Between January 28 and July 12, 2026, households along the Philadelphia–New York corridor posted 35 hiring requests on the GigNGo local-services marketplace, with a typical stated budget of $125 per job — and more than a third of those jobs, 37 percent, were odd jobs that fit no standard service category. Small work dominates the corridor: odd jobs, small home repairs, and moving help together account for 77 percent of everything posted.
This report covers every hiring request posted on GigNGo within 40 miles of the Philadelphia–New York City axis during the period, after removing jobs flagged by the marketplace's scam screening. The sample is small — 35 jobs — and it describes activity on one marketplace, not the regional economy. Both points are covered plainly in the methodology below. Within those limits, the numbers are real: every figure on this page is computed directly from the jobs people actually posted and the budgets they actually stated.
Finding 1: The most-requested "service" is not a service category at all
The single largest group of corridor jobs — 13 of 35, or 37 percent — were errands and odd jobs that fit none of the standard home-services categories. These are the tasks no traditional contractor advertises for: one-off pickups, waiting in line, small favors around the house. Handyman work and small home repairs came second at 8 jobs (23 percent), and moving, hauling, and delivery help came third at 6 jobs (17 percent). Cleaning, painting, and yard work made up the remainder, at 3, 3, and 2 jobs respectively.
Taken together, the picture is consistent: people in the corridor come to a local-services marketplace mostly for small, immediate, hard-to-classify work — not for large renovation projects.
Finding 2: The typical corridor job carries a $125 budget, below the marketplace-wide median
The median stated budget across all 35 corridor jobs was $125, with the middle half of jobs falling between $50 and $200. That is below the $160 median across all 253 budgeted jobs posted on GigNGo nationwide over the same overall period — the corridor skews toward smaller tasks than the marketplace as a whole.
The category detail explains why. Small home repairs posted in the corridor carried a median budget of just $75 (8 jobs), well under the $200 national median for handyman services published in GigNGo's cost guides — corridor households are posting quick fixes, not half-day repair lists. Moving and hauling help ran the other way: a $200 median in the corridor (6 jobs) against a $150 national median for moving help, which fits a region where moving anything involves stairs, street parking, and city apartments.
Finding 3: Two-thirds of corridor demand sits at the New York end — but Philadelphia is the tighter market
Of the 35 corridor jobs, 23 (66 percent) were posted within 40 miles of New York City — Manhattan, Yonkers, Hoboken, Bayonne, Secaucus, Chappaqua — while 11 (31 percent) were posted within 40 miles of Center City Philadelphia, including Trenton, Collingswood, Marcus Hook, and Newark, Delaware. By state, New York accounted for 43 percent of corridor jobs, New Jersey 31 percent, Pennsylvania 20 percent, and Delaware 6 percent.
Supply tells a different story. GigNGo's public worker directory lists 43 local workers with usable locations inside the corridor: 32 of them around New York, but only 9 around Philadelphia. That means the Philadelphia metro had more jobs posted (11) than listed locals available to take them (9) — the only part of the corridor where demand outran listed supply during the period. For anyone in the Philadelphia area looking to earn money doing local work, the jobs are currently arriving faster than the people to do them.
Finding 4: Corridor activity is accelerating — mostly because the marketplace is
Thirty of the 35 corridor jobs (86 percent) were posted in the 90 days before this report, against 5 in the 90 days prior — a sixfold increase. We want to be straightforward about what that measures: GigNGo itself grew substantially over the spring of 2026, so this trend reflects the marketplace's own growth in the region at least as much as any change in underlying demand for local services. It should not be read as a regional economic indicator. What it does show is that the corridor dataset behind this report is getting denser, and future editions will rest on larger samples.
The data
| Service group | Jobs posted | Share | Median stated budget |
|---|---|---|---|
| Errands and other odd jobs | 13 | 37% | $125 |
| Handyman and small home repairs | 8 | 23% | $75 |
| Moving, hauling, and delivery help | 6 | 17% | $200 |
| House and home cleaning | 3 | 9% | Sample too small |
| Painting | 3 | 9% | Sample too small |
| Yard and outdoor work | 2 | 6% | Sample too small |
| All corridor jobs | 35 | 100% | $125 |
Jobs posted on GigNGo within 40 miles of the Philadelphia–New York City axis, January 28 – July 12, 2026, excluding jobs flagged by scam screening. Medians are reported only for groups with at least 5 budgeted jobs. Shares are rounded and may not sum to exactly 100 percent. Middle half of all corridor budgets: $50–$200. State split: New York 15 jobs (43%), New Jersey 11 (31%), Pennsylvania 7 (20%), Delaware 2 (6%).
See also the companion report on the corridor's larger end: New York Local Services Report 2026.
Methodology
What this data is. Every number in this report is computed from real hiring requests posted by consumers on the GigNGo marketplace, using the budget the consumer stated when posting (their estimated price, or the midpoint when they gave a range). Nothing is modeled, surveyed, or estimated from outside sources. Equally: this report describes activity on GigNGo's marketplace. It is not a measure of the whole local-services economy in the region, and it should not be cited as one.
Corridor definition. A job counts as inside the corridor if its posted location falls within 40 miles of the straight line between Center City Philadelphia and Lower Manhattan. Forty miles is the same radius GigNGo uses internally to group nearby towns into a single market, on the logic that a local worker can realistically serve anywhere in their metro. The corridor so defined spans four states: southeastern Pennsylvania, nearly all of central and northern New Jersey, New York City with lower Westchester, and the northern tip of Delaware. It excludes Pittsburgh and upstate New York.
Sample and date range. Of 294 hiring requests on the marketplace at the time of analysis, 25 were excluded because GigNGo's scam screening had flagged or hidden them, leaving 269. Of those, 35 fell inside the corridor, posted between January 28 and July 12, 2026. Medians are reported only where a group has at least 5 budgeted jobs; smaller groups are shown as counts only.
Why the corridor and not Philadelphia alone. Only 6 of the 35 corridor jobs were posted in the city of Philadelphia itself — too few to report city-level statistics honestly. Rather than dress up a thin sample, we widened the report to the full Philadelphia–New York corridor and say so plainly. As the marketplace grows in the region, future editions will break Philadelphia out on its own.
Supply counts. Local-worker supply comes from GigNGo's public worker directory. Of 994 listed profiles nationwide, 568 include usable location coordinates; the corridor counts (43 total, 9 around Philadelphia, 32 around New York) include only those, so true supply is somewhat undercounted everywhere. The comparison between the Philadelphia and New York ends of the corridor uses the same method on both sides.
Small-sample caveat. Thirty-five jobs is a small dataset. Medians are reasonably stable at these sizes; single large jobs are not — one $4,390 painting job sits in this sample, which is why this report leads with medians rather than averages throughout.
National category benchmarks referenced in this report (handyman $200, moving help $150, house cleaning $200) are the marketplace-wide medians published and continuously updated at gigngo.org/costs.
Media and citation
Journalists, researchers, and bloggers may cite any figure in this report with attribution to GigNGo and a link to this page (gigngo.org/philadelphia-local-services-report-2026). Suggested attribution: "according to marketplace data from GigNGo, a local-services platform."
GigNGo also publishes continuously updated national pricing data at gigngo.org/costs (what services cost consumers) and gigngo.org/earnings (what local workers earn per job), computed from real jobs using the same methodology. For questions about this report or the underlying data, reach us through gigngo.org/contact.