Millions of Americans are embracing work in the gig economy often doing casual work but are not counted as employed for the purposes of the government’s official statistics. New research sheds light on the true prevalence of informal gig work.

The report found that the share of adults who are counted as employed would be higher by up to 5.1 percentage points if the people doing causal gig work were accurately counted in the Current Population Survey, on which the jobless rate is based. Some estimates suggest that the employment-to-population ratio would have been 0.25 to 1.1 percentage point higher from 2015 to 2022 if these individuals were counted.

Bracha and Burke took a novel approach to probing just how many of the people who say they aren’t working in that survey are not engaging in gig or gray market work. These answers revealed uncounted Americans who are earning money in exchange for work but do not answer as such when first asked.

Paper authors, Anat Bracha of Hebrew University Business School, and Mary A. Burke of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston said, “There are reasons for thinking about gig work differently with respect to labor market slack, because it points to a hidden labor supply that could be tapped by traditional employers.”

These uncounted gig workers may be an untapped source of new labor supply ideally suited to enter the long-term care and home care based services workforce.