Side Income Without the Guesswork
A lot of people are looking for a practical way to bring in extra money right now: retirees who want a few paying jobs a month, parents with a free Saturday, tradespeople filling gaps between bigger projects. The usual advice about side income is long on encouragement and short on numbers. This article takes the opposite approach: it reports what consumers actually budgeted for everyday jobs posted on GigNGo, a local services marketplace, so you can see what this kind of work pays before you spend an hour on it.
A note on what these numbers are: each figure below comes from the stated budget of a real job posted by a real consumer on GigNGo. They are what people offered to pay, not survey answers and not estimates from a pricing guide. Because local workers on GigNGo keep 100 percent of what the consumer pays — there are no lead fees and no commission — the budget on a job is a fair proxy for what the local who takes it can earn.
The Numbers: Nine Services, 148 Real Jobs
The table covers every service category with at least five posted jobs in the current benchmark data, sorted by median budget. The typical range is the middle half of jobs — the 25th to 75th percentile — so one unusually large or small job does not distort the picture.
| Service | Median job budget | Typical range (25th–75th percentile) | Jobs in sample |
|---|---|---|---|
| Painting | $300 | $200 – $483 | 16 |
| House Cleaning | $205 | $150 – $320 | 31 |
| Handyman | $200 | $88 – $250 | 22 |
| Moving Help | $150 | $120 – $250 | 35 |
| Furniture Assembly | $130 | $100 – $150 | 10 |
| Lawn Care | $125 | $45 – $200 | 9 |
| Snow Removal | $100 | $60 – $225 | 7 |
| Lawn Mowing | $70 | $40 – $160 | 10 |
| TV Mounting | $65 | $50 – $135 | 8 |
Source: budgets of 148 real jobs posted on the GigNGo marketplace, across the nine categories shown. Data current as of August 19, 2026. Medians, not averages. Categories with fewer than five posted jobs are excluded.
Three Things the Data Shows
Painting carries the highest typical budgets. At a $300 median it tops the table, with a typical range from $200 to $483 — the widest upper reach of any category with enough jobs to measure. House cleaning and handyman work sit behind at $205 and $200. None of the three requires a trade license in most places; they require care, reliability and basic equipment.
The steadiest demand is for straightforward physical help. Moving help is the most-posted category at 35 jobs, house cleaning next at 31, handyman at 22. Those three account for 88 of the 148 jobs in this edition. It is unglamorous work and it is what people actually pay for.
The cheapest jobs are not the worst jobs. TV mounting has the lowest median at $65 and lawn mowing sits at $70, but both are short. A $70 mow that takes forty minutes compares differently to a $300 paint job that takes two days than the headline numbers suggest. Judge by the hour, not the ticket.
Editions, and how to read the changes
This page is refreshed each quarter and dated, so a figure cited from one edition stays true to that edition. Two have been published so far.
| Edition | Jobs in publishable categories | Categories clearing the five-job minimum |
|---|---|---|
| July 2026 | 107 | 9 |
| August 2026 (current) | 148 | 9 |
Some medians moved between the two editions, and the honest answer is that we cannot yet tell you why. Painting rose from a $225 median to $300, and lawn care fell from $190 to $125.
The likeliest explanation is the season rather than the market. Late summer is when exterior painting gets booked, and exterior jobs are larger than a hallway repaint. Lawn care in August is mostly routine mowing, where spring is when people pay for the heavy clean-up that has built over winter. Both moves point the way seasonality would push them.
What we cannot do is prove it. Both categories have fewer than twenty jobs behind them, so a handful of postings moves the middle on its own, and two editions in consecutive months cannot separate a seasonal pattern from ordinary sample noise. Establishing that needs the same quarter measured across more than one year. Until then, treat the levels as informative and any movement between editions as unexplained. We will keep saying so in each edition rather than dress a small sample up as a trend.
The wider benchmark set behind this page held 197 posted jobs across 24 service categories at the August cut. Fifteen of those categories had fewer than five jobs and are excluded here for that reason.
Methodology
Every number on this page is computed from the budgets of real jobs posted by consumers on the GigNGo marketplace, as recorded in GigNGo's public price-benchmark data on August 19, 2026. We report medians rather than averages because a single large job can pull an average far above what a typical job pays; the median is the middle job. The typical range is the 25th to 75th percentile of budgets in each category. Categories with fewer than five posted jobs are excluded because samples that small are not reliable. Budgets reflect what the consumer offered for the job; the final agreed price can differ, and these figures are not a guarantee of any individual worker's income.
What This Means If You Are Starting Out
If you are weighing this kind of work, the data suggests a sensible path: start with the high-demand, low-barrier categories — moving help, house cleaning, furniture assembly — to build reviews, then add higher-budget work such as painting or handyman jobs as your profile grows. On GigNGo, trying this costs nothing: creating a worker profile is free, browsing nearby jobs is free, and applying is free, because GigNGo charges no lead fees and takes no commission. If you have ever paid for leads on another platform, our lead fee calculator shows what that habit costs over a year.
One more practical point: because these are posted budgets, you can see the money before you commit the time. A local browsing GigNGo sees each job's budget up front and simply chooses which offers are worth making. There is no fee to find out, which is not true of platforms that charge for every lead.
Current per-service numbers, updated from live marketplace data, are always available at gigngo.org/earnings.