Freelancer or gig worker with variable income, no employer benefits, self-employed tax obligations, minimal savings.
F-02 is the 1099-only formation household: variable monthly cash flow, no employer-sponsored health or retirement plan, quarterly estimated-tax exposure, and a Schedule C as the central tax document rather than a W-2.
F-02 captures the entry point to the gig economy: a single worker in their twenties or early thirties whose primary income is 1099 — rideshare, delivery platforms, freelance creative work, contract trades, or platform-mediated services. The defining technical surface is the absence of withholding. Every F-02 household has a quarterly estimated-tax obligation under §6654, a self-employment-tax line that is structurally larger than the income-tax line at this income range, and a Schedule C that needs vehicle, home-office, and platform-fee deductions to produce a defensible net. There is no employer 401(k) — Solo 401(k) and SEP-IRA are theoretically available but adoption in the corpus is essentially zero. There is no group health plan, which puts every household at the intersection of marketplace ACA enrollment, advance-premium-tax-credit reconciliation on Form 8962, and the income-volatility problem that makes APTC reconciliation a notorious year-end surprise.
Cash flow volatility is the structural story. Median gross of $62,738 looks similar to F-01, but the within-year variance is materially higher and the corpus reflects this in the goal mix: 12 of 25 households (48%) carry an emergency-fund goal — the highest emergency-fund prevalence in the Formation cohort — and homeownership is rare at 12% versus F-01's 20%. Credit cards appear on every record and frequently function as a working-capital buffer during low-revenue months. Three households carry mortgages despite the low homeowner rate, capturing the inherited-or-pre-gig housing situation.
F-02 is distinct from neighbouring formation archetypes because it is the only one without a W-2 backbone. F-01 has an employer; F-03 has two; F-06 has an H-1B-sponsoring employer. F-02 has a 1099 payer and a Schedule C, which changes every downstream calculation: AGI flows through Schedule SE rather than line-1 wages, retirement-plan contribution limits are computed against net SE earnings rather than wages, and ACA premium-credit eligibility is income-volatile in a way the W-2 archetypes are not.
Aggregated across the 25 F-02 households in the shipped v3 corpus corpus. Numbers describe the corpus, not population claims.
William is a self-employed single F-02 household in Cincinnati sitting just above the corpus median income ($68.2k vs $62.7k median), with net worth ($73.8k) almost exactly on the corpus median ($73.8k) and $32.4k of liquid assets — a textbook median F-02 balance sheet. Total liabilities are only $2.2k (a single credit-card balance against a $6.3k limit), so the credit-card-as-working-capital trap is not yet active but the cushion is thin. The v3 industry taxonomy codes William as 'retail' rather than carrying a discrete 'gig-platform' value, so the diagnostic feature the archetype tests is the cash-flow shape (self-employed 1099 income, no employer 401(k), no employer health plan, Schedule C / Schedule SE plumbing) rather than the industry tag itself. The goal mix carries the rest of the story: home purchase off-track with a $870/mo required save against $54/mo actual, retirement off-track at a $1.16M target, and no Solo 401(k) or SEP-IRA balance to compound — illustrating that even a median-income F-02 cash-flow profile under-delivers on retirement accumulation relative to a W-2 peer at the same gross income.
Every F-02 household ships with — at minimum — these JSON fields populated. The full schema is documented in the data set you purchase.
Three buyer profiles draw on F-02 most often. Self-employed tax-prep software teams use it to validate Schedule C + Schedule SE flows, quarterly estimated-tax reminders, vehicle-deduction (standard mileage vs actual) elections, and the §199A QBI deduction on net SE earnings. Embedded-finance and gig-platform engineering teams (gig-platform driver-and-shopper financial flows, plus small-business banking platforms serving owner-operators) use it to test cash-flow-smoothing products, set-aside-for-taxes features, and platform-1099 ingestion. ACA-marketplace comparison platforms use it to test APTC eligibility at variable income and the §162(l) self-employed deduction.
F-02 is single-earner by construction (25 of 25 households file Single). Two-1099-earner partnered gig households are not in this corpus; that profile is closer to a custom blend of F-02 and F-03. Established self-employment with multi-year-stable income, S-Corp election, and an actual SEP/Solo balance lives in A-04 (Small Business Owner — Early Stage) or SB-02 (Solo Practitioner). Creator-economy revenue with brand-deal income, royalty streams, and Patreon/Substack subscriber bases is X-02 (Creator Economy / Influencer), not F-02 — the latter is platform-task work, not audience-monetization work. Recently-laid-off W-2 workers temporarily on 1099 contracts during a job search are not modeled here either; they are absent from the catalogue's formation cohort.
Income distributions during v3 synthesis referenced BLS Contingent Worker Supplement bands and the Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking (SHED) gig-work tabulations, with platform-specific earnings benchmarks (rideshare hourly net, delivery per-trip) informing the lower-band concentration around $55k–$65k gross. The corpus deliberately under-represents the top-of-market freelance professional (consultant, designer, software contractor at $150k+) because that profile belongs in SB-02. Per CLAUDE.md §9 the v3 corpus is frozen; the priors above describe the calibration intent at synthesis time rather than a reproducible regeneration pipeline.
F-01 has a W-2 backbone (employer 401(k), withholding, group health). Reach for F-01 when the testing surface needs employer-sponsored retirement-plan enrollment, signing-bonus mechanics, or RSU grants.
A-04 is the established small-business-owner version: stable revenue, S-Corp or LLC structure, actual SEP-IRA or Solo 401(k) balances, and QBI deduction in active use. F-02 is the earlier, pre-structuring stage.
X-02 is creator-economy income — audience monetization via Patreon, Substack, YouTube, brand deals. F-02 is platform-task work (rideshare, delivery, contract labour) with no audience asset.
SB-02 is the solo professional services practitioner (consultant, attorney, designer) with stable client relationships and materially higher net income. F-02 is the entry-level platform worker.
F-02 — Gig Economy Starter models the single-earner formation household with 1099 income as the primary source: rideshare drivers, delivery couriers, freelance platform workers, contract trades. The defining testing surface is the absence of withholding (quarterly estimated taxes), the absence of an employer plan (Solo 401(k)/SEP-IRA, not 401(k)), and the absence of employer health coverage (ACA marketplace with APTC reconciliation).
By definition. F-02 is the 1099-only archetype. Solo 401(k) and SEP-IRA are theoretically available but the corpus models the typical adoption reality at the formation-phase income range, which is essentially zero. Records with active SEP/Solo balances belong in A-04 (Small Business Owner — Early Stage).
F-02 is the formation-phase 1099 worker without business structure; A-04 has elected an LLC or S-Corp, taken the §199A QBI deduction in active use, established a SEP or Solo 401(k), and has multi-year revenue stability. F-02 is the lifecycle moment before any of those structuring decisions.
Median gross of $62,738 (Schedule C net before SE-tax deduction) with a 25th-to-75th-percentile range of $56,071 to $68,305. The corpus deliberately under-weights top-of-market freelance professionals — those belong in SB-02.
Yes. Every F-02 household lacks employer-sponsored coverage by design, making the corpus suitable for marketplace-enrollment, APTC eligibility, and §162(l) self-employed health-insurance deduction testing. Income volatility across the year is reflected in the household time-series data.
No. The shipped v3 F-02 corpus is frozen as of the corpus drift confirmation on 2026-05-09. Sampler improvements land in a future v4 release; the current 25 households are not reproducible from current code.
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