Madiha Yaqoob
Pakistan counted its gig economy for the first time this year, and the number is smaller and stranger than the freelancing headlines suggest. The Labour Force Survey 2024-25, published by the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics, found that gig work makes up just 2.9 percent of primary employment nationwide, and that 97.1 percent of that gig work is physical: ride-hailing, courier runs, deliveries, not remote digital freelancing. If you build your income online, this survey is the first real map of who else is doing it, and where you actually sit on that map.
What the Survey Actually Measured
The Labour Force Survey 2024-25 is the first edition to follow the 19th International Conference of Labour Statisticians standards, and the first to carry a dedicated chapter on digital platform employment. Before this, every claim about Pakistan’s gig or freelance workforce, two million freelancers, three million, five million, was an estimate stitched together from platform data, remittance flows, and association guesses. The PBS Labour Force Survey 2024-25 is the first attempt at a household-level headcount.
That headcount is smaller than the export figures imply, and there is a reason for the gap. Freelancer export earnings, the $1.76 billion the State Bank recorded for FY2025-26, measure money crossing the border through banking channels. The Labour Force Survey measures people, asked directly what their main and secondary jobs are. A freelancer who banks through a friend’s account, works informally, or treats freelancing as a side hustle rather than a primary occupation can show up fully in the export data and barely register in the labour survey. Both numbers are real. They are just measuring different things.
The Physical Work Dominates, Not the Laptop Work
Break down that 2.9 percent of gig workers by what they actually do, and freelancing is a minority activity even inside the gig economy itself. According to sector data reported by Pakistan Today’s analysis of the survey, the largest shares of gig workers are in teaching (17.8 percent), taxi services (16.8 percent), selling goods (16.8 percent), and only then freelancing (14.3 percent), followed by delivery services (12.2 percent). Content creation on YouTube and TikTok accounts for 5.6 percent, medical and healthcare gig work 4.2 percent.
Sindh leads gig work participation at 3.4 percent of its workforce, ahead of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (2.9 percent), Punjab (2.8 percent), and Balochistan (1.2 percent), which tracks with urbanisation and internet infrastructure rather than any single province’s freelancing reputation. A reported feature in The News on Sunday put faces to that physical-gig majority: a Karachi ride-hailing driver who calls the flexibility “running my own business,” a courier whose income only stabilised once he joined a delivery platform. Neither works in a category the survey calls digital.
Why This Matters If Freelancing Is Your Main Income
Freelancers registered with PSEB, filing under the 0.25 percent tax rate, or receiving payments through official channels are, statistically, a smaller and more specific group than the export headlines suggest. That is not a bad thing. It means the formal, documented, tax-compliant freelance workforce is more identifiable to policymakers than it has ever been, which is exactly the leverage needed to argue for benefits, social security, and recognition. Our guide to PSEB registration and the 0.25 percent tax rate walks through what that formal status actually requires.
Gig Work Splits Sharply by Gender, But Not the Way You’d Guess
Among online gig workers in a primary job, men slightly outnumber women: 3.0 percent versus 2.5 percent. Flip to secondary or side-income gig work, and the pattern reverses. Among workers who report a subsidiary job, 15.0 percent of women say it is gig-based, against 9.8 percent of men. Women are more likely than men to be gigging on the side, just less likely to have gig work as their main job.
What kind of gig work also splits by gender. Men dominate mobility-heavy sectors: taxi services (20.9 percent of male gig workers) and delivery (14.9 percent). Women concentrate in teaching (39.8 percent) and selling goods (21.9 percent), both of which can be run from home. Digital platforms have opened new income paths for women, but largely within roles that were already considered socially acceptable, rather than pulling women broadly into the same freelance and tech categories men occupy.
The Policy Gap the Survey Exposes
Formal recognition has not caught up with any of this. Most gig workers, physical or digital, operate without minimum wage guarantees, employer-based social security, health insurance, or a pension. Pakistan is a signatory conversation away from the kind of platform-worker protections the ILO’s new gig economy treaty and the EU’s platform work directive are pushing internationally, and this survey is the first evidence base a Pakistani regulator could actually use to design something similar.
For now, the practical reality has not changed: freelancers still carry their own tax registration, still negotiate their own payment rails, and still build their own safety net. Non-IT freelancing, now roughly 39 percent of the country’s freelance exports, is part of exactly the informal, uncounted layer this survey is trying to bring into view.
What To Do With This Data If You Freelance
Three things follow directly from the numbers. Register formally if you have not, because the state’s ability to advocate for freelancers depends on being able to count them, and right now it barely can. Treat freelancing as a category distinct from gig work generally when you read future government statistics, since the survey groups you with taxi drivers and door-to-door sellers under one 2.9 percent figure. And expect slow-moving, not fast-moving, policy attention: a labour survey chapter is a data point, not a benefits scheme, and the gap between measurement and protection in Pakistan has historically taken years to close, not months.
