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, 107 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 | $225 | $175 – $483 | 10 |
| Handyman | $200 | $88 – $200 | 16 |
| House Cleaning | $200 | $120 – $250 | 21 |
| Lawn Care | $190 | $45 – $265 | 6 |
| Moving Help | $150 | $120 – $250 | 26 |
| Furniture Assembly | $105 | $50 – $150 | 7 |
| Snow Removal | $100 | $60 – $225 | 7 |
| Lawn Mowing | $70 | $40 – $160 | 9 |
| TV Mounting | $65 | $45 – $135 | 5 |
Source: budgets of 107 real jobs posted on the GigNGo marketplace, across the nine categories shown. Data current as of July 12, 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 $225 median, painting tops the table, and its typical range runs all the way from $175 to $483 — the widest upper range of any category with enough jobs to measure. Handyman work and house cleaning sit just behind at a $200 median each. None of these 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 single most-posted category in the sample at 26 jobs, with house cleaning next at 21 and handyman at 16. Those three categories alone account for 63 of the 107 jobs — roughly six in ten. For someone starting out, that matters as much as the price: a category with steady postings means steady chances to work.
Even the quickest jobs pay real money. TV mounting has the lowest median in the table at $65 and furniture assembly sits at $105, and both are jobs a capable person can often finish in an hour or two with ordinary tools. Lawn mowing's $70 median tells a similar story. These are not get-rich figures, and we will not pretend they are — but three or four such jobs in a weekend is a meaningful addition to a monthly budget.
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 July 12, 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.