Living in the UK is getting a lot more expensive so you have two options either you pay higher costs while remaining at the same salary thereby saving less or you find a side hustle to make money on the side thereby saving more. You are on a Visa, which Visa you are on depends on what you plan and whether you can take up a part-time job or a side hustle or not. So today we will discuss about whether your Visa allows side hustles or not, what side hustles you can consider and how much you can expect to get paid.
Let’s start off with basic wages in the UK you have to be paid a minimum amount of wages in the UK per hour depending on how old you are. The lowest you could be paid if you were 23 years was 9.5 pounds. For now you will have to be paid at least 10.42 pounds enough and you can see the rates for other age groups too. It’s 10.18 per hour if you’re between 21 years and 22 years and 7.49 pounds per hour and so forth now this is irrespective of whether you’re doing a full-time job or a part-time jobs bear that in mind all right now.
Let’s talk about skill worker visas and healthcare worker visas because they’re the most common visas through which most working professionals move to the UK on a skilled worker visa you can do an additional work of up to 20 hours. As long as you’re still doing the job that you received a skilled worker visa for, you’re legally allowed to do either work in the same occupation code at the same level as your main job so basically if you got a job as a developer you can do extra work as a developer, if you get a job as a lawyer you can do extra hours as a lawyer or work in a shortage occupation as you know some jobs in Healthcare, Tech etc. fall under the shortage occupation list basis where there’s a shortage of workers in the UK so if your role is in
the shortage occupation list you can do additional work if you plan on working more than 20 hours a week or in a different occupation code.
As per gov.uk you do need to update your visa and you’ll receive a new certificate of sponsorship from your second employer you also need to include a letter with your application stating that you want to change your current permission to stay. The other work visas don’t specifically mention if you can work or do a part-time job or a side hustle or not so I’m going to assume you probably can’t but if you’re really interested you can definitely get in touch with the solicitor in the UK to just confirm whether you can or you can’t.
If you’re a student in the UK you can work up to 20 hours a week during term time and during vacation time you can work well full time. Now this is only in case your course is longer than six months but here’s the thing though on a student Visa you can’t be self-employed that means you can’t set up your own business.
You can’t be a freelancer and You can’t run your own consultancy. Now the reason why I bring this up is because if you do anything outside these lines well you could be fined or arrested or both, so It’s better for you to be aware.
Let’s now discuss a bunch of side hustles that you can consider and all of these side hustles may not be available to all Visa options so basis the visa restrictions that I just mentioned to you you should bear in mind whether you’ll be able to do this or not.
Now the first option is to be a dog sitter or a dog walker, don’t laugh, don’t pass it off, don’t skip trust me where I live I would honestly say one in four families has either one or two dogs so you can see there’s a very big market and here’s the thing if you own a dog the dog needs to be walked and if you go on holidays the dog needs a sitter if you’re not taking the dog along with you or it needs a boarding place now I say this from experience because the last time we wanted to take a long holiday I checked three months in advance
and every single dog uh boarding place which was close to our house was completely packed three months in advance and the only other option we had to consider was either dog sitters or individuals who were willing to board dogs which basically means that if you are a sitter or if you are willing to board dogs you are looking at making a ton of money so dog sitters take approximately 40 bucks per day per dog so if a family is going for a five-day holiday you are looking at making 200 bucks of one dog if they’re going for a 10-day holiday you’re looking at making 400 bucks and this is just dog boarding apart from this there’s also dog sitting so dog sitters charge anywhere from 30 pounds to 60 pounds a night or it could be more and this is for one dog all right and dog sitting involves where you go and stay in the owner’s house and you live and take care of their dogs until they come back and then back to dog walking where you can earn anywhere between 10 to 20 pounds for walking one dog. Now there’s also the concept of Doggy Daycare which basically means while people go to work they need to go out for the day they leave the doggy in your house and you take care of the dog just for the day and the owners come back at night and take their dogs back for this you can earn anywhere between 20 pounds to 45 pounds for the dog now .
You might have no idea what a handyman is ? let me explain if my tap breaks down I may need to replace my tap and the problem is I don’t know where to start. We have absolutely no idea how to go about doing this so we obviously now need to hire a handyman. A Handyman is somebody who basically can help you with the plumbing, with carpentry, fixing shelves, mounting your TV on the wall, fixing your fences, fixing the tiles
pretty much any handy work that you need done now here’s the thing London will always have such requirements because the majority of the population in London is either studying or working and probably either doesn’t know how to do this or doesn’t have the time and if you move outside London and come to the towns like where we stay in there’s a lot of population that is the older population over here which can’t manage to do these things themselves so they need help with this as well. A handyman can basically make anywhere between 10 pounds to 45 pounds depending on which area you live in and this is per hour.
You can visit your local grocery shops and you’ll usually find Flyers over there of people who are
advertising their business or you can go to local coffee shops and you’ll probably find Flyers there as well a lot of times if you stay outside London . There will also be people who will come and drop off flyers at your house for such services.
Another job you can pick up either part-time or full-time is that of social media manager with most businesses moving their presence online there’s often the demand for somebody to come and manage their social media accounts well most bigger brands of course go with agencies with smaller companies find it difficult to pay those agency fees so they would honestly prefer either students or somebody doing this part-time or individuals managing the account versus an agency now of course you can’t land a social media manager gig with absolutely no experience so two things would help you the first thing is if you manage to do some courses free courses, paid courses whatever it is in social media management. The second thing would be to learn those Concepts and then apply it on your own personal accounts and at least grow your own personal following so even if you haven’t had a corporate gig as a social media manager if you show this kind of growth or the strategies that you have learned and implemented on your own account it might still help you land the gig.
If you want a freelance and your Visa allows it. You can look at Fiverr, you can look at Freelancer or you can look at Upwork if, you’re looking at rates just to recover itself people charge all the way from 17 pounds to 200 pounds depending on the nature of work you’re looking at so there’s a lot of money to be made.
Another gig you can consider in the UK to make money on the side is Tutoring. if you are in University or if you are in college you can tutor other students in your University you can tutor Secondary School students you can even help with writing essays and coursework. If you are not a student you should still consider tutoring now let me give you an example in a year or so I would want my son to start learning some amount of French and I obviously can’t pay too many French so I would obviously then opt for the tutor and here’s the thing a lot of parents I know who have children of the same age as my son are also looking Idol right now or going to look very shortly for tutors to teach their children other languages you might be thinking you don’t know languages bathroom English in Hindi but you know what there are a lot of people who are also looking at learning Hindi so don’t discount that and here’s the thing it’s not limited to just languages you have the option of teaching Maths, Science , Chemistry, Biology etc these are typically the most demanded subjects if you check online in terms of online tutoring so if you’re good at it you have the option of teaching somebody Maths, Chemistry, Biology and a lot of other subjects as well these are the most demanded subjects but that doesn’t mean there’s no demand for other subjects there’s also the option of teaching somebody how to play a musical instrument because that is something I would want as well and you can always teach somebody how to play the piano, the keyboard, the guitar, a lot of these options exist with the exception of music of course you have the option of either tutoring online through Zoom calls or you can do it face to face and if you’d like to sign up with somebody or you don’t know where to start just Google it tutoring in the UK tutoring, in maidenhead tutoring in London whatever and you’ll have a bunch of services that pop up that you can register with just to give you an idea. French tutors charge about 30 bucks an hour maths tutors charge about 37 bucks an hour so again you are looking and making a decent amount of money.
Another option you can definitely consider is selling your own stuff the secondhand Market is really big in the UK or pre-loved or pre-owned you could look at selling your old clothes your, old books, your old appliances whatever you’re looking at selling it works now you can either look at selling them either on Facebook Marketplace or eBay or through a car boot sale which mostly happens in summers unless I’m wrong because if the area where we live in it happens only in the summer but people come to this whole
open ground and quite typically sell things out of their car boots so that’s something you should definitely consider as well not only does it help you make extra cash on the side but also helps you get rid of stuff you don’t want now the next thing is deliveries if you stay in London you have a lot of shops nearby but if you stay anywhere outside London you’d realise that you don’t often have a shop which is or a store which is too close to your house you do have supermarkets like Tesco’s and they usually deliver the next day unless you opt for like a desk or whoosh which is the equivalent of Swiggy Genie no whatever which whichever comes in drops off groceries instantly and these Tesco deliveries are often delivered by people who were passing by
who signed up for the service had some work on the way and just decided to drop off these groceries brilliant when it comes to delivering groceries or options like deliveroo get in a lot of other options if you work with deliveroo you look at making for about five delivery in an hour anywhere between 15 to 22.5
If you are working with get . You’ll be approximately making about 10.6 an hour now apart from delivering groceries you can also look a delivering couriers so unlike in Indi where if mintra wants to deliver a courier it has its own delivery channel. In the UK the usually sign up with separate companies like every for instance is one of those companies and every is using regular people like you and me to deliver couriers it’s not really a professional Network it’s just a bunch of people who sign up for the service to deliver these couriers.
Debenhams uses a service through which a lovely 60 year old woman usually comes and delivers my courier and it’s an absolute joy to meet you meet her each time she comes here and every time my next couriers come it’s another lady who I’m very familiar with because she’s always the one to come drop it off. She’ll come in her car drop it off wave and leave so it’s very normal people. They’re not delivery agents they’re actually people who probably live close by and who opted for this just as a side way of making some more money now every pays you approximately 10 to 15 pounds an hour while delivering these Scrolls.
If you work with every you can look at enough now what if you don’t have making approximately 10 to 15 in pounds anything to sell and you’re not very good with social media and you’re not a very good handy person and you don’t know how to teach anybody maths or science just like I can’t teach anyone anything but you can cook so if you are from India the concept of a cook coming over at home and cooking once or twice a day is extremely common especially if I’m a big city so almost everybody I knew in Bangalore had a cook that came home and made a breakfast and lunch and then came and made dinner again or made all the three of them at one shot in the morning or the evening but when we moved to the UK and we started asking around about that concept everyone was really surprised and they’re like. We thought okay maybe the concept doesn’t exist in the UK but then when we asked our friends in London they have managed to find cooks and one of them has a cook that comes three times a week one of them has a cook that comes every day and they all manage now unfortunately we can’t seem to find any Cooks in maidenhead and that means I have to sit and cook every day which is something I absolutely the best now I am willing to pay for a cook but there’s no cook in maidenhead and I am 100 sure there are more people like me who work and who go to London or go to reading whatever and then they come back home tired and they don’t want to cook but there are no Cooks so imagine if you stayed here and you knew people like us you could make a lot of money off people like me right so if you do move to the UK and if you’re good at cooking or if you’re even badly decent at cooking but you don’t mind doing that process that’s something you should definitely consider especially in areas which have a lot of people possibly who come from India because we’re used to the concept and that’s something we would enjoy versus a lot of people who have been born and raised here and who aren’t familiar with the concept so they don’t really have that need but for anyone who’s coming from outside and who’s already used to this kind of life, it’s an absolutely great option and in both of the cases of the people who I told you who were in London who managed to find books both of their cooks are Indians and if you do know somebody who does live close to maidenhead or well in maidenhead and likes cooking please I will be very happy the thing for you to remember is because this is such a niche category and people are desperate you can make a lot of money over here now most of the jobs that I just discussed, now are not corporate gigs but if you are looking at a side hustle or a part-time job that is a corporate gig, the only place I would suggest you go to LinkedIn and indeed and you should find most of your options that all you have to do is type out part-time and whatever role you’re looking at in foot London or where anywhere in the UK and you should get a bunch of options so consider doing that as well especially if you belong to the skilled worker route where you have to do jobs within your own occupation code.