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What percentage of working Americans are self-employed in their main job?
11.8% of working Americans are self-employed in their main job - about 12 in every 100, or 1 in 10. That is the figure published by the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking for 2025.
0 in 100100 in 100
11.8
Where this number comes from
- Survey
- Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking
- What it measured
- SHED 2025 item D3A (“Think about your main job (the job from which you earned the most money in the past month). In this job, (were you working/Did you work) for someone else, were you self-employed, or something else?”), counting responses 1=Self-employed (working for myself), among adults who did any work for pay or profit last month (D1A = Yes). Computed from the Federal Reserve's public-use microdata with its post-stratification weight WEIGHT. The public file has no design variables or replicate weights, so the standard error follows the Fed's documented design effect: SE = √(deff · p(1−p)/n), deff = 1.14 (the Fed's 1.14, or the Kish design effect of these weights if larger); unweighted n = 7,488.
- Population
- U.S. adults who worked for pay last month
- Year
- 2025
- 95% confidence interval
- 11.02% to 12.58% (derived from the published standard error)
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, public-use data (doi:10.17016/datasets.002). Percentages computed here, with attribution.. See the source data
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