The 8 best PhD side hustles | Earn money during your PhD

PhD life gets harder when finances stay constantly in the background—so the practical fix is building side income streams that don’t steal focus from research. The central idea here is to choose work that stays close to the PhD environment, minimizes distraction, and pays enough to matter, while avoiding time-heavy “sell your time” jobs that come with bosses, schedules, and mental load.

The approach starts with a clear filter: side hustles should not derail study progress, should be located near where the PhD work happens (often inside the university), and should fit the reality that “passive income” usually isn’t reachable early on. Content creation and long-term income products may be the ideal endgame, but they typically take years to build multiple streams—so during a PhD, the focus shifts to higher-value exchanges of time for money. The underlying logic is also skills-based: PhD students already have advanced knowledge and communication ability, which can be converted into paid help for others.

One-on-one tutoring is presented as the most lucrative option. The tutoring model relies on credibility—advertising qualifications and past results—and on charging rates that avoid racing to the bottom (roughly AUD 40–55). Exam-focused tutoring is framed as especially valuable because students pay for clarity and confidence when deadlines hit. Closely related are “exam cramming sessions,” run about two weeks before exams. These sessions use past exam papers from the prior five to six years, delivered as one-on-one or small group formats in university rooms, with pricing around AUD 30–50 per person depending on group size. The demand is explained through urgency: students who leave revision to the last moment create a market for structured, high-yield preparation.

Other income ideas lean into monetizing existing skills and university access. Etsy sales are suggested through examples like digital products (such as academic writing toolkits or planners) and handmade items made from hobbies—like turning stripped circuit boards into jewelry. Exam marking is another route: approaching lecturers with “ideal answers” and mark allocations, then grading large cohorts (the speaker describes learning where marks land after repeated marking). Teaching and lecturing also appear as a natural extension—offering lectures, tutorials, and workshops, including marking afterward, and sometimes even delivering masters-level lecture series tied to the student’s own research experience.

For universities, student services are highlighted as a hub for paid tutoring and workshop facilitation—covering essay help, English support for second-language students, math skills, and academic problem-solving. In lab-based disciplines, becoming a lab demonstrator is offered as a way to earn while guiding undergraduates through practical experiments like titration, distillation, crystallization, and separation techniques.

Finally, the transcript draws a line against the gig economy’s typical lack of security and worker protections, but makes an exception for user testing. Using platforms such as usertesting.com, the work involves about 20 minutes of completing tasks and speaking through thoughts, paying around $10 per session, with the benefit of professional structure and a relatively good pay-per-hour when opportunities accumulate through positive reviews.