Fiverr Data Shows Business Freelance Hiring Up 260%: What Owners Outsource

Business hiring of freelancers has jumped 260% in recent years, according to Fiverr's 2025 Economic Impact Report. The number explains a broader shift: small business owners are buying back their time by handing specific tasks to contract workers on demand.

The report puts hard figures on the market. Freelancing contributes $319 billion to the U.S. economy. That equals 1.1% of GDP, Fiverr reported. The average freelancer earns $52,000 a year across top markets.

Why are owners outsourcing now?

Time is the constraint, not ambition. Nearly half of small business owners — 46.5% — say having more time is the single biggest improvement they need, according to recent data from Small Business Expo. That figure comes from the organizer of the largest small business networking event in the U.S., and it frames the hiring logic: owners who cannot add hours to the day are renting hours from someone else.

The mechanism is simple. A business posts a defined task on Fiverr, a freelancer completes it, and the owner keeps internal attention on operations, sales or product. Neither party carries payroll overhead, benefits obligations or a long-term contract. That structure explains why the surge benefits both sides of the transaction, since many freelancers use the platform to supplement income from other work rather than as a full-time replacement.

What does the earning curve look like?

The platform's own data on average earnings gets a concrete illustration from one freelancer's account. Actor Victoria Carroll told Entrepreneur she joined Fiverr in 2018 to pursue voice-over work. She created a profile to attract clients and averaged $1,000 to $2,000 a month within the year. In her second full year on the platform, she earned $70,000 — more than she had ever made before.

Her trajectory matters for anyone weighing the supply side. The first year built the profile and the client base. The second year converted that reputation into income above the platform's stated $52,000 average for top markets. Voice-over, her category, also appears on the list of jobs owners delegate most.

Which jobs do owners hand off first?

Fiverr's data identifies the tasks small business owners most commonly assign to freelancers. The published list includes:

• Voice Over
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• UGC Videos
• Logo Design
• Book Design
• Translation

The pattern is consistent across the list. Every item is a skill with a clear deliverable — a recorded track, a ranking audit, a logo file, a formatted book, a translated document. None of them requires the freelancer to sit inside the company's daily operations. That is the dividing line: owners keep core work in-house and buy specialist output at the edges, where full-time hires would sit idle between projects.

For service businesses, the list reads like a marketing budget. SEO and user-generated-content videos directly feed customer acquisition, and logo design builds the brand layer a new company cannot yet staff internally. Book design and translation extend a product's reach into new formats and markets without a single hire.

What does the 260% figure signal?

The direction of travel is toward more contract work, not less. If freelancing already moves $319 billion through the U.S. economy and equals 1.1% of GDP, and business demand has grown 260% in recent years, the competitive question for a small business is no longer whether to outsource these tasks. It is whether rivals who do outsource them will reach customers faster — because the owner on the other side of that transaction just bought back the one resource 46.5% of peers say they lack most.