How do I calculate my real side hustle income?

Take six months of bank statements. Add up money in, subtract every cost of earning it, and divide by six. Then divide that by the hours a month. The hourly figure is your real pay.

What is a side hustle worth, in numbers?

Exactly what your sheet says: the six-month average after costs, per hour of work. Set a target with a number and a deadline first, then compare. Without a target, any figure feels fine.

Is gig economy pay worth it?

Only your own numbers can answer that. Measure the pay after costs per hour, set the target you need, and look at both side by side. The book adds the zones that show when a number turns from a warning into an emergency.

Side Hustle Income: Measure What You Keep, Not What You Earn

Nine out of ten app drivers in Seattle took home less than minimum wage after costs.

Sunday night. The app shows a good week. Big numbers, a little green arrow, a badge for hours online.

Then the fuel bill arrives. The car needs tyres. And the bank shows a figure the app never mentioned.

Here is the irony. The app counts every order to the cent. The cost of earning it gets counted by feel, or not at all.

A busy app screen can hide a side hustle that costs you money. The Jirgenson Model answers it as a control system: one real number per goal, from a source you trust. It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23964934).

Delivery driver pay after costs: measure what you keep

The line at the top is about the gap between what a screen says you earned and what you kept. Close that gap tonight.

Take the bank statement as your source, not the app. The app shows revenue. The bank shows what is left after fuel, repairs, phone and fees.

Andrew, who runs a coffee shop, found the same gap in his own books. He was sure his margin held at around twenty per cent. When he measured it, it was 9%. He had never counted waste: sour milk, pastries written off at the end of the shift. The costs were real. They never showed up in any report.

Your fuel, tyres and phone bill are those pastries. Count them, or your pay is a story.

How to avoid the gap for good: give every number one source and one definition. For pay, the source is the bank, and the definition is "money in, minus every cost of earning it".

In the Jirgenson Model, the state is the measured value of each goal, row by row, from one named source. It turns feelings into facts. An instrument shows; it does not scold.

Measure your side hustle income in one evening

This is the tool. One sheet of paper, one evening. Six steps, each with a real entry beside it.

The entries come from Elena, a freelance designer. Her income came in uneven months, the way gig income does.

1. Draw the sheet

Three columns: parameter, where to get it, value. One row for each thing you want from the work.

Elena's rows: average monthly income, the share of her biggest client, and her hours a week.

2. Give every row one source

Name the one place each number comes from. Other places may only cross-check it.

Elena's sources: bank statements for income, the same statements per client for the share, her time records for hours.

3. Write a number, never a word

"Good month", "lots", "roughly enough" don't count. They are impressions.

Alex, thirteen, thought he had about €55 saved for a bicycle. He tipped the coins out and counted: €40. That fifteen-euro gap is the kind that leaves you short later, on the day you need the money.

4. Average six months, not the best one

The big month feels like your real income. It isn't. One good month does not make an average.

Elena's six months swung between €800 and €2,200. The average was €1,300 a month.

5. Divide by the hours

This is the row the app never shows. Take the average, divide by the hours a month.

Elena worked 50 hours a week, about 217 hours a month. €1,300 over 217 hours is about €6 for each hour of work.

6. Ask three questions of every figure

Who counted it? How, exactly? Over what period? No answer means no number. Where you have no number yet, write the source and a date.

Here is Elena's finished sheet.

Parameter	Where to get it	Value
Average income	Bank statements, last six months	€1,300 a month (range €800 to €2,200)
Biggest client's share	Bank statements, by client	€910 a month, 70%
Hours	Time records	50 a week
Pay per hour	Income divided by hours	about €6

That is the whole tool. It took Elena one evening. A rough table today beats a perfect system in six months.

Network marketing income: count the costs before the cheque

Nearly three out of four people in network marketing lose money or make nothing.

The answer to that line is the same sheet, with a cost row nobody can skip. Write down every cost at the moment it happens: stock, samples, travel, fees.

Numbers let you down in three ways. Memory keeps the loud days and loses the quiet ones. Rounding turns "nine and a half" into "about twenty". And whatever goes unrecorded doesn't exist for the report. It still exists for the money.

So shorten the path between the event and the record. A receipt in a folder beats your memory of a receipt. A line in the bank beats both.

How to avoid working for nothing: put "money in minus money out" on the sheet every month. If the row stays at zero or below, you will see it in the first month, not the first year. If you sell products, the same blind spot hides in your pricing: margin vs markup shows one shop's profit as four true numbers.

Extra income or a second income: set the target first

Your typical side hustle makes just enough a month to take the family out for dinner.

Decide what the work is for before you judge it. Then the number on your sheet has something to stand against.

A goal needs a number, a unit and a deadline. "More income" has no number. "€3,000" has no period and no deadline. "€3,000 a month, as a three-month average, by month 14" is Elena's goal.

Then put the goal and the state side by side, row by row. Andrew's first sheet looked like this:

Goal	Target	Now
Cash reserve	2.0 months	0.5 months
Margin	15%	9%
Owner's hours	40 or fewer a week	65

The hardest figure was the 9. His first impulse was to close the spreadsheet and go and make coffee. He didn't. It was an instrument reading, not a verdict.

How to avoid the dinner-money trap: write the target before the next gig. Then every month tells you which side of the line you sit on.

Guessing against measuring

An illustration: one side hustle, two Sundays.

The guessing Sunday. "It was a good month. Roughly enough, I think. Worth it." No source, no costs, no hours.

The measured Sunday. "Six-month average €1,300, from the bank. Costs counted. 217 hours. About €6 an hour against a goal I wrote in May." One look, and you know what to do next.

This is one piece of a loop: goal, state, gap, levers, plan, forecast. The sheet is the state. Without it, every other step steers by feel.

"I don't have time for spreadsheets." You don't need one. Andrew's first version took two hours. Elena's took an evening. Paper works.

The cost of six more months of guessing

Andrew nearly paid for his guess in full. The same week he measured, he had planned to hire a second barista and start an advertising campaign. The whole plan rested on a twenty per cent margin that didn't exist. Within a few months the shop would have run out of money, and no one would have known why.

The slow cost has numbers too. At 9%, the shop added about 0.1 months of reserve a month. If nothing changed, it would reach two months at M16. With the plan working, at M10. Six extra months, one breakdown away from trouble.

Your version is smaller and closer to home. Six more months at €6 an hour, without knowing it, is six months of evenings sold below what you think they are worth.

What the sheet does not fix

The sheet gives you the truth about where you stand. It treats a symptom: you stop guessing your pay.

The cause of bad decisions stays. You see €6 an hour, but you don't know if that is fine, a warning or an emergency. And you don't know which move would change it.

Two steps close that gap:

Error and the three zones. Where each number turns from green to yellow to red, and the red protocol for the day two rows go red at once. Chapter 4.
Levers you can pull today. The short list of things you control yourself, each with a leading indicator, so you stop pulling the wrong one. Chapter 5.

Without them, the sheet tells you where you are. It doesn't tell you when to act or what to move.

Key takeaways

Your pay is money in, minus every cost of earning it.
Take the bank as the source, never the app screen.
Average six months. One good month does not make an average.
Divide by the hours. That row is the one nobody shows you.
An instrument reading, not a verdict.

Two Sundays from now

You have two choices tonight. Close the tab, open the app, and keep trusting the green arrow. Or take one evening and put your real pay on paper.

The sheet tells you where you stand. The zones and the levers tell you when to act and what to move.

Test the logic for free: Chapter 1, with the refusal test. Or get the full control system on Kindle, on Amazon. It comes as a Kindle book, with a task to try in every chapter.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
GitHub: experiment folder
Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552

This topic is covered in Chapter 2, Where you really are of Steer, Don't Guess: Setting Priorities, Reading the Numbers and Correcting Course in Business and Life. The numbers in the examples are illustrative; the book states its limits in Appendix G.