The gig economy in 2026: five forces every platform needs to plan for

How big is the gig economy in 2026?

Work has reorganized, and screening volume as we know it has gone with it.

The global gig economy was worth $556.7 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $2.1 trillion by 2033, according to Business Research Insights. In 40 percent of organizations ADP surveyed in 2025, one in four payroll workers is now a gig worker. Blue-collar gig hiring surged 92 percent year over year in 2024. White-collar project work grew 38 percent in the same period. (Business Research Insights)

Underneath those headlines: 5.6 million U.S. independent workers now earn more than $100,000 annually, an 87 percent increase since 2020 (MBO Partners). 52% of Gen Z professionals freelance in some capacity (Upwork Freelance Forward, 2023). Among Gen Z freelancers specifically, 61% cite taking more control over personal development and career path as a reason for freelancing, with the broader theme of the research being that this is choice-driven rather than necessity-driven. Gig has stopped being just the work people take when they cannot find a job. For a meaningful share of the workforce, it is now the work they prefer.

The assumption that you can verify identity once at hire and forget about it is no longer tenable for any high-volume gig employer. Workers are cycling through platforms, holding multiple identities, and being re-onboarded faster than most verification cadences were designed for.

How is gig economy regulation changing in 2026?

Regulation is diverging around the world. For a few years it looked as though gig regulation might settle into a single internationally recognized category. That window has closed.

• EU. The Platform Work Directive (adopted October 2024) creates a presumption of employment for platform workers (commonly referred to as gig workers) across all 27 member states. National transposition deadlines run to December 2026. No two member states are implementing it identically. across all 27 member states. National transposition deadlines run to December 2026. No two member states are implementing it identically.
• U.S. The Department of Labor reverted to contractor-favoring guidance in May 2025. State law remains fragmented. California’s AB5 sits alongside Proposition 22; Massachusetts has its own carve-outs; New York City sets minimum wages for delivery drivers.
• The UK passed the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 in December 2025, which extends Right to Work checks to gig, zero-hours, and casual workers under Section 48. The implementation framework is still being developed following a public consultation that closed in December 2025. Once in force, employers face civil fines of up to £60,000 per illegal worker for repeat offences.” Brodies LLP analysis.

What identity fraud threats face gig platforms in 2026?

The threat surface has changed structurally.

In June 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice announced coordinated searches of 29 suspected “laptop farms” across 16 states, through which North Korean IT operatives had obtained employment at more than 100 American companies. A related sentencing weeks later documented a single operation that had placed operatives at more than 300 companies, generating $17 million. The documents weren’t forged; many belonged to real people. On paper, everything checked out. The gap was between the identity on file and the person at the keyboard. That case is one example among many: AI-generated identities are no longer a specialist threat; they’re a widely available infrastructure.

• Deepfake-as-a-Service emerged as one of the fastest-growing cybercrime tools of 2025 (Cyble)
• Sumsub ranks deepfakes in the top five fraud types globally in its 2025–2026 Identity Fraud Report (Sumsub report)
• The UK government estimated 8 million deepfakes were shared in 2025, against 500,000 in 2023 (UK gov source)
• Gartner projects one in four candidate profiles could be fake by 2028 (Gartner)

Gig platforms are uniquely exposed. High-volume onboarding, limited human oversight, cross-border operations, and economic pressure to prioritize speed combine into a threat surface that earlier screening models weren’t built for.

The shift operators talk about most: the key question their identity verification has to answer has changed. It used to be “did this candidate pass the background check?” The question now is whether the person working today is the same person who passed the check at onboarding.

If your current verification can’t answer the second question, that’s a gap worth scoping before your next budget cycle.

What digital identity infrastructure is being rolled out?

The infrastructure underpinning verification is finally going live.

For two decades, digital identity was a thing the next generation was supposed to sort out. The next generation has arrived.

The EU’s eIDAS 2.0 regulation requires every member state to provide a digital identity wallet to its residents by the end of 2026. Regulated sectors must accept those wallets by the end of 2027 (eIDAS 2.0 regulation).

In the U.S., mobile driver’s licenses are now active in states covering 41 percent of the population, with active or in-development programs reaching 76 percent.

The FIDO Alliance announced 15 billion accounts were passkey-ready by late 2024, with adoption doubling year over year (FIDO Alliance announcement).

What this infrastructure makes possible matters more than the rollout itself. Verification shifts from a one-time event to a continuous state. The EU wallet enables selective disclosure: a worker can prove they have the right to work without revealing their full identity. UK Digital Identity and Attributes Trust Framework providers already process millions of Right to Work checks every month.

The verification infrastructure that didn’t exist five years ago is going live now. Platforms that integrate it early could mitigate both fraud risk and onboarding friction. Platforms that don’t will keep paying for the gap manually.

Why is gig screening shifting from risk to trust?

The industry’s language has moved.

Across the screening and identity industry, the framing has shifted from “mitigating risk” to “enabling trust.” Trust and safety as a professional category didn’t formally exist before 2020 and is now estimated at $15 billion globally, growing at 15 percent annually (Data Insights Market). 39 percent of U.S. hiring managers now conduct more in-person interviews specifically to verify candidate authenticity (Greenhouse, 2025) — which tells you two things: trust has become the organizing concept, and a lot of organizations are paying for it manually because the digital infrastructure isn’t yet sufficient.

In the gig economy, this shift is most acute. The consumer-facing apps your workers deliver, drive, and serve through have built their public proposition on trust for years. The screening conversation underneath those apps is still catching up.

A short planning checklist

Here are six questions worth answering before your next budget cycle:

Volume. Has your hiring volume grown faster than your identity verification and background screening cadence?

Geography. Are you running multiple regulatory regimes? Is your screening setup native to each, or working around the gaps?

Fraud. Can your current identity verification confirm that the person working today is the person you onboarded?

Infrastructure. Are you integrating digital identity standards as they roll out, or planning to deal with them later?

Policy. How are you evaluating the impact of the threat or even false verifications? How much risk are you willing to expose yourself to and at what cost?

Language. Inside your business, is screening being budgeted as procurement or as workforce trust infrastructure? Those are different conversations.

Frequently Asked Questions