Eight in Ten Young Americans Now Work a Second Job, and Most Say They Need It Just to Cover Basics

Eight in ten Gen Z workers and 77 percent of millennials now hold some kind of job beyond their primary one, according to a new Goldman Sachs survey, and for most of them the extra income is not discretionary. 76 percent of Gen Z workers and 73 percent of millennials with a second job say they could not cover basic living expenses without it, turning what used to be called a side hustle into something closer to a second shift.

The same survey found confidence in reaching retirement goals falling fast, from 68 percent of respondents who felt on track in the previous year down to 58 percent in 2026. The share of people increasing how much they save annually dropped even further, from 55 percent to 39 percent, a decline Goldman's senior retirement strategist Chris Ceder summed up plainly, savings momentum seems to be stalling, as competing priorities push retirement contributions further down the list.

Housing costs are doing most of the crowding out. The survey found rent and mortgage payments now compete directly with retirement savings for the same limited dollars, and the stress of that competition is showing up at work, 69 percent of Gen Z and 67 percent of millennials said debt and household cost worries make it hard to concentrate on the job itself. Major financial milestones, buying a home, building an emergency fund, paying down debt, contributing more to retirement, are getting pushed back across the board rather than achieved on the timeline people expected.

The one result that cuts against the rest of the data is retirement itself. 44 percent of current retirees said they left work earlier than they had planned, and 45 percent of that group stopped between one and three years ahead of schedule. Taken together with the savings numbers, the picture is a workforce under more financial pressure in its thirties and forties that is somehow still retiring early once it gets the chance, whether by choice, health, layoffs or simply deciding that enough was enough regardless of what the retirement math said.

What the survey describes is not a single crisis but a mismatch between when people need money and when the financial system assumes they will need it. A second job that covers rent today does nothing for a retirement account forty years from now, and a generation increasingly built around solving the first problem is, by Goldman's own numbers, making less progress than ever on the second.