It wasn’t long after Ariel Clarke moved from New York to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to be a program manager at a local nonprofit that she started to feel like she was living paycheck to paycheck.

Even though she was working full time, she had to budget intensely to be sure she had money for everything — rent, groceries, bills, transportation and her student loans, which were newly coming due. 

After a few months of living that way, she decided to take on a second job, as a part-time peer health educator with another nonprofit.

“Honestly, it is financial stability, I will say that first and foremost. And also just allowing myself to feel comfortable,” said Clarke, 23, who recently graduated college with a bachelor’s and a master’s degree. “Because there’s always a bill for something. Or just to have, I guess, cushion money, if something were to come up.”

Clarke said a lot of people she knows in Tulsa are working multiple jobs to get by. So are a growing number of people around the country. 

As of November, 5.4% of working people had more than one job, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That number has been ticking up and is now higher than it was before the pandemic.

“I think some of it is just that the labor market has taken a while to fully recover from the pandemic,” said Emma Harrington, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Virginia. 

Before COVID, the percentage of people working multiple jobs had been on an upward trajectory for years, she said, “then really took a nosedive during the pandemic, and then has been sort of ticking up towards the pre-pandemic trend for a while now.”

You can see this clearly if you look at this chart: There’s a steep drop-off in the spring of 2020, then a slow rebound that more or less tracks the economy’s recovery. 

“Many people have referred to this number as evidence that the labor market is under strain, and that workers are struggling to make ends meet,” said Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “But historically, the number of people holding multiple jobs tends to be high when there are multiple jobs to be had.”

When the labor market and the economy are strong. 

Women, Black people and those who are single, widowed or divorced are more likely than others to work multiple jobs, Pollak said. “That does suggest, perhaps, that some of this is driven by need and by low-wage work.”

But not all.  

“It’s not only your bartender and your hotel restaurant worker who may be juggling multiple jobs,” she said. “Often it is white-collar workers too — doctors who are also professors and who are also consultants. It is not just one thing.”

And there is not just one reason people take on more than one job at a time.

“When we ask people, ‘Why are you holding multiple jobs?’ about half say they just want to make some additional money,” said Lonnie Golden, a professor of economics and labor human resources at Penn State University, Abington. “But there’s a significant minority that say they can’t find a suitable full-time job, or they’re not able to make ends meet with just their one job.”

There are others who do it because they’re just interested in the work or want something else to do, according to Golden’s surveys. 

These days, technology and the rise of remote work have also made it easier to find and juggle multiple opportunities, noted Emma Harrington at UVA. 

“Work from home makes it more feasible to do multiple jobs at once,” she said. “It’s easier to have two jobs if you don’t have to also do two commutes.”

Easier, but not necessarily easy. 

“A lot of people, when they’re surveyed, they often say that they would prefer a more stable, traditional work arrangement,” Harrington said.

That’s true for Ariel Clarke in Tulsa. Even though she likes both of her current jobs, “it’s exhausting,” she said. “It very much so can feel like a burden at times.”

Clarke’s goal is to become a lawyer and eventually only have one job, “and not even think twice about it just being enough.”

Though, she said with a laugh, she knows it’s entirely possible that if she does become a lawyer, she’ll end up working just as many hours at one job as she does now with two.