The FTC Mailed $2.7 Million to 62,893 Handy Gig Workers: How to Track Your Real Take-Home Pay

Take your last platform payout and divide it by every hour the work actually cost you — not just the billed hours, but the driving between jobs, the waiting on a no-show client, the unpaid messages, and the evening you spent disputing a fee. That number is your real wage, and for tens of thousands of home-service gig workers it turned out to be far below the rate the job cards implied. In July 2026 the Federal Trade Commission started mailing the proof: more than $2.7 million in refund checks to 62,893 workers, averaging about $43 each, after finding that the platform's advertised earnings bore little resemblance to what most workers brought home.

This post is about your side of that story. You cannot rewrite a platform's marketing, but you can compute your true hourly rate, reconcile every payout against the fees behind it, and keep books that show exactly where the money goes — so the next gap between advertised pay and actual pay shows up in your spreadsheet before it shows up in an enforcement action.

What the checks are, in brief​

The refunds come from a $2.95 million settlement between Handy Technologies — the home-services gig platform now operating as Angi Services — and two enforcers, the FTC and the New York Attorney General, following a joint complaint filed in January 2025. The allegations had two parts: first, that Handy advertised "up to" hourly earnings figures that few workers actually achieved; second, that it charged fees and fines without clearly disclosing them or getting workers' informed consent. The checks cover workers on the platform between January 2019 and November 2024, and the settlement requires the company to get express, informed consent before charging fees going forward.

Two details matter for your bookkeeping more than the headline. First, the earnings gap was a measurement problem before it was a legal one: the advertised number was gross, pre-fee, best-case pay, while the worker's reality was net-of-fees pay spread over unpaid hours. Second, the fees workers never clearly agreed to are exactly the line items most gig workers never separately record. Both problems yield to the same fix: track the gross, track every deduction, and divide by all your hours.

Compute your real hourly rate​

A platform shows you what a job pays. It does not show you what the job pays you, per hour of your life, after everything. Run this calculation once a month for each platform you work:

1. Start with gross job pay — the customer-facing total for jobs you completed, including bonuses, tips, and incentive payments. This is your revenue, and it is the number your tax return wants.
2. Subtract platform fees and fines — service fees, payment-processing cuts, background-check charges, cancellation penalties, chargebacks, and any "adjustments" that reduced a payout. Each one is a business expense, not a pay cut you absorb silently.
3. Subtract your operating costs — mileage at the IRS standard rate (72.5 cents per mile for 2026), parking and tolls, supplies and cleaning products, the business share of your phone bill, and equipment you bought for the work.
4. Subtract your tax reserve — set aside roughly 25 to 30 percent of net profit for income and self-employment tax if you have no other withholding. This is not optional; nothing was withheld from any of these payments.
5. Divide by all hours — billed time plus travel, waiting, supply runs, messaging, disputing fees, and bookkeeping. If a platform's app tracks only job time, keep your own timer for a typical week and apply the ratio.

A concrete example: $486 in gross job pay for a week, minus $72.90 in platform fees, minus 140 miles of driving at 72.5 cents ($101.50), minus $18 in supplies, leaves $293.60 before tax. If the jobs took 11 billed hours but 17 total hours of your week, your real rate is about $17.27 per hour before tax — not the "up to $45" the job card suggested. Nobody needs to deceive you for this gap to exist; unpaid time and untracked costs create it on their own. The point of the exercise is not outrage but information: once you know the real number, you can compare platforms, decline unprofitable job types, and raise your effective rate by cutting the costs you control.

Reconcile every payout, gross to net​

Your second habit is a weekly ten-minute reconciliation. Platforms report income in fragments — gross earnings on one screen, fees on another, adjustments buried in email, tips arriving days later — and the only deposit you can verify independently is the one that hits your bank account. Tie them together:

• Log each payout's components. For every deposit, record the date, the gross job pay behind it, each fee and fine deducted, tips included, and the net deposited. A simple spreadsheet with one row per payout is enough; the discipline matters more than the tool.
• Match deposits to bank statements monthly. Every platform deposit should trace to a logged payout row, and every row should trace to a deposit. Orphan rows mean money you expected but never received; orphan deposits mean income you forgot to record.
• Screenshot statements before they age out. Platforms rotate old pay statements out of the app. Export or screenshot each pay period and keep the files with your tax records — if you ever dispute a fee or respond to a tax notice, the platform's current screen will not show last year's numbers.
• Track fees you did not clearly authorize. Under the Handy settlement the company must now get express, informed consent before charging fees. Read fee consent screens instead of tapping through them, and when a new deduction appears, ask what authorized it. A fee you can point to in your own log is a fee you can dispute with evidence.

This log is also what makes tax season survivable. When no single form tells the whole story — and for most gig workers, none does — your payout log is the source of truth your return is built from.

No tax form does not mean no tax​

Gig platforms report your earnings on information returns, but the thresholds leave most workers with incomplete paperwork. For 2026, payment apps and marketplaces generally issue Form 1099-K only when your gross payments exceed $20,000 and you have more than 200 transactions on that platform — a threshold Congress restored retroactively in 2025, ending years of phase-down confusion. Separately, the threshold for Form 1099-NEC nonemployee-compensation reporting rose from $600 to $2,000 for payments made in 2026. Either way, the rule that matters is the one that never changed: all business income is reportable on Schedule C whether or not any form arrives.

The mechanics, briefly:

• Schedule C collects every platform's gross income in one place and subtracts your business expenses — platform fees, mileage, supplies, phone, insurance — to reach net profit. Every legitimate expense you document reduces both income tax and self-employment tax.
• Schedule SE applies the 15.3 percent self-employment tax (Social Security plus Medicare) to 92.35 percent of that net profit, once net earnings reach $400 for the year. You also deduct one-half of the self-employment tax from income before computing income tax.
• Quarterly estimates are how you pay it. With no employer withholding anything, the IRS expects estimated payments four times a year; the penalty for skipping them is the most common surprise first-year gig workers face.

An expense is deductible when it is ordinary and necessary for the work: platform commissions, the business-use share of your phone, cleaning supplies, tools, tolls and parking for jobs, and mileage you logged contemporaneously. What sinks deductions is not the category but the evidence — reconstructing a year's driving from memory in April is how legitimate miles go unclaimed. Log them weekly and the deduction takes care of itself.

Keep books that show the gap​

Spreadsheets track numbers; double-entry books explain them. When each payout is recorded as gross income with fees as separate expenses, your profit-and-loss statement answers the question the settlement raised — "where did the advertised pay go?" — in one glance. A week of platform work, plus the refund check itself, looks like this in plain-text accounting:

2026-01-01 open Assets:Checking USD
2026-01-01 open Income:Gig-Platform USD
2026-01-01 open Income:Other USD
2026-01-01 open Expenses:Platform-Fees USD
2026-01-01 open Expenses:Phone USD
2026-01-01 open Expenses:Supplies USD
 
2026-07-15 * "Platform payout week 29, gross 486.00, fees 72.90"
  Assets:Checking            413.10 USD
  Expenses:Platform-Fees      72.90 USD
  Income:Gig-Platform       -486.00 USD
 
2026-07-20 * "Business share of phone bill"
  Expenses:Phone              45.00 USD
  Assets:Checking            -45.00 USD
 
2026-08-10 * "FTC redress check, platform settlement"
  Assets:Checking             43.00 USD
  Income:Other               -43.00 USD

Three choices here are deliberate. Recording the $486 gross with the $72.90 fee as its own expense — instead of booking the $413.10 deposit as income — keeps your real revenue visible and your fee burden measurable; netting them hides both. The phone bill is split so only the business share lands in expenses, which is what "ordinary and necessary" requires you to be able to show. And the redress check is booked as income when received, because money that replaces earnings you never reported can be taxable — keep the letter that came with it and hand both to your tax preparer rather than guessing.

The Beancount documentation on recording income and balancing transactions covers the account structures this pattern builds on. Once a few months of payouts accumulate, Fava charts of income and expenses by account show your fee line creeping upward the moment a platform raises its take — the trend that tells you to renegotiate your effort before your real hourly rate renegotiates you.

If you got one of the checks​

A few practical notes, since redress mailings have their own small print. Cash or deposit the check promptly — government-mailed refund checks go stale, typically within months, and a reissue is paperwork you do not need. Keep the accompanying letter with your tax records; it documents what the payment was for, which is what a preparer needs to classify it. Do not ignore it at tax time on the theory that small checks do not count: report it and let the return handle it. And treat the roughly-$43 average as what it is — a refund of fees and overstated earnings from years past, not a windfall. The raise that matters is the one you give yourself by tracking the real number going forward.

Your this-week action list​

1. Compute one real hourly rate. Pick your busiest platform, pull last week's gross, fees, miles, and total hours, and run the five-step calculation. Write the number down; it is now your baseline.
2. Start the payout log. One row per deposit — gross, fees, tips, net — beginning with this week's payouts. Backfill last month if your statements still show it.
3. Export your pay statements. Download or screenshot every pay period the app still holds, and store the files where your tax records live.
4. Split one expense account. If your books currently show only net deposits as income, re-record this month gross-with-fees so the fee line becomes visible.
5. Set your tax reserve. Open a separate savings account if you have not, and move 25 to 30 percent of each week's net profit into it before you spend anything.

Start with step one tonight. The platform will keep showing you the gross, best-case number — that is its job now. Knowing your own number is yours.