Contingent Workforce Statistics 2026: Is It Really 40% of US Workers?

Last updated: September 28, 2026

By Jennifer Burdick, Recruiting Manager, KORE1

Contingent workers make up about 4.3 percent of US employment, roughly 6.9 million people, according to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, not the 40 percent figure that keeps turning up in vendor decks. That 40 percent number is real. It also dates from 2010, comes from the Government Accountability Office, and lumps part-time employees, independent contractors, and the self-employed in with temps.

The slide showed up in a budget review I sat in on last spring. A procurement director at a regional health system in Hartford, Connecticut, was making the case for a formal contingent labor program, and her second slide said, in very large type, that contingent workers were 40 percent of the American workforce. Nobody questioned it. I did not either, at the time. It had a source line under it. The rest of her argument was sound.

Afterward I went looking for that source line. It led to a software vendor’s blog. That blog cited another vendor’s blog, which cited a federal report from 2015 about survey data collected in 2010. Three hops. The report is careful. The slides are not.

So this is the page where we keep the numbers. Every figure below links to the agency or association that published it, and the tracker near the bottom gets refreshed once a year when the federal data moves. Or, as happened this year, when it does not.

A word on where I sit. I run recruiting on our contract staffing searches, and a bigger contingent workforce is good for my business. I have every reason to like the large number. I don’t. I would not put it in front of a CFO, and the rest of this piece is why.

Where the 40 Percent Figure Comes From

A contingent worker, in the federal definition, is someone whose job is temporary or not expected to last. An alternative work arrangement is a broader idea that covers independent contractors, on-call workers, temp agency workers, and contract-firm staff whether their work is short-term or not. Nearly every inflated statistic comes from blurring those two. Easy mistake. Expensive one, too.

The 40 percent traces to GAO-15-168R, which the Government Accountability Office released in May 2015. GAO worked from the 2010 General Social Survey, which NORC at the University of Chicago runs. Its estimate was that 40.4 percent of employed people were in some kind of alternative work arrangement, plus or minus 3.8 points. The same method gave 35.3 percent for 2006.

GAO was not hiding anything. The report says near the top that labor experts have no consensus on whether independent contractors, the self-employed, and standard part-time workers belong in a contingent count at all, since many of them hold long-term, stable jobs. Its own narrower measure, which it called the core contingent workforce, came to 7.9 percent.

That caveat did not travel. The 40 did.

The 40.4 Percent, Taken Apart

Here is GAO’s own breakdown for 2010. The largest slice is the one most hiring managers would never call contingent.

Source: GAO-15-168R, table 4. GAO notes the rows may not add exactly to the total because of rounding.

Check the second-to-last row. Standard part-time workers account for 16.2 of those 40.4 points. A pharmacist who has worked three days a week at the same hospital for nine years is in that group. So is the person who opens a coffee shop at six every morning and leaves at eleven, by choice, because she has kids to pick up. Remove part-timers. The figure drops to about 24 percent. Remove the self-employed as well and you are near 21, and most of what remains is independent contractors, a group in which most people say they like the arrangement just fine (more on that below).

And the data is sixteen years old.

What the Bureau of Labor Statistics Counts Now

The federal source that actually measures contingent work is the Contingent Worker Supplement, a set of extra questions BLS attaches to the monthly Current Population Survey. The latest published round covers July 2023, and BLS released the Contingent and Alternative Employment Arrangements results on November 8, 2024.

The rows overlap. A temp agency worker can also hold a contingent job, so the column cannot be added up into a single total.

Independent contractors are the largest group, at a little more than one worker in fourteen. Contingent workers in the strict sense are about one in twenty-three.

Earlier rounds of the supplement reported three measures of contingent work, narrow to broad. Take the broadest. It stood at 4.9 percent in February 1995 and 4.1 percent in February 2005, per the 2018 BLS release, then 3.8 percent in May 2017. For 2023, BLS changed the questions and warns that the new figures are not strictly comparable with earlier years, so the move from 3.8 to 4.3 is best read as roughly flat rather than a surge. For three decades the federal number has stayed between 3.8 and 4.9 percent.

Nowhere near 40.

Temp Help Employment Has Risen Eight Months Running

The survey data is slow. The payroll data is not. The BLS Current Employment Statistics series for temporary help services showed 2,519,500 jobs in August 2026, a preliminary figure, which works out to 1.58 percent of the 159.1 million jobs on nonfarm payrolls. The count has risen in every month of 2026 so far, eight in a row, and sits 68,100 above December 2025. Small numbers. Steady direction. Over the twelve months from August 2025, temp help grew about 1.5 percent while total payrolls grew about 0.4 percent.

My colleague Gregg Flecke’s contract labor market outlook for 2026 goes into why that gap exists, and I will not rerun his argument here beyond one line of it. Companies are adding capacity without adding headcount. Fewer offer letters.

The American Staffing Association counts a different way, by surveying staffing firms directly. Its fourth-quarter 2025 figures show an average of 2.0 million temporary and contract workers on assignment each week, up 65,000 from the third quarter. For the full year, ASA counted 9.5 million temporary and contract employees, 8.5 percent fewer than in 2024, and temporary and contract staffing sales of $113.5 billion, also down 8.5 percent. The March 2026 forecast update from Staffing Industry Analysts sizes US staffing as a whole at $180.2 billion for 2026, 1 percent above 2025. Those two dollar figures come from different surveys with different scopes. Different yardsticks. Please do not put them side by side on a slide as if one of them were wrong.

Who Holds Contingent Jobs

The 2023 supplement also describes who these workers are. A few findings surprise clients.

• Age does most of the work. Among workers 16 to 24, 12.9 percent held contingent jobs, against 3.1 percent of those 25 to 54 and 2.6 percent of those 55 and older.
• $838 a week. That was the median for full-time contingent workers, 74 percent of the $1,137 earned by full-time workers in jobs expected to last.
• Only 19.9 percent of contingent workers had health insurance from their employer, compared with 51.2 percent of everyone else.
• Would they rather have a permanent job? Asked directly, 44.8 percent said yes.
• Independent contractors answer the opposite way, and 80.3 percent of them preferred being independent.
• Contingent rates ran highest in natural resources, construction, and maintenance occupations (6.5 percent) and service occupations (6.1). By industry, agriculture led at 10.4 percent, then leisure and hospitality at 7.7. Management, business, and financial operations jobs sat near the bottom at 2.1 percent.

That last point matters. Especially if you buy technical or professional talent. The software engineers, accountants, and data analysts that firms like ours place on contract are a small share of the federal contingent count, and plenty of them would not describe their own job as temporary. A W-2 contractor twelve months into a renewable assignment might answer the BLS question either way. How that same person is classified for tax and employment purposes is a separate matter entirely, which our W-2 vs C2C vs 1099 comparison works through.

The Gig Economy Number Answers a Different Question

Then there is gig work, the source of the other big figure in circulation. In the Federal Reserve’s report on household economic well-being in 2024, published in May 2025, 20 percent of adults said they had done some gig activity in the prior month. Selling things was the most common, at 13 percent. Nine percent did short-term tasks such as driving or handyman work.

Only 21 percent of the people doing any of it called it their main job.

So one adult in five earned something outside a regular paycheck last month. True. Interesting, even. It is not a statement about the pool of people an employer hires from. When someone quotes a gig figure to justify a contingent labor budget for engineers or accountants, ask which of the two questions they meant to answer, because a person reselling sneakers on weekends is not in your candidate pool.

Which Number Belongs in Your Deck

When a client asks me for “the” contingent workforce number, I ask what decision it is supposed to support. Different decision, different source.

• Sizing the national labor pool for a contract program: BLS, 4.3 percent contingent and 7.4 percent independent contractors.
• If the question is whether demand is moving right now, the monthly temp help series is the one to watch. It comes out with the jobs report.
• Budgeting spend? Use the staffing revenue figures from SIA or ASA, and say which one.
• “Everyone freelances now” is a Federal Reserve claim at best, and only with the 21 percent main-job caveat attached.
• The 40 percent. Only with the year, the definition, and the part-time share written next to it. Written out like that, it persuades nobody.

An operations vice president at a logistics software company in Tempe, Arizona, learned this the expensive way. She built the business case for a vendor management system on the 40 percent figure, reasoning that a company of 1,100 employees was probably carrying a few hundred contingent workers it could not see. Then her team counted. Twenty-three contractors, across IT and finance. The first-year license ran about $140,000. A shared spreadsheet and one coordinator could have run that program for a fraction of the cost, and that is exactly what happened once the renewal notice arrived and finance asked what the license had actually bought.

If you are at the stage of deciding how much structure your contractor population needs, our guide to contingent workforce management covers where the tipping points usually fall. If you would rather hand the recruiting and payroll side to a partner, that is what our contingent staffing services are for. And if the real question is whether one specific role should be contingent at all, a role-by-role contingent versus full-time framework will help more than any national statistic.

2026 Contingent Workforce Data Tracker (Updated Annually)

This part changes. Each September I update the values, and the log under the table records what moved and why.

Update Log

September 28, 2026. First edition. A February 2026 Federal Register notice says BLS fielded the Contingent Worker Supplement in May 2025 and planned another round for July 2026, with new questions on work found through apps and websites. As of this writing, the July 2023 results are still the latest BLS has published. When the newer rounds come out, the first two rows change, and so does the answer at the top of this page.

Questions People Ask About These Numbers

So is the 40 percent contingent workforce stat just wrong?

Not wrong, exactly, but it is sixteen years old and far broader than most people who quote it realize.

It is GAO’s estimate of everyone in an alternative work arrangement in 2010, and the biggest piece of it is standard part-time workers. GAO’s own contingent figure from the same analysis was 7.9 percent. Big difference.

Realistically, how many contingent workers are in the US right now?

Roughly 6.9 million people held contingent jobs in July 2023, 4.3 percent of everyone employed, per the latest BLS survey.

Add independent contractors and the population is larger, since BLS counted 11.9 million of them. The two groups overlap, though. Adding them together overstates it. For a current read on direction rather than size, the monthly temp help numbers are fresher. August 2026 came in at 2,519,500. Still climbing.

Why is the newest federal survey from 2023?

BLS runs the Contingent Worker Supplement only occasionally, and it had not released results from its May 2025 round as of September 2026.

The supplement ran five times between 1995 and 2005, then went dark for twelve years. It came back in May 2017, again in July 2023, then May 2025, with a July 2026 round planned. More regular data is the stated goal. I will believe it when the 2025 numbers show up. Soon, I hope. This page will change that week.

Do independent contractors count as contingent workers?

Only when their work is not expected to last, because BLS treats independent contracting as an alternative arrangement, a separate category from contingent work.

Most independent contractors are not short-timers. Far from it. In 2023, 80.3 percent said they preferred working that way. The legal question of whether someone is truly independent is different again, and getting it wrong is costly, as our piece on contractor misclassification risk lays out.

Temp jobs are up eight months running. Is hiring back?

Not in the usual sense, since total payrolls have barely moved while temp help added 68,100 jobs between December 2025 and August 2026.

Temp employment has historically turned up before permanent hiring does. Not this year. The second half of that pattern has not arrived. For the argument about why, see the 2026 contract labor outlook.

A Smaller Number You Can Defend

A contingent share of 4 to 5 percent is less exciting than 40. Much less. It is also the number that survives a CFO asking where it came from, and that is the only test a planning statistic really has to pass.

If you are sizing a contract program, pricing one, or trying to work out whether your contractor count is normal for a company your size, talk to a recruiter on our team. KORE1 has been filling contract and permanent seats in more than 30 US metros since 2005. Twelve months after a placement starts, 92 percent of those placements are still going. We will tell you what we see across our own searches. We will also tell you which of our numbers are anecdotes.