Part-time work or home income after 60: which actually pays more?

Dale is 63. He claimed Social Security at 62, works about twenty hours a week at a hardware store, and has decided he wants roughly $700 a month more coming in. Two options are sitting in front of him. He could sign up to drive deliveries in the evenings. Or he could rent out the spare bedroom his daughter moved out of years ago.

On paper, they look like the same $700. They aren't. One of them takes something like fifty or more hours a month behind the wheel, puts miles on his car, and — because of how Social Security treats earnings for someone who claimed early — would cost him more than two months of benefit checks the following year. The other one, set up properly, doesn't touch his benefit at all.

Dale isn't one real person; he's a composite, built from situations that come up again and again. But the numbers behind his choice are real, and most people never write them down before deciding. This article does that, side by side: what part-time work actually pays, what home income actually pays, and what each one costs you in time, wear, taxes, and Social Security.

This is the long version. Use the contents to find your part.

1. What does gig work actually pay, once you count the waiting?

Less than the headline. Figures of $20 an hour or more get passed around online for delivery and rideshare apps, but those numbers usually count only “active” time — the minutes you're actually carrying an order. Gridwise, an app that tracks earnings for thousands of drivers, found the average DoorDash driver grossed about $12.43 per active hour in 2025. That's before gas, before wear on the car, before taxes, and before any of the time spent sitting in a parking lot waiting for the next order to come in.

Once those come out, estimates of what a driver actually keeps vary widely by city, app, and time of day — but commonly land somewhere between the high single digits and the low teens per hour. Some shifts do better. Slow weeknights in a smaller town often do worse.

What gig work does offer is real flexibility. There's no schedule and no boss; you open the app when you want to work and close it when you don't. The flip side of that freedom is that nobody guarantees you hours or orders, and a slow day pays slowly.

2. What taxes come with gig income?

Gig income is self-employment income, and that changes the tax picture in two ways most first-time drivers don't see coming.

First, you owe both halves of the Social Security and Medicare tax — 15.3% combined — on your net earnings, on top of regular income tax. An employer would normally pay half of that for you. Here, nobody does.

Second, the apps generally don't withhold anything. The whole tax bill arrives at once in April unless you set money aside as you go or make quarterly estimated payments.

The one real help is the mileage deduction. For 2026, the IRS standard rate is 72.5 cents a mile for miles driven January through June, and 76 cents a mile for July through December — the IRS raised it midyear, which it rarely does. That rate is meant to cover gas, wear, insurance, and depreciation together, and for many drivers it adds up to a meaningful deduction. It only works if you log your miles from the first day, though. Trying to reconstruct a year of driving in March doesn't hold up well.

3. Does your car insurance cover delivery driving?

Often not by default. Many personal auto policies exclude driving for pay, or limit coverage while you're logged into a delivery or rideshare app. Some insurers offer an inexpensive add-on for exactly this; others don't. The apps carry some coverage of their own, but it varies by company and by whether you're waiting for an order, driving to pick one up, or carrying one.

This is the same lesson as renting a room: call your agent before you start, not after something goes wrong. It's a five-minute call, and it's the one people put off because nothing has happened yet.

4. What does a regular part-time job actually pay?

A part-time job in retail, a grocery store, a garden center, or a front desk pays a set hourly wage, usually somewhere around your local entry-level rate. It's steadier than gig work: you know your rate, your employer withholds taxes and pays half of your Social Security and Medicare tax, and you don't put miles on your own car.

The trade is control over your time. Most part-time retail and service roles run roughly 15 to 28 hours a week on a schedule the employer posts, and that schedule can shift from week to week. You're on their calendar, not yours. Some retirees like that — somewhere to be, people to see. Others retired specifically to get away from it.

5. Is there a quieter middle option?

Yes, and it's easy to overlook. Between driving for an app and standing on your feet in a store, there's a category of remote, low-physical-demand work: customer service, virtual assistant work, bookkeeping, and tutoring. These are increasingly offered as part-time, work-from-home positions, often scheduled in advance rather than gig-style.

Pay tends to land closer to a regular part-time job than to the gig apps, and it's still wages — so everything in the Social Security section below applies to it too. But for someone who wants to avoid time behind the wheel or on a sales floor, it's worth a look before ruling out work altogether. Tutoring in particular has its own full guide on this site: what tutoring after 60 actually pays.

6. What does home income actually pay?

A spare room, a garage, or a slice of your yard doesn't pay by the hour. It pays by the month, and once it's set up, the money doesn't depend much on how many hours you put in.

For a spare room, the honest range depends heavily on where you live. Across large U.S. metro areas, a single rented room typically brings in somewhere between $900 and $1,600 a month, with mid-size metros in the Southeast and Midwest closer to $900–$1,100. After your share of utilities and the small costs that come with having someone in the house, most homeowners over 60 in a typical metro end up with something like $700 to $1,200 a month in real, extra income before tax. Smaller towns and shared-bath rooms run lower. Nobody can promise you a number, and the full breakdown — what moves your price up or down, and how to check it against local listings — is in spare room income after 60.

Garage, basement, or yard storage usually pays less than a room, but asks even less of you: no one living in the house, no shared kitchen, very little ongoing time.

And it isn't free money. You'll need a call to your insurance agent, a proper screening of whoever you rent to, and a simple written agreement. Those are covered in what renting out a room actually costs you.

7. How does the Social Security earnings limit treat each one?

This is the part that changes the math the most, and it only applies if you're collecting Social Security before your full retirement age.

If you're under full retirement age for all of 2026, you can earn up to $24,480 before Social Security starts withholding. Above that, they hold back $1 for every $2 you earn over the limit. In the year you actually reach full retirement age, the limit rises to $65,160 and they withhold $1 for every $3 over. Once you reach full retirement age, the limit disappears entirely.

Wages from a part-time job count against that limit. So does net self-employment income from gig work — that's your earnings after expenses like the mileage deduction, which is one more reason to track your miles. Remote work counts too. It's all earned income.

Rental income from a room, garage, or yard generally does not count. Social Security treats it as unearned income — a different bucket from wages — so you can collect it without triggering any withholding at all.

There's one exception worth knowing. If you're providing real services along with the room — meals, cleaning their room, doing their laundry — it starts to look less like renting space and more like running a bed-and-breakfast, and it can be treated as self-employment income. Then it does count. Sharing utilities and Wi-Fi, or cleaning a kitchen you both use, doesn't cross that line. If you're not sure where your arrangement falls, a short call to Social Security or a tax preparer settles it.

And one thing people get wrong about withholding: the money isn't simply lost, but it isn't simply handed back either. Once you reach full retirement age, Social Security recalculates and credits those withheld months into a permanently higher monthly check from then on. Whether that comes out ahead depends on how long you live. It isn't a penalty, and it isn't free. It's a trade — and it's still money you don't have this year, when you were working to get it.

8. What does that look like with real numbers?

Back to Dale. His hardware store job pays him about $22,000 a year, which keeps him just under the $24,480 limit. His Social Security check is $1,400 a month. He wants about $8,400 more a year — that $700 a month.

If he drives deliveries and nets $8,400 after expenses, his total earnings come to about $30,400. That's $5,920 over the limit, so Social Security withholds about $2,960 — usually by holding back whole monthly checks at the start of the following year until the amount is covered. For Dale, that's roughly two full checks and part of a third. He'd also owe self-employment tax on the $8,400, and to net that amount at realistic gig rates he'd be driving something like twelve to eighteen hours a week, every week, on top of his store shifts.

If he rents the spare room for around $850 a month and clears about $700 after utilities and small costs, his earnings for Social Security purposes stay at $22,000. Nothing is withheld. The rent is still taxable income, but at ordinary rates with deductions that come with it — covered in spare room rental tax after 60 — and his time commitment is a few hours a month once the right person is moved in.

Same $700 a month. Very different year.

9. What about the physical side?

It's worth being honest with yourself here, because it matters more with each passing year. Gig driving means hours in the car, parking, walking orders up stairs, and doing it at night and in bad weather when demand is highest. Part-time retail usually means hours on your feet and some lifting.

Home income asks something different: very little of your body, but more of your comfort with someone else in your space, at least some of the time. Neither is the “right” kind of effort. The useful question isn't which one sounds more respectable — it's which one you'll actually have patience for two years from now.

10. Which one is faster to start?

Gig work, easily. Most delivery apps can have you approved and driving within days, and many pay out weekly or faster.

A part-time job usually takes a week or two between applying and a first paycheck.

Home income takes the longest to start. Between preparing the room, the insurance call, listing it, screening people properly, and a written agreement, several weeks is normal before the first rent check — sometimes longer if the right person doesn't turn up quickly. That's the honest cost of the steadier option: it pays later, then keeps paying.

11. Can you do both?

Yes, and a sensible way to think about it is short-term versus long-term. Gig work or a few extra shifts can cover a specific, near-term need — a car repair, a dental bill, the weeks it takes to get a room ready — while a rented room or garage becomes the steadier piece that keeps coming in afterward.

If you're collecting Social Security early, the one thing to watch is your total earned income for the year. The rent doesn't count toward the limit, but every dollar of wages and gig earnings does, and they add together.

12. Which one fits you?

If you need money this week, gig work or a part-time job wins. Nothing else on this list pays that fast.

If you have unused space and can wait a few weeks, home income usually wins over the long run — on hours, on wear and tear, and, if you claimed Social Security early, on how much of it you actually get to keep.

And if you're past full retirement age, the earnings limit drops out of the picture entirely. Then it really is a question of time, energy, and which kind of effort suits you.

One concrete next step: write down two numbers before you choose. First, what you expect to earn from work this year, including anything you're already earning — and if you claimed Social Security before full retirement age, see how close that puts you to $24,480. Second, what a room like yours actually rents for nearby: check three local listings. Those two numbers will tell you more than any article can, including this one.

Sources: Social Security Administration, 2026 earnings test limits; IRS standard mileage rates for 2026 (January–June and July–December); Gridwise driver earnings data for 2025; SpareRoom 2026 metro pricing index, cited via Kiplinger. Dale is a composite example, not a real person. Individual results vary by market, platform, and arrangement. This is general information, not tax or legal advice.