Contingent and Temporary Workforce Statistics 2026: The BLS View vs. the Staffing-Industry View

Two Different Ways of Counting the Same Workforce

The BLS Contingent Worker Supplement is a household survey, asking individuals directly about their own job arrangements at a point in time, including whether they consider their current work temporary or contingent. The American Staffing Association’s figures come from the opposite direction, staffing firms themselves reporting operational data on the workers they place and bill each week.

Those are structurally different measurement approaches, one self-identified by workers, one firm-reported by employers, and they are not expected to produce identical totals even when describing overlapping populations.

What the Most Recent BLS Wave Found

The Contingent Worker Supplement’s most recent published wave, fielded in July 2023, counted 945,000 temporary-help-agency workers nationally, representing 0.6% of total US employment. Measured more broadly, 4.3% of all workers, 6.9 million people, held a contingent job as their sole or main position at the time of the survey.

These figures are drawn from secondary summaries of the named BLS release, not a direct read of BLS’s own published tables, so they should be re-verified against bls.gov directly before being treated as fully audited.

How the Prior Wave Compares

The previous Contingent Worker Supplement wave, fielded in May 2017, counted 1.4 million temporary-help-agency workers, 0.9% of total employment at the time, with 3.8% of workers holding a contingent job. The temporary-help-agency worker share fell between the two waves, from 0.9% in 2017 to 0.6% in 2023, even as the broader contingent-work share rose slightly, from 3.8% to 4.3%.

That divergence between the narrow temp-agency category and the broader contingent-work category is itself worth noting, the two do not move in lockstep even within the BLS’s own data.

Why ASA’s Number Runs So Much Higher

ASA reports an average of 2.2 million temporary and contract employees working in a typical week during 2024, more than double the BLS supplement’s 945,000 temporary-help-agency-worker count from its most recent wave. The gap traces back to the methodology difference above: ASA’s figure is firm-reported operational data covering everyone staffing companies placed and billed that week, while the BLS figure depends on individual workers self-identifying their arrangement as contingent or temp-agency work in a survey, a narrower and more subjective lens.

Neither figure is wrong, they are simply answering different questions about the same broad workforce.

A Caution Worth Repeating Before Citing Either Number

The Contingent Worker Supplement does not run annually, its confirmed waves are May 2017 and July 2023. A document referencing a possible further CWS-adjacent release could not be independently confirmed in this research pass, so the July 2023 wave should not be assumed to remain the current one without checking bls.gov directly first.

Any use of these figures going forward should confirm the currently published wave and cite its specific reference date, rather than presenting the numbers here as automatically current.

The Numbers

Sources

The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.

• Gig Economy Data Hub, summarizing the BLS Contingent Worker Supplement
• American Staffing Association, staffing industry statistics

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