Best Side Hustle Ideas You Can Do At Home Or In Your Spare Time

Has the 9-to-5 left you burnt out, unsatisfied, and looking for another outlet? We can help you start a side hustle from home!

There’s a good chance that you have talents you can monetize, you just need a concrete business idea to properly tap into them. Maybe you’ve been thinking about starting a side business for a while but you don’t know where to stop planning. You could also just be looking to make some extra money to supplement your current income.

Whatever your reason, if you’re considering beginning your very own side hustle, we have some ideas for you, ways you could translate your side business into your full-time job, and resources to help you get started!

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12 Best Work-From-Home Side Hustles

When you are looking for your very own side hustle, there are a couple of things you want to consider. Can it actually be a side hustle or is it enough work to be considered a full-time position? Do you have the time and energy to add it to your already busy schedule? Is it something you are passionate enough about (or that makes enough money) that you won’t get burnt out too quickly?

Check out our list below of the 12 best work-from-home side hustles and see if any of them pique your interest!

Freelance From Home

Whether your specialty is writing, copy editing, graphic design, photography, bookkeeping, or tutoring, there is always a demand for freelancers in just about any field. You could set your own hours, use skills gained from your day job, work independently, get paid to do something you already enjoy doing, and keep 100% of your payment after any expenses.

However, freelancing from home could feel redundant to your full-time job, it may be difficult to find properly paying jobs with realistic timelines and legitimate businesses, you have to do your own marketing and promotion, and you’d have to handle any payment disputes on your own.

To get started, take inventory of freelancers you may know in your current field or the field you would be looking to venture into. Learn more about their rates, connections, and the steps they took. Make your own website or social media and start spreading the word!

Upwork Side Hustle

Upwork is a platform that connects independent professionals with businesses and agencies around the world and is the largest site for freelancers. It feels like a cross between LinkedIn and Indeed but for freelancers!

As an Upwork freelancer, you can customize your profile to feature specific skills, there is no fee for membership, it’s easy to find open positions, there is hourly-pay protection and legitimate contracts, you have an easy way to make an online portfolio, gain new contracts, and payment is collected and handled for you. You can even have it automatically deposited to an account of your choosing.

While Upwork is a popular and easy-to-use platform, it does take a significant service fee from every hour you are paid, only tracked time through the desktop app is protected, potential clients like to lowball the prices of their work, the app can be unstable at times, and your skills may not be in high demand on the platform.

Check out Upwork and see if it is a platform that would work for you!

Fiverr Side Hustle

Another option for freelancing through a platform is Fiverr. It has a high amount of users like Upwork, but more simple construction. Fiverr makes it easy to find one-off or short-term jobs, clients are able to find you easily based on your ratings and reviews, and the site tends to have fewer technical problems than Upwork.

Some of the potential issues with Fiverr include clients being able to cancel payments even after the work has been completed, the membership fee, reviews and ratings are required in order to get more offers, and there are limited categories for work compared to Upwork.

Look into Fiverr and see if the simplistic nature of the platform fits your style more than Upwork!

Social Media Influencer

No, you don’t have to be the next viral Tik Tok star to be an influencer. According to Shopify, almost half (47.3%) of all influencers are considered “micro-influencers” with 5,000 – 20,000 followers on their largest platform. They also report that 77% of marketers report that they would rather work with micro-influencers than any other demographic. Instagram is considered the most desirable platform with Tik Tok having the highest number of influencers while the popularity of Facebook while still impressive is beginning to decline annually.

As a micro-influencer, you would get to pick the brands you want to work with, use platforms you are used to, and it’s fairly easy to find examples of what to do (and what not to do) from influencers you already follow and interact with. On the flip side, as a newer and smaller influencer, brands will try to undersell you, you might need to start a business profile from scratch, and it may take time before you see any real profit.

The rules are always changing on social media, so what might be considered “best practices” today could be completely different tomorrow, so research what you can and give it a shot, you may have a talent for promoting that you never knew about!

Sell Your Art

Do you have a knack for knitting or a passion for pottery? If you have extra time and can handle creating art on a semi-regular schedule or on commission, selling your art online from home could be a viable side hustle.

Use a site like Square Online or Shopify to accept payment from customers and keep records!

As an artist who sells their work, you get to make money doing something you enjoy, you get to share your work with more people, and there’s no need to rent space for a gallery or spend the time setting up a booth (but if you do want to sell at your local farmers’ market, we have some resources for you). However, keep in mind that turning your hobby into a side hustle can make you start to dislike a once relaxing activity, there is an annoying possibility of people taking your designs or using your photographs to make cheap knock-offs of your work, and depending on your art form supplies could be expensive and the price needed to make your art profitable could be too high for potential customers.

Find your market. There are people who are willing to pay for high-end art pieces in any form, you just have to find them!

Check out our article about the 10 Best Websites For Selling Art Online.

Child Care

Do you watch children for family, friends, or neighbors? Consider advertising these services to your community. If you have the space, you could even consider opening a small daycare in your home. This will require licensing and approval from your state so make sure to do your research and obtain small business insurance.

As a childcare provider, if you already have children, you can socialize them with other kids and take care of your own childcare needs while making some money on the side, you can take advantage of extra space in your home, and you can grow your skills with children while having fun with your side hustle. On the flip side, you will have to obtain some certifications in order to make your home daycare or child care service safer and more attractive for potential clients, it can be a time-consuming and often tiring job to undertake, and while you could be utilizing extra space in your home you could also be incurring larger energy and water bills with the extra humans using your heat/AC and water.

If you are a parent or already have a small group of children you care for on a semi-regular basis, begin asking around to see if there is a need for more daycare services in your community. Research classes and certifications in your area while you are networking and gauging interest.

Accounting Side Hustle

Tax season is a stressful time for everyone. For accountants, it’s also a very lucrative one! If you have accounting skills you can take advantage of the need for more hands-on books in the spring for the general public. Another option is to combine your skills with a special interest or even your day job and advertise your services to a specific industry. You could specialize in accounting for aesthetics professionals, musicians, writers, or design freelancers.

With an accounting side hustle, you can combine multiple passions into a lucrative business and help others pursue their passions with their nontraditional filings. However, if you don’t already have the skills for accounting it can be tricky and costly to gain them and you might find a specific niche market too niche to find enough clients to be profitable.

Consider using services like Quickbooks to launch your accounting side business and Square Online or Shopify to accept payments from clients and keep records. If you plan on reaching out to a specific industry to work with, make sure you already have connections or begin networking before you launch your side hustle. That way you can gain reviews and use word-of-mouth to find more clients.

Pet Services

Now that people have begun returning to the office, pets who grew used to always having their humans around may be in need of companionship or at the very least a walk and some treats during the workday. If you have a talent for baking, training dogs, grooming cats, or caring for exotic pets that need special attention, pet services could be the side hustle for you!

In the pet services industry, you can use skills you have tried and tested with your own animals, have fun experimenting with homemade treats, and/or play with four-legged friends as a side hustle! The downsides to starting a side hustle in this industry are that some pet services are not able to be done strictly from your home, supplies are an expensive upfront cost for grooming, making your own treats can prove costly as well, and being trusted to watch another person’s pet can be a daunting task.

Dog walking, pet-sitting for vacations or during the workday, scooping poop, and even attempting to find lost animals can be great options for a side hustle in the pet services industry.

Do your research, look for apps or platforms that can help you facilitate relationships with potential clients, and use your passion for pets to get some extra cash!

Dropshipping Business

What is dropshipping? Dropshipping is a method of order fulfillment where you, the merchant or seller, don’t actually have to house any physical inventory. A customer places an order with you through a system you create and then you place an order for the same item with a dropshipping supplier.

Dropshipping doesn’t just benefit the manufacturers and suppliers. As a dropshipper, you don’t have to make space for inventory or worry about purchasing inventory to sell, none of the logistics of acquiring the product are your responsibility, and you often get to determine the price you sell an item and, therefore, your profit margins for each sale. In order to be successful, though, you do have to create an eCommerce site to sell the products through, your supplier will often hand off sales, marketing, and customer service to you instead of paying someone in-house to handle it, and name-brand products are usually too expensive to sell this way leaving you with sometimes less popular generic products.

Dropshipping is a legitimate business model. You just have to make sure you are finding reliable suppliers, whether you find them through branching out or sticking to well-known eCommerce sites like Shopify Dropshipping Suppliers.

Virtual Assistant

A virtual assistant is typically a self-employed professional that provides administrative, technical, or creative assistance to clients from their homes. Typical tasks may include scheduling appointments, making phone calls, making travel arrangements, and/or managing email accounts. You can, however, also specialize in a field of your choice like graphic design, copywriting, accounting/bookkeeping, social media content creation, and marketing services.

There are no specific educational requirements for this side hustle but there are online courses and certifications you could take/earn if you desired, you are hired for specific tasks not “other duties as assigned”, set your own schedule and rates, and this job can be done from anywhere including while you are traveling.

As a new virtual assistant, you may run into difficulties finding clients and rely on sites like Upwork or Fiverr which take a cut of your profits, this is another side hustle that could be redundant with your full-time job, and it is a competitive field, so it may take you some time to gain enough experience to land bigger jobs.

Use the internet to your advantage and search around for recruiters in your area who are looking for virtual assistants, check out job boards, and begin networking!

Audiobook Narrator

If you love to read and have strong speaking skills (or are willing to practice), you could start a side hustle as an audiobook narrator. These same skills could transfer to voice-over work as well! Audiobook narration is the process of recording a voice-over of a written book to be used on sites like Audible, Libby, or virtually any streaming service.

Audiobook narrators get to set their own hours, work independently with authors, read books and get paid for it, and explore a lot of different kinds of narration and genres. Before embarking on this side hustle, you do need to consider that the upfront cost of acquiring decent recording equipment can be high, and it can be difficult to find a room in your home quiet enough to record with no echoes or background noise (especially if you live in a city or apartment complex). It can be another side hustle that takes time to become profitable, and you could start to get burnt out with reading.

Download Libby or another app that your local library allows you to check out audiobooks through and give some of your favorite genres a listen! Could you see (or rather, hear) yourself doing what they do? Check out articles from sites like Indeed and Audible to learn more about becoming an audiobook narrator.

Upcycle Furniture & Other Home Goods

Have you been on Facebook Marketplace lately or your local “buy nothing” group and seen some furniture with potential? What about a nightstand on the side of the road with a giant FREE sign on top of it? You can make a good chunk of change by rescuing these pieces, restoring them (or making them into something new entirely), and selling them back to your community!

You can use Facebook Selling features or use a service like Shopify or Square Online to create shoppable posts on Instagram and even sell through Tik Tok.

Furniture restoration is a fun and rewarding side hustle as you are not only bringing something once-loved back to life, but you are also keeping it out of a landfill and giving it a second chance, you can sell online from the comfort of your home or take your wares out into the world at your local farmers’ market, there is a potential to work on consignment, there are thousands of tutorials all over the internet if you run into a situation that exceeds your skills, and you can probably use some of those new skills to restore some furniture around your own home.

However, this is a side hustle that requires space, some of the paints or seals, or other chemicals you may use need special equipment and due to their toxicity, storing inventory can prove difficult, and you may put a lot of time and effort into a piece only to find out near the end that it isn’t structurally sound.

Do some YouTube research or maybe visit the social media of an upcycler you admire and see what other successful folks do in this industry. Find something for free and see what you can do with it before you spend more than a piece is worth and find you don’t enjoy the process.

Side Hustles That Can Turn Into A Successful Business

While all of the ideas we listed above can be done from home, some can be expanded to permanent or mobile storefronts, and there are plenty of other side hustles that can be done outside of your living situation AND be turned into successful businesses!

Just because you want a side hustle doesn’t mean you have to enter the “gig economy.”

These jobs cannot offer you the life-changing revenue and new professional opportunities a well-managed side hustle can simply because they often end up paying you below minimum wage when all is said and done.

A prime example of this is Uber and Lyft drivers. You have to pay for gas, car maintenance, and rideshare insurance along with other unexpected costs that come out of your take-home pay. These services also take a sometimes hefty fee for what your earn for each job. While you can make some money on the side through gig work, it will often not be very empowering or long-lasting.

Working full-time as a freelancer is a very real possibility for many people with a side hustle. You can become your own marketing, graphic design, and communications firm and choose which clients you do business with. A side hustle making baked goods for a farmers’ market could turn into a full-time bakery run from your home catering large events like weddings and company parties.

Or: Instead of opening a full restaurant, consider running a ghost/dark kitchen.

These kitchens are commercial kitchens designed specifically for food delivery service. There is no storefront, no front-of-house staff, no tables or chairs, or long wait times for reservations. The staff prepares dishes off of delivery-only menus in areas of high demand. Because you have no true physical presence like a traditional restaurant, you can reach more customers and end the day with more profit in your pocket.

You have the power to find something you love to do and, well, do it! The world of side hustles is your oyster, you just have to crack into it.

Starting A Side Hustle: So What’s Next?

Now that your creative juices are hopefully flowing and you are picturing yourself with extra cash in the bank and time spent working from home, it’s your turn to see what you can really do. Do your research, get feedback regarding your side hustle idea from others in the field, plan out promotions, determine if any training or qualifications will be needed, decide how much money you’ll need to spend upfront, and whatever you do, don’t be discouraged if you don’t immediately find success! It’s hard to start something new from scratch but if you work hard and put in the time and effort needed, you’re sure to reap the rewards.

Read our full guide to help you get started on the right track: How To Start A Side Hustle: A 7 Step Guide.

FAQs: Starting A Side Hustle

Square is a great way to accept credit cards for a side hustle

Reader	eCommerce	Retail	Food Service
Free App & Reader	Square eCommerce	Square for Retail	Square for Restaurants
Get Started	Get Started	Get Started	Get Started
Free, general-purpose POS software and reader for iOS and Android	Easy integration with popular platforms plus API for customization	Specialized software for more complex retail stores	Specialized software for full-service restaurants
$0/month	$0/month	$0-60/month	$0-60/month
Always Free	Always Free	Free Trial	Free Trial