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Level 2: Intermediate

Side hustle and gig income

5 min read · Before you start: the tax and small business lessons · Updated 1 November 2026

A great many people in Trinidad and Tobago earn something outside a main job: selling, driving, baking, hairdressing, repairs, design, tutoring. The money is real income, and it brings obligations and arithmetic that a salary does not. This lesson covers both.

Pricing: the mistake that recurs

The most common pricing error is covering materials and nothing else. A full price accounts for three things:

• Direct costs — materials, ingredients, packaging, fuel for a delivery.
• A share of fixed costs — phone, data, equipment wearing out, any subscription the work depends on.
• Your own time, at a rate you would accept from someone else.

A worked example

Someone bakes and sells a cake for TT$250. Ingredients and packaging are TT$90. That leaves TT$160. Three hours went into baking, decorating and delivery, and fuel was TT$30. The hourly return is therefore about TT$43 before any allowance for the oven, the mixer or the phone used to take the order. Whether that is acceptable is a personal judgement; the point is that it is a different number from the TT$160 that appears at first glance.

Tax and registration

Income earned outside employment is still income, and it is not taxed at source the way a salary is. In broad terms:

• Registration with the Board of Inland Revenue and a BIR file number.
• Business name registration with the Companies Registry, where you trade under a name that is not your own.
• Records of income and expenses, with receipts kept.
• National Insurance, which has its own arrangements for self-employed people.
• VAT, once turnover passes the registration threshold — a figure on which published sources have differed, as the small business lesson sets out.

Because nothing is deducted at source, the tax on side income falls due as a bill rather than as a deduction. Setting a share of each payment aside as it arrives is the practice that prevents that bill arriving against money already spent.

Keeping it separate

A separate account for the work is the single change that makes everything else easier. It makes the income visible, makes expenses provable, and removes the need to reconstruct a year from a personal statement. Without it, the honest answer to "is this actually making money?" is usually unknown.

Getting paid, and not getting paid

Late and non-payment are the recurring frustrations of small-scale work. The practices that reduce both are ordinary: a written quote stating what is included and what is not, a deposit on larger orders, agreed payment terms before work begins, and an invoice with a date on it. A record of what was agreed, in writing, is what makes a dispute resolvable.

Where payment arrives from abroad, the cross-border lesson covers the fees and exchange rate margins that reduce what actually lands.

When a side hustle grows

Three signals commonly indicate that an arrangement has outgrown informality: turnover approaching the VAT threshold; taking on someone else's labour, which brings payroll and NIS obligations; and holding stock or equipment of real value, which raises questions of insurance and of what happens to the asset. At that point the small business lesson rather than this one is the relevant one, and an accountant becomes worth the cost.

Test yourself

Mark this lesson as done

Not financial advice. This lesson is general education only. See our editorial policy and disclaimer.