Fiverr's Understanding the Impact of the Freelance Economy study focuses on what they call "specialized freelancers". These are independent workers who provide professional, technical, or creative services.
As the report chart below shows, there are about 2.5 million "specialized freelancers" in the U.S.
Fiverr and their research partner, Rockbridge Associates, dug deep into the U.S. Census non-employer business dataset for this analysis.
Non-employer businesses are businesses that have a business owner, but no traditional employees. The data comes from tax records (forms 1120, 1065, or Schedule C).
Fiverr and Rockbridge analyzed the non-employer industry data to develop their estimates for the number of "specialized freelancers" (see the report for more details on their methodology, which is quite clever).
The most recent non-employer data is from 2015 and it showed were are about 24.3 million U.S. non-employer businesses at that time. So the specialized freelancers are about 10% of all non-employers.
The non-employer data also provides some geographic details. This allowed Fiverr and Rockbridge to develop city estimates for the top 15 U.S. metro areas.
As the report list below shows, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago are the top 3 cities in terms of the total number of specialized freelancers.
We've long tracked the non-employer business statistics. It was the dataset that first alerted us to the rise of independent workers back in 2006.
The non-employer data tends to get less attention than other government data on self-employment. This is because the data are messy and include a hodge podge of business entities that aren't related to self-employment, such as passive businesses, firms no longer in business and LLCs owned by major corporations.
But we find this data to be a useful general indicator of U.S. self-employment.
It's also one of the few sources of regional and metro area data on self-employment (and, in our opinion, the best one). So it was a good choice for the analysis done in this study.
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