For a rising share of ride-share and delivery workers, app earnings alone are not enough.
Many also depend on programs such as food assistance or public health coverage to get by.
That has intensified scrutiny of a gig-economy model that markets flexibility while often leaving workers — and taxpayers — to shoulder the underlying costs.
Here's what to know
In 2020, Walmart and McDonald's were among the largest employers with workers receiving SNAP benefits, according to a Government Accountability Office survey.
By 2025, a Government Accountability Office report highlighted by Fortune found that DoorDash, Lyft, and Uber had overtaken them and moved to the top.
That shift challenges the idea that app-based work is mostly a way to earn a little extra spending money.
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In a survey of more than 1,000 Michigan residents, about 22% said they had done gig work, and roughly half of those workers said it was essential or important to meeting basic needs.
When companies depend on low-paid labor without offering standard benefits such as health insurance, disability coverage, or workers' compensation, public programs often end up filling the gap.
The same Government Accountability Office report shows how sharply that dependence has grown in healthcare as well: gig platforms ranked third among U.S. employers by number of workers enrolled in Medicaid in 2025, after sitting outside the top five in 2020.
More background
In the Michigan survey, 9 in 10 workers said flexibility mattered, and more than two-thirds said their overall experience of gig work was positive.
But that flexibility can become a liability when pay swings from week to week and benefits are absent. Only 6% said they had cut back hours or left another job to do more gig work, suggesting these platforms are less a replacement for stable employment than a tool for coping with a broader affordability crunch.
Those pressures intensify under tougher Medicaid work rules in President Donald Trump's 2025 tax and immigration bill. Gig work can count toward the 80-hour monthly work-or-school requirement, but proving those hours may be more difficult for workers spread across multiple apps, lacking standard pay stubs, and spending unpaid time waiting between assignments.
That can create a brutal cycle: uneven pay makes paperwork harder, paperwork problems can cost workers their health coverage, and losing coverage can mean bigger medical bills — even as large companies continue to benefit from a labor model that pushes risk downward.
What's being done?
One policy idea gaining traction is portable benefits, which would let workers keep benefit accounts as they move from one app or job to another.
In the Michigan survey, 61% of gig workers backed that approach, along with more than half of other workers.
New York offers a prominent example through the Black Car Fund, a state-authorized nonprofit benefits fund that automatically enrolls gig and taxi drivers and is financed with a passenger surcharge on fares. It has provided workers' compensation, along with health, dental, and disability benefits, while shifting more of the cost away from taxpayers.
California offers a different lesson about policy design. Proposition 22 kept drivers classified as independent contractors while attaching a narrower set of benefits that does not fully transfer across platforms. Because eligibility is based on "engaged hours" rather than total time worked, many drivers still fall short of the threshold; one study found that only 10% of California drivers receive the healthcare stipend created by the law.
If gig work is becoming a core source of income for millions of people, its convenience should not depend on weaker worker protections or on shifting food, health, and disability costs onto the public.
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