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IF your bank balance is looking scary after Christmas and you want to boost your finances then finding a job to do in your spare time could be just the answer.
Whether you’re squirrelling away money for a deposit on your first home, or building up a rainy day fund, we reveal the 21 easy jobs you can fit around a busy lifestyle – and explain how you could earn up to £816 extra a month.
The first month of the year is traditionally the hardest financially, with a study from Credit Karma showing that a fifth of us run out of money in January, half of those by the middle of the month.
And with prices continuing to rise, affording daily essentials, from energy bills to the weekly food shop, is getting harder.
But doing easy money-making side jobs can help you cover the cost – and save enough money to put aside for your financial goals.
Add these jobs to your list and see your bank balance soar.
Be a Christmas tree dumper – £360 a month
Councils used to dispose of local inhabitants’ Christmas trees for free.
But with budgets under pressure, many have cut this service – meaning you can offer to drop your neighbours‘ trees off at the dump for them for a fee to take this hassle off their hands.
Handyman service Taskrabbit, said requests for Christmas tree and decoration removal rose 41% between January 2024 and 2025.
Many people charge around £30 for this service. Advertise on local forums or sign up on Taskrabbit to find interested customers.
Dump 12 Christmas trees for your neighbours and make £360.
Get paid to have a chat – £108 a month
If you’re a chatterbox, then you’ll be thrilled to hear you can get paid for simply having a natter.
Being fluent in English is a marketable skill, and you can use it to make money without any tutoring or teaching experience.
There’s no need to prepare anything – you just talk to people who want to improve their English.
The Cambly app is an easy way to do this, with students all around the world so you can choose when you are free and work around a job or children.
To get started you upload a profile and a two minute video talking about yourself.
You’ll earn £7.75 for talking to adults and £9.11 an hour talking to children.
If you arranged three hourly sessions a week, that’s £93 if you’re talking to adults.
That means £108 each month for working with children, or £1,296 a year.
Become a referee – £300 a month
Love the beautiful game? There’s a way to make money from it by becoming a referee.
If you sign up to the FA you’ll need to do five modules of online training and then 11 hours of face-to-face time to become one.
The cost of this varies depending on what is provided by your Football Association, but is usually around £120 which you’ll make back over the season.
The average wage is between £20 and £55 a game at the grassroots level.
Many keen referees manage between four and six games a weekend at a grassroots level, so you could make over £300 in a month during the football season at the lowest earnings level – over £1,000 if you’re in demand for top-level games.
Over the course of a year, that works out as £3,600 – or £12,000 if you get picked for the most competitive fixtures.
Let companies spy on you for vouchers – £33 a month
If you’re willing to let companies snoop into your spending habits they’ll pay for the privilege.
NielsenIQ pays in vouchers if you scan in your shopping each week and show them what you pay.
YouGov pays in points for looking at your banking and shopping habits. You can link up your streaming services, bank accounts and fill in surveys to rack up points that you can redeem for vouchers or cash.
Make around £8 a month for connecting banks and streaming sites to YouGov, plus an extra £15 or so if you fill in surveys. NielsenIQ points rack up about £10 a month with scans and surveys.
In total, that’s £396 a year with minimal effort.
Be a mini film star – £214 a month
Fancy a stint on the silver screen or even on your favourite TV show?
Being a background extra in a film or TV show can earn you extra cash.
Rates set by trade unions start for a nine-hour day of filming with a meal break start at £107 and you’ll get more if you’re working on a public holiday or at night.
Sign up with Casting Collective, Extra People or Crowd Casting, or search agencies near you.
Do two days a month to earn £214, or £2,568 a year.
Sell your photos – £46 a month
If you’re proud of your holiday snaps, they may be good enough to make money from.
Upload them to Getty Images, Alamy or Shutterstock to be licensed by websites and magazines.
Uploading them is free, and you’ll get paid a percentage if the photo is licensed for use by someone else, Alamy pays 20% to newbies, Shutterstock between 15 and 30%.
If you’re using real people – even if they’re your family – you’ll need signed ‘model release forms’ to ensure the shots are legal though.
The average licence fee for a photo is around $30 (£23) so you could receive £4.60.
Sell ten images in a month and that’s £46, equivalent to over £550 annually.
Model for life drawing classes – £160 a month
Modelling (clothed or unclothed) for painters or their pupils, can earn you £20 an hour according to the Register of Artists Models (RAM).
You can join them for £38.50 a year but may need to prove yourself first, particularly if you live in London.
Once you’re on the books, you can be contacted by artists seeking models and also respond to adverts on the site from those wanting models.
There’s nothing to stop you setting up on your own as an Artists’ Model, but you may find it harder to find clients.
One two hour modelling session could earn £40 so if you modelled for an evening class once a week you could earn £160 in January.
People who enjoy it, and get a reputation as reliable models, could earn over £1,900 a year for 96 hours of work.
Transcribe during telly breaks – £400 a month
Skilled typists can make money in the evenings transcribing documents from recordings for Rev, an app that matches those wanting documents transcribed with freelance typists.
You’ll need to take a quality test checking your typing speed and accuracy, after which you can ‘claim’ jobs on the platform and get paid weekly.
Your hourly rate will depend on how fast you work, but the average rate is £10 an hour.
Two hours each weekday evening could earn you over £400 a month if you’re a fast typist.
Keep it up for an entire year, and that’s roughly £4,800 earned from the comfort of your sofa.
Police exams and spot a cheater – £360 a month
January is a key exam season for universities and private schools.
If you’ve time in the day, you could earn money for watching the clock (and the students).
At the time of writing St George’s University in London was advertising these roles at £15.02 an hour without need for experience.
If you signed up for two three-hour exams a week, that’s £360 over the month.
Different schools hold exams at different times so there will often be work available.
If you keep an eye out for jobs for a whole twelve months, invigilating there’s no reason why you couldn’t earn over £4,300 a year.
Try job sites like Indeed for advertised invigilation roles or contact local schools and colleges to get added to their list of invigilators.
Deliver parcels in your spare time – £190 a month
Becoming an Amazon driver in your spare time could be a great option.
Download an app called Amazon Flex and reserve a block of time when you’ll be able to deliver parcels on it.
Then drive to the hub given you on the app to collect your parcels at the right time and start delivering.
Amazon says you can earn between £14 and £18 an hour.
You’ll need special commercial insurance for your car to do Amazon deliveries. You can buy it from Zego or Inshur on an hourly basis or longer. This costs around £3.29 an hour, which will cut into your profit.
A four hour Amazon Flex block once a week could make you around £190 in January, though you’ll have spent some money on petrol.
That means an annual pay cheque of £2,280 from Amazon alone – on top of whatever other income you have.
Be the hostess with the mostess – £750 a month
If you live in a city with a language school and have a spare room, you can rent it out to language students for short term stays.
English UK, which represents the language schools, says you don’t need a foreign language yourself and will mostly be hosting young adults or under 18s for a couple of weeks or months.
You could earn as much as £250 per student per week if you’re providing meals, the organisation says. That’s £750 for one student if you have them for three weeks over the month.
People who are prepared to host students all year round with a week’s break each month – could make around £9,000.
Become a mystery traveller – £120 a month
Companies pay ‘mystery’ travellers to test customer experience on trains, buses and coaches across the land.
Sign up with companies like Mystery Shoppers UK, which pays between £10 and £30 per assignment and more for assignments where you’re handed a camera to record your experience.
Doing just two assignments a week could make you £60. That’s £2,880 a year.
For safety’s sake, only sign up with agencies that are part of the Mystery Shopping Professionals Association, which covers travellers as well.
Become a ‘pet friend’ – £388 a month
Looking after dogs and cats when owners go back to work in January can be a moneyspinner.
You can apply to be a “pet friend” by signing up to sites like Pawshake and Cat in a Flat.
You could get around £20 a day for one home visit lasting half an hour in London, or £12 in Sunderland, although you can set your own fees.
But if you use a petsitting site to advertise they’ll take a cut – for example Pawshake takes 19% of your fee. If you set up on your own you might need insurance, which is available from just under £6 a month.
If you did pet sitting three days a week for two cats that’s £388 in January with a fee taken into account.
Pet-sitters who have a knack for it, and gain owners’ trust, would make over £4,600 a year at that rate.
Be a ‘microtasker’ – £160 a month
There’s a handy app that’s ideal for doing little jobs for cash.
Clickworker divides its clients’ tasks into small steps and outsources them to seven million people worldwide.
Each pays very little – from a few pence to a few pounds – but you can do them at home whenever you have time and earn a little extra income.
You might be recording a video of you saying something to train AI or searching for something on Google and screenshotting it.
A couple of hours of this work might earn you £40 a week – so you could then make £160 of extra income in your spare time each month.
If you stay consistent, filling up those spare minutes with odd jobs, it could be possible to make over £1,900 each year.
Be a professional Mary Poppins – £223 a month
If you’re good with children, consider babysitting in the evenings.
You can advertise locally on your own, but if you’d like the certainty of an organisation behind you, you can sign up to an organisation like Koru Kids.
All you need is experience babysitting or working at a summer camp.
You can earn £11.15 an hour and the company provides insurance, training and your DBS checks for free.
One babysit a week of five hours could earn you £223 a month, or £2,676 a year.
Flog your kid’s revision notes – £60 a month
If you or the kids have been revising hard for public exams, you can turn the study materials you’ve made for yourself into cash.
Grab those flashcards and revision essays and upload them onto Stuvia to sell them to new students.
You could earn £7 per essay or past paper and some documents are downloaded hundreds of times.
It is free to upload your notes, so you’ve nothing to lose, but Stuvia takes a cut if you sell.
The average Stuvia seller makes £62 a month but you can make far more if your notes are popular.
Spread out over an entire year, that comes to £740.
Become a professional flat-packer – £816 a month
Building flat-pack furniture is most people’s idea of a nightmare afternoon.
But if you’re a dab hand with a screwdriver, you could advertise yourself on apps and offer up your skills for cash.
Sign up to AirTasker, which matches those looking for help with “taskers” selling their talents.
‘I’m a odd jobs pro – I earn £3,000 during a good month’
IT product manager Ilya Solodovnikov earns up to £3,000 a month by charging for small tasks like gardening and building flatpack furniture.
Ilya, 38, from Hammersmith, has been signed up on the small jobs site Airtasker for six months, doing ad hoc tasks that earn him hundreds of pounds.
“Within twenty minutes of signing up, I got my first job,” he recalls. “That first task involved helping out in an office move, five hours of moving and dismantling shelves that earned £160.
“Moving jobs are probably my top tasks, but I also take on gardening, furniture restoration, and creative building projects using wood materials,” he says.
Ilya, who is married and lives with his wife Anastasia, 35, says that he can take on as little or as much work as he likes.
The extra income he makes goes towards paying for his jet-setter lifestyle.
“The money I earn goes towards everyday living and travel,” he says. “I complete around three to six tasks a week”.
“It’s a great way to get in shape after the holidays, most of the jobs involve physical activity, so it’s like getting paid for a workout.”
Create a profile on the app and browse requests from those needing help then contact those that fit your skills to agree a price.
The company says the average price for self-assembly furniture jobs is £102.
If you do two jobs every weekend, that’s £816 over January – or £10,600 if you do it throughout year.
Sell patterns on Etsy or Ravelry – £114 a month
If you can make crochet, sewing or knitting patterns you’re onto a winner. Your instructions for how to make anything from a cardigan to a children’s toy could net you hundreds of pounds in passive income.
These can be downloaded multiple times and you won’t have to manufacture or post them.
You can sell your patterns on Etsy, or Ravelry.
On Ravelry you’ll just pay Paypal fees for the first $30 (£23) of products that you sell, then a 3.5% fee.
On Etsy, once various fees were taken into account you’d make around £3.80 per download if you sold a pattern for a fiver.
Sell that same pattern 30 times in a month and you’ve made £114.
Keep sales rolling in for the next twelve months, and you’ll see almost £1,400 land in your bank account.
Popular patterns on Etsy at present include a Highland cow crochet pattern selling for £2.54 which has four thousand reviews, suggesting the creator has made over £7,500 on this pattern alone.
Join a clinical trial or medical study – £4,000
Joining a paid clinical trial such as Flucamp can get you free accommodation and a generous payment if you don’t mind feeling ropey for a week or two.
Healthy volunteers get a private room, a PlayStation and a telly for 11-15 days and receive a diluted flu virus which Flucamp says will only cause ‘mild’ symptoms.
You’ll be screened twice for suitability first and if you’re suitable could be paid over £4,000.
You’ll also be paid for the screenings – £40 for the first one and £70 if you make it to the second round, so even if you’re not picked you can still make cash.
Be a tutor… no, you don’t need a degree – £360 a month
Surprisingly, you don’t need an expensive degree to be a tutor.
If you’re bursting with knowledge in a particular field – from English, to maths and crochet to cooking – you can make it pay by teaching online.
Websites like First Tutors allow customers to find you online, and your clients pay a one-off finder’s fee of half your hourly rate to contact you, so you don’t pay anything more.
With violin teaching for beginners offered at around £40 an hour and Microsoft office skills tutors offering to help for £30, you might be surprised what your skills are worth.
Teach for three hours a week online at £30 an hour to make £90 a week or £360 a month.
Tutors who build a regular pool of students could easily make over £4,300 a year for around 140 hours of work.
Rent your parking space – £200 a month
If you’ve got an empty drive, rent it out via JustPark or YourParkingSpace.
Anywhere where street parking is hard to find may be surprisingly lucrative.
But your space will be particularly valuable if you live near an airport, station, or concert venue.
Listing your space is simple. Go online and put up pictures, details and location.
You can set a price yourself or allow an algorithm to show you an acceptable price for the local area.
Parking apps will then charge more to customers on top of this and taking a three per cent cut as a processing fee.
Some people earn £200 a month or more, equivalent to £2,400 annually.
Earn £1,000 a year tax-free – understanding the ‘side hustle tax’
Everyone has a £1,000 a year ‘side hustle’ tax allowance, which you can use to make money from hobbies.
This allowance, which the taxman calls a ‘trading allowance’ resets every tax year, so runs from April to April.
If you make more than £1,000 from your ‘side hustle’ you will have to tell HMRC about the money you are making. There is more information online here.
There’s also an extra £7,500 ‘rent a room’ allowance if you are renting a room in your house. You can receive this much rent tax free in a year whether you rent a room for the short term (such as to students or as an AirBnB) or long term.
However, you cannot also claim expenses.
Rent a Room money up to £7,500 does not need to be counted as income for Universal Credit purposes. However, any money made from any other side hustle does need to be reported if you receive Universal Credit.
