn’t post hourly rates on its site.
What workers report getting runs lower. BreakingEven, which tracks worker-reported rates, puts general annotators at $17 to $25 an hour. I used that as my Real Pay instead of running my formula, since it already reflects what workers take home.
The common complaint is that the task queue can go empty without warning. These platforms hand out projects from AI companies as they come in, so when a project ends, your work can end with it. That’s why many workers sign up for two or three AI training platforms and cash out often.
How much UserTesting pays per test
- Gross Est.: About $30 an hour while testing
- Real Pay: $15 to $26 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Unpaid screener questions.
UserTesting doesn’t publish a rate card. Pay depends on the test type, length and demand, and your dashboard shows the amount before you start. One tester reports $10 for a test of up to 15 minutes and $30 for a 30-minute test, so $30 an hour while testing is a cautious estimate.
The gap comes from screeners. You answer them for free, and many end in a rejection. One 2026 UserTesting review puts it at about four or five screeners for every test you get, at 2 to 5 minutes each.
Here’s the math for one $10 test:
- Good day: A 15-minute test plus about 8 minutes of screeners takes 23 minutes, which is about $26 an hour.
- Slow day: A 15-minute test plus about 25 minutes of screeners takes 40 minutes, which is about $15 an hour.
Bad days go lower. The tester I mentioned above once sat through two hours of screeners without qualifying for a single test. That’s one person’s report, not a typical day.
Signing up for a few sites like UserTesting gives you more tests to try for. Payment goes to your PayPal usually 14 days after you finish a test.
What Preply tutors keep after commission
- Gross Est.: $15 to $25 an hour
- Real Pay: $10 to $17 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Commission and trial lessons that pay $0.
Preply’s commission model keeps 100% of every trial lesson with a new student. After that it takes 33% of your lessons, dropping to 28% after your first 20 hours of teaching and down to 18% for the most experienced tutors.
Here, Gross Est. is the lesson price you set, and Real Pay is what’s left after the 33% starting commission. Free trial lessons aren’t counted, so they would pull it lower.
Pricing a few dollars higher and pointing trial students toward a lesson package can help cover those free hours.
Prolific pay per hour for research studies
- Gross Est.: $10 to $18 an hour
- Real Pay: $5 to $7 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Time spent waiting for studies.
Prolific is the only hustle here that forces a minimum hourly rate on the people paying you. Its payment rules make researchers pay at least $8 an hour, and $12 is the recommended rate.
The problem is finding studies. They fill fast, so a lot of your time goes to checking for new ones. One tracker says most studies pay $10 to $18 an hour, but active users earn about $80 to $200 a month with 30 to 60 minutes of effort a day.
Spread over 15 to 30 hours a month, that’s about $5 to $7 an hour. That’s why Prolific lands near the bottom even with its pay floor.
How much survey sites like Swagbucks really pay
- Gross Est.: Roughly $5 to $10 an hour (my estimate)
- Real Pay: $2 to $5 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Getting screened out partway through.
Paid online surveys came in last. One site that tracks survey hourly rates puts Swagbucks surveys at $2 to $5 an hour and says disqualification rates at Survey Junkie hover around 30% to 50%.
You get screened out because brands only need answers from certain types of people, and finding that out can take minutes of your unpaid time. My own real rate landed in the same $2 to $5 range once screen-outs were counted.
No source I found tracks pay per hour of actual survey time, so the $5 to $10 gross is my own estimate for the surveys you finish. It’s based on about 20 years of my own surveys, where a typical one paid me $1 to $5, checked against first-hand accounts on Reddit and online forums.
If you like answering questions for money, Prolific pays a little better for your time, as long as studies are available.
In-person side hustles that pay the most per hour
If you’d rather get off the couch, in-person hustles ranged from about $7.50 to $50 an hour in real pay, and the top payer in the whole index is one of them.
How much donating plasma pays per hour
- Gross Est.: $53 to $67 an hour of donating (my estimate)
- Real Pay: $20 to $50 an hour, once the full visit is counted
- Biggest pay drain: A limit of 2 donations a week.
Plasma ranks first, but a lot of that comes from new donor offers.
What plasma centers pay:
- New donors: CSL Plasma advertises up to $800 in your first month and notes the offer varies by location. Spread over the roughly eight visits you can make in a month, that’s about $100 a visit.
- Regular donors: One pay tracker puts regular donors at about $40 to $60 a visit, or roughly $200 to $500 a month.
- Limit: FDA rules allow no more than two donations in seven days, which caps how much you can earn.
Real Pay counts the whole visit. CSL Plasma says a donation usually takes about 90 minutes to two hours once you count check-in and waiting. A $100 new donor visit over two hours is $50 an hour, the top of my range. A regular $40 to $60 visit over 90 minutes to two hours is about $20 to $40 an hour.
Gross Est. counts only the time in the chair. From my research, the donation itself usually takes 45 to 90 minutes on your first visits and closer to 30 to 45 minutes after that. Using the longer end of each range, $40 over 45 minutes is about $53 an hour, and a $100 new donor visit over 90 minutes is about $67.
Rates change by center, your weight and current promotions, so compare the highest-paying plasma centers near you and check the pay chart in your local center’s app before you go.
Tip: Your first few visits take longer, so wait a few visits before you judge the hourly rate.
What TaskRabbit Taskers make per hour
- Gross Est.: $20 to $35 an hour
- Real Pay: $17 to $30 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Travel between jobs and a slow first month.
TaskRabbit’s own blog says it plainly: “As a Tasker, you always take home 100% of the hourly rate you set, plus all tips.” Clients pay TaskRabbit’s service fee on top.
Glassdoor puts the median Tasker at $25 an hour, with most earning between $22 and $36, though that’s based on a small number of reports. Skilled jobs and pricier cities can run well above that.
Once travel time between jobs is counted, I estimate Taskers keep about 85% of the rate they set. The main upfront cost is a one-time $25 registration fee.
Jobs can come slowly at first. The reason? Clients tend to look at reviews, and you don’t have any yet. Pricing a little under similar Taskers in your area for your first ten jobs can help. Raise your rate once the reviews stack up.
How much Rover dog walkers keep after fees
- Gross Est.: $30 to $34 an hour
- Real Pay: $14 to $20 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Unpaid travel between walks.
Rover’s own rate page puts the national average at $21.45 for a 30-minute walk. Two back-to-back walks bill about $43 an hour.
What Rover takes depends on where you live:
- Most of the U.S.: A 20% service fee from sitters, which leaves about $34 an hour. That’s the top of my Gross Est.
- Seattle, Chicago and Dallas areas: A newer pilot program charges 30% on a new client until you’ve booked $600 with them, then drops to 15%, and to 10% after $1,200. That 30% sets the bottom of my Gross Est.
- California: It works differently. Sitters keep the rate they set, and Rover adds its fees on top for the pet owner.
Once travel time between bookings is counted, I estimate walkers keep a little under half to 60% of that gross rate. Keeping your clients in one neighborhood and turning first bookings into weekly regulars can help a lot.
What eBay flipping pays per hour
- Gross Est.: About $22 an hour
- Real Pay: $12 to $20 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Unpaid sourcing trips.
ZipRecruiter data puts the average eBay seller job at about $21.56 an hour. That’s for paid seller jobs, so treat it as a rough guide to what your own flipping time might earn.
eBay’s own selling fees run 13.6% in most categories, plus 30 cents on orders of $10 or less and 40 cents on bigger orders. One detail trips up new sellers: that percentage applies to the total sale, including shipping and sales tax, not just the item price.
Your hours aren’t just listing and shipping. They also include the thrift store trips where you find nothing. I learned this firsthand when I flipped used books from secondhand stores like the Salvation Army. The slowest part was checking what each book was worth, since I typed every ISBN in by hand.
No source tracks how much unpaid sourcing time resellers put in, so this Real Pay is my estimate. I based it on my own book flipping and research, checked it against first-hand accounts from resellers on Reddit, and assumed sourcing adds 10% to 80% on top of your listing and shipping time, depending on how often your trips come up empty. At $21.56 an hour, that works out to about $12 to $20.
Batching your sourcing into one weekly run can save a lot of that time.
Mystery shopping pay per hour, counting report time
- Gross Est.: $15 to $35 a shop
- Real Pay: $7.50 to $20 an hour
- Biggest pay drain: Unpaid prep and report writing.
One provider, RealityCheck, pays about $15 to $35 a shop. It says each one takes about 45 minutes to an hour on site, plus about 30 minutes of prep and 30 minutes of data entry afterward.
So every shop is really a job of close to two hours. A $15 shop over two hours works out to $7.50 an hour, and a $35 shop over an hour and 45 minutes is about $20.
New shoppers may start lower. BestMark, another mystery shopping company, says shops usually pay $7 to $20 when you’re just starting out, until companies trust you with better-paying ones.
Bonuses can push you the other way. Some companies raise pay on shops nobody has claimed near the deadline, and stacking a few of those along one driving route can move you toward the top of the range.
I keep an updated list of legit mystery shopping companies if you want to try this one.
Average side hustle pay: what the numbers show
So how much do side hustles actually pay on average? Across all 15, real pay averaged about $16 an hour.
- Average Gross Est.: about $24 an hour
- Average Real Pay: about $16 an hour
- Median Real Pay: $13.75 an hour
- Average share of gross lost per hustle to fees, car costs and unpaid time: about 35%
- Median share lost per hustle: 33%
These use the midpoint of each range. Whether you average each hustle’s own loss or compare the two averages above, it comes out to about 35%.
Still, the number that matters for you is the row for the hustle you’re thinking about, and even that isn’t all yours to keep.
Side hustle taxes: what comes out of your pay
Every number above is before taxes, and taxes are where a lot of new side hustlers mess up.
Whatever hustle you pick, these tax rules change what you keep:
- Self-employment tax: You owe 15.3% self-employment tax once your net side hustle earnings reach $400 for the year.
- The 1099-K rule: The IRS says payment apps and marketplaces only have to send a Form 1099-K once you pass $20,000 and 200 transactions in a year. You still owe tax below that line.
- The mileage deduction: If you drive, use a mileage tracking app to log every business mile. At 76 cents a mile, 5,000 miles driven in the second half of 2026 is a $3,800 deduction.
The IRS Gig Economy Tax Center explains what to report and which records to keep.
Tip: Set aside part of every payout the day it arrives, so quarterly taxes don’t catch you short.
Limitations of this study
Keep these in mind before treating any number here as fixed:
- These are my estimates, not official pay rates. Sources measure pay differently, including platform rates, driver data, job-site wages, and worker reports. I used the same formula across all 15 hustles, but close rankings aren’t exact.
- These are national figures. Pay varies by location and demand. Local rules can also change the math, such as New York’s $22.13 delivery pay floor.
- Skilled and strategic workers can earn much more. Experienced plumbers, copywriters, coders and others can beat these ranges. So can people who choose the best hours, stack apps or skip low-paying jobs. These numbers describe typical pay, not the ceiling.
- Some figures rely on worker reports or my estimates. AI training, UserTesting, Prolific and survey pay come from worker and tracker reports rather than official rate cards. My eBay real-pay, survey gross-rate and plasma gross-rate figures are estimates, with the math shown in those sections.
- Driving pay is likely overstated. Gridwise’s 30 to 50 cents per mile does not include insurance or the value your car loses. Driving figures also exclude unpaid waiting time between trips, which means actual hourly pay may be lower.
- Mileage can affect other hustles too. I only deducted mileage costs from the four driving gigs. Rover, TaskRabbit, mystery shopping and eBay sourcing can also require driving, so their real pay may be somewhat lower.
- Averages and medians use range midpoints. Most sources report ranges, not single figures.
- The eBay gross is a job wage, not flipping profit. It comes from paid eBay seller jobs, not from buying and reselling items yourself.
Research methodology
I’ve spent about 20 years working on side hustles and ways to make money online, and I’ve done two of these hustles myself: surveys since about 2005, and flipping used books on eBay years ago. My own survey results matched the tracker numbers.
For every hustle, I started with the platform’s own pages: fee and help pages from Upwork, eBay, Preply, TaskRabbit, Rover, Prolific, UserTesting, DataAnnotation, Amazon Flex and CSL Plasma. For the driving apps, I used Gridwise’s driver data, and where a platform publishes no pay figures, I used Glassdoor, PayScale, ZipRecruiter and worker reports. Tax and pay-floor rules come from IRS.gov and NYC.gov, and the low-end driving warning comes from the UC Berkeley Labor Center.
How to cite this study
You’re welcome to use these numbers with a link back to this page. Suggested citation: “The 2026 MoneyPantry Side Hustle Real Wage Index,” MoneyPantry.com, September 2026.
Which side hustles are worth your time in 2026?
For most people, one side hustle on its own won’t replace a full paycheck.
A better setup is to pair a high-paying hustle that has a limit on how often you can do it with one that grows with your effort. For example, donate plasma twice a week for a steady few hundred dollars, then add flipping, writing or TaskRabbit jobs.
Here’s one thing you can do tonight: take last month’s side hustle income and divide it by every hour you gave it, including the dead time. That number tells you whether to keep going or switch.
It’s also the real answer to how much side hustles actually pay, and it’s almost always less than the app’s rate.
If you’ve already tracked yours, share it in the comments so other readers can compare.
