America’s Self-Employment Landscape

In early 2000s, self-employment was on a rapid ascent in the United States. The number of Americans working on their own – those who consider themselves self-employed, not just freelancers doing side jobs – increased 4 percent annually from 2001 through 2005, and then grew 2 percent from 2005 to 2006. But then the early signs of the downturn began to appear, followed by the financial crisis and Great Recession, and self-employment growth came to a halt. New jobs of any kind became scarce, and even when employers started hiring post-recession, self-employment didn’t recover. Only since 2012 has there been positive growth, albeit slight.

For our latest report with CareerBuilder (download PDF), we documented self-employment trends before and after the Great Recession using EMSI’s dataset on self-employed workers. These are workers who, when surveyed by the U.S. Census Bureau, consider self-employment to be a significant part of their income or time working.

Key Findings

• For all the talk about more people wanting the independence of working on their own, self-employment jobs have declined 5 percent since 2009. The U.S. has an estimated 10 million self-employed jobs, nearly one million fewer than it had in 2006. By contrast, the number of jobs for salaried employees – those who work in traditional work settings – has risen 4 percent since 2009.

• The decline in self-employed jobs coincides with a rise in Americans working on the side to supplement their incomes. More people are getting second and third jobs, but fewer people are dropping their day jobs altogether to work on their own. According to a new CareerBuilder survey, 20 percent of full-time workers picked up a second job in 2013 or plan to do so in 2014.

• The biggest declines in self-employment have come in the farming and agriculture, construction, real estate, child care, and retail trade industries. The biggest gains have been in lower-wage fields – photographers, landscaping workers, maids, and personal care aides.

• Even with low-wage occupations at the top of the self-employment growth list, several high-wage occupations have made significant gains, most notably computer occupations such as web developers, market research analysts/specialists, and management analysts.

• Nearly two-thirds of self-employed jobs in the U.S. are taken up by men (62 percent), and more than 30 percent of the self-employed are 55 years and older. 

• Only North Dakota and Washington, D.C. have seen self-employment increases since 2009, and their gains have been minimal (5 percent and 1 percent, respectively). Among large metros, only five have seen at least 2 percent growth in self-employment jobs: Memphis (4 percent), Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk (3 percent), Austin (2 percent), Orlando (2 percent), and Las Vegas (2 percent).

Definition and Data Sources

EMSI’s self-employment dataset is based largely on the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, which EMSI combines with our other proprietary data and other publicly available sources. This dataset tracks proprietors who work for their own unincorporated business, practice, or farm. People with incorporated businesses are considered wage-and-salary workers for their own companies, and are thus not considered proprietors.

While not included in this study, EMSI also tracks what we call “extended proprietors” – those who do side gigs or earn income through a sole proprietorship or partnership, most often (but not always) in addition to their primary job. If surveyed, they would not list this extra work as their main source of income.

This report uses EMSI’s 2013.4 data release.

Monitoring Entrepreneurial Activity

EMSI’s proprietor datasets offer a window into entrepreneurial activity for any level of geography, but we caution against labeling all workers in the self-employed or extended proprietor classes as entrepreneurs. More accurately, inside the extended proprietors dataset are those who pursue extra work opportunities while maintaining their day job, while the self-employed dataset includes those who have taken the additional step and earn a significant part of their income through their own business. Once start-up owners incorporate their business, they fall under EMSI’s traditional wage-and-salary worker datasets.

National Trends

The U.S. has an estimated 10 million self-employed jobs. That’s 6.6 percent of all reported jobs, down from a high of 7.2 percent in 2006. A far larger percentage of workers hold freelance jobs or work on the side in some fashion in addition to their primary job (e.g., performing music on the weekend, coaching their child’s youth sports team, mowing lawns or doing other yard work in the summer). Freelancers Union estimates that nearly a third of the labor force are independent workers. Yet due to the limitations of publically available data from the government on proprietors, it’s difficult to pin down the exact share of the workforce who do side jobs versus those who earn income in partnerships and other ventures that aren’t necessarily jobs in the strict sense.

What’s clear, however, is that the number of workers who consider themselves self-employed is declining after a period of sustained growth. From 2001 to 2006, the self-employment workforce rose 19 percent – close to 1.8 million new jobs nationally. But since, the U.S. has lost 936,000 self-employed jobs, a 9 percent decrease.

Economic forces like the credit crisis and housing bubble either soured people on self-employment or made it harder for them to start and sustain their own businesses. No industry bears this out more than construction.

During the growth days of the early 2000s, construction was the biggest driver of new jobs among the self-employed. Even with a small decline during the 2001 recession, the construction industry, fueled by the housing boom, accounted for nearly 1 in 4 new self-employment jobs (418,000 total) from 2001 to 2006. Much of the jobs gains, however, have been wiped out since the downturn. Self-employed construction jobs dipped 13 percent from 2006 to 2013, a loss of 266,000 jobs.

Just as construction made up almost 25 percent of all new jobs during the boom period for self-employment, it has accounted for 28 percent of the jobs losses since. However, not every field inside the sector is bleeding jobs. For instance, self-employed jobs for construction laborers (as shown in Table 1) have expanded 10 percent since 2006. On the other hand, construction managers have declined 38 percent over that time. Based on these trends, there could be a comparable rebound in construction self-employment if the
housing recovery kicks into full gear.

Beyond construction, the biggest declines in self-employment have come in farming and agriculture, retail trade, and real estate. Jobs for self-employed real estate agents have dipped 22 percent since 2006, from approximately 317,000 to 246,000. And the drop-off in self-employed farmers and ranchers has been even more substantial – a 38 percent decline in jobs, which equates to 93,000 lost jobs.

The largest gains, meanwhile, have been among “managers, all other,” a catch-all management occupation, and three lower-wage occupations: landscaping workers, maids, and personal care aides. Nonetheless, several high-wage occupations have also seen solid self-employment growth, most notably computers occupations such as web developers (up 67 percent since 2006), as well as market research analysts/specialists and management analysts.

The largest self-employed occupations are childcare workers (516,000 jobs), maids and housekeeping cleaners (437,600), and farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers (437,000). Carpenters and construction laborers are also common self-employed occupations.

Among high-skill occupations, the largest self-employed fields are ones that lend themselves to people starting their own firm or office – lawyers (184,000 jobs), management analysts (158,000), and accountants and auditors (107,000). Of those three occupations, only management analysts have grown since 2006 (3 percent) while lawyers (-10 percent) and accountants (-13 percent) have seen double-digit percentage declines.

Table 1 shows the performance of high-skill occupations, and occupations with the most growth and decline among the self-employed.[1] One occupation that stands out: medical transcriptionists. Self-employed jobs in this field have shot up 375% since 2006, from just over 2,300 jobs to more than 11,000 nationally.

Note: The “physicians and surgeons, all other” category includes all self-employed physicians and surgeons not included in the broad physicians and surgeons occupation or in other health diagnosing and treating practitioner categories. Keep in mind that respondents to the American Community Survey self-report their occupation, thus making the data subject to error.

Composition of the Self-Employed Workforce

The most likely demographic to be self-employed: older men. As of 2013, men took up 62 percent (6.2 million) of self-employed jobs in the U.S, and more than 30 percent of the self-employed were 55 years and older. The next largest age group was 45- to 54-year-olds (28 percent of all jobs).

In some of the largest self-employed occupations, close to half of all workers are at least 55. This includes farmers and ranchers (49 percent are 55 and over); accountants and auditors (48 percent); lawyers (46 percent); and real estate agents (45 percent).