I have a new report out today on our annual survey of the freelance economy. This year we are able to look at how freelancers are faring under COVID, and we learn a lot about the diversity & flexibility of freelancing. upwork.com/i/freelance-fo…
To start, it’s useful to characterize what has happened to the level of freelancing overall. What we found was that after covid a lot of people started freelancing for the first time. But we also had a lot of people pause freelancing.
One story that has been pushed is that the rush of new freelancers has crowded out previous freelancers, but looking at the data don’t think this is largely the case. New freelancers and paused freelancers are very different. Here are the differences:
New freelancers are largely:
More full time
More remote
Younger
More educated
In harder hit occupations
More likely to be male, urban, and caregivers
In contrast, paused freelancers are:
Freelancing on the side
Less remote
Less educated
In less hard hit occupations
More full time
More remote
Younger
More educated
In harder hit occupations
More likely to be male, urban, and caregivers
In contrast, paused freelancers are:
Freelancing on the side
Less remote
Less educated
In less hard hit occupations
For example, the top occupations for new freelancers are computers/mathematics and finance/business operations, for paused freelancers it’s education and construction. New freelancers in programming aren’t crowding out freelancers in ed.
Decline of side-gigs and rise of full-time freelancers is consistent with other data. In the CPS, self-employment share of employed is up while multiple jobholding is down. Non-employer business registrations are also up. 
Another factor driving the demand for some freelancers is that they have always been disproportionately remote, and there is obviously a major need for remote work now. Even before COVID, one in four freelancers was entirely remote.
However, we can also show that is was not *just* labor demand that increased, but labor supply also. This is clear in Upwork data, where freelancer registrations actually picked up before client registrations.
Uncertainty also affects supply & demand. When businesses are uncertain and have to respond to quickly changing conditions, freelancers help them be agile. For freelancers, lots of clients means diversifying when many are at risk of closing
Finally, flexibility is very valuable. For clients, they need to rapidly respond to business challenges. On Upwork, we see demand for customer services and a sustained increase in demand for ecommerce development and web and mobile design
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