These Are The Best Ways To Earn Passive Income In 2025
Why work for your money when you don't have to? Learning how to make passive income will mean you make money while sleeping. If you've always wanted to earn more but have never had the time for a second job or don't have a great side hustle that's pulling in cash, consider these passive income streams for 2025.
Renting Out Your Property
This is a fantastic option if you have a second house or are considering investing in real estate and renting your newly owned house out. While there are overheads to consider, in the current rental climate, you will have no problems renting out your space. On average, a landlord in the US makes $87,000 per year.
Printing On Demand
Everyone is always buying t-shirts with logos and slogans on them—if you're an artist or designer, consider starting a print-on-demand service creating your own logo or slogan designs, printing them onto t-shirts for sale, then advertising your print on-demand business for other people's slogan ideas. These are ordered online and then printed and shipped at your leisure. But, you'll always get paid first! The average POD job could net you $55,000 per year.
Sell Digital Products
If you've written a book, or designed a template or even specialized files, you can sell these as digital products. The best part is that you only have to create the digital file once—and you can then sell it repeatedly without any extra legwork on your part. You can make upwards of $70,000 per year creating and selling digital products online.
Online Courses
Another great option for front-heavy work with a repeatable product is online courses. If you have a specialism and have perhaps been tutoring one-on-one, consider designing an online course that students (or anyone) can download for a fee. Rather than teaching online, you'll have created a one-size-fits-all product that is available immediately and takes up no more of your time. The online education market is projected to grow by 10.5% between 2025 and 2029.
Blogging
If you're passionate about a subject or topic, you could start writing about it for an online audience—and get paid to do so! You can promote affiliate products, create sponsored posts and run ads using Google Adsense, so you'll generate an income everytime someone clicks on an ad on your site. Affiliate mareketing in the U.S. made an average of $70,000 in 2024.
Handmade Goods
If you're used to heading down to your local farmer's market and flogging your wares there, consider setting up an online store to sell your handmade goods instead. Although you'll need to invest time and money in the materials to make your goods, you'll increase your potential market immeasurably. In 2024, artisans in the United States earned an average of $30,000.
Affiliate Marketing
If you make YouTube videos, or write for a blog, consider using affiliate marketing to make some extra money. The way it works is that you post an affiliate link to Amazon or through another vendor and every time someone buys that product using your link, you get a percentage of that sale—usually around 2%. While that may seem small, depending on the volume of affiliate links and the number of purchases made using yours, you could earn $80,000 per year.
Stock Photos
If you have a gift with the camera, you could take some stock images of things like sunrises, sunsets, products, people—almost anything—and upload them onto a stock photography website. You'll be paid whenever someone downloads your image. This will only be a few pennies per image, as with affiliate marketing, but that could be a few extra hundred dollars a month, depending on how many images you sell. Stock photography earnings are an average of $62,000 per year.
Stock Market Investments
While the stock market may seem like a confusing place, intended only for those with wealth who understand how it works—it's really for everyone. An option to earn money in the long-run by investing some of your money in a diverse portfolio of mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, index funds and high-dividend stocks. Speak with a financial advisor before entering into the stock market investing game.
Renting Out A Spare Room
Even if you don't have the money to buy a house or condo and rent that out, you may have a spare room in your home. Even if you don't want to rent it out for someone to live in it, there are all sorts of personal health professionals, like massage therapists or psychologists looking for an office space or a treatment room. Explore these options.
Car Rentals
If you have a second vehicle that you don't drive, or find that you don't drive your car very much at all, you could rent it out on a short-term basis for individuals who may be visiting your area and are in need of a vehicle to get around in. Using apps like Turo, or renting the vehicle out to an Uber or Lyft driver, you could make an average of $25,000 per year.
Peer To Peer Lending
Peer-to-peer lending can be a lucrative side hustle, if you have some funds that are sitting around and not doing anything for you. By investing them in peer-to-peer lending, you're helping someone else out and will receive interest of 5% to 12% annually. Ensure you use a reputable P2P lending site.
Vitalii Vodolazskyi, Shutterstock
Cashback Rewards
Some companies like Rakuten offer cashback rewards on purchases you make on certain websites. While you shouldn't overspend your monthly budget, just to make back their 2% to 5% cashback, it can be a nice little boost every month, even if it's just enough to pay for a few coffees.
Buying An Existing Website
If you think you have the skills to take affiliate marketing, advertising income, or other online business to the next level—but don't want to do any of the initial start-up work—check to see what websites are already available for sale on the topic you're interested in. If they've already established a healthy passive income stream, you could be purchasing a cash cow for relatively little and be able to take it to new heights in 2025.
Digital Designs
If you're a graphic designer looking for a little side hustle, there are plenty of websites out there that you can make passive income on. Whether you're designing website templates, fonts, or other custom designs of all sorts, most digital design marketplaces have built-in marketing, so you can hit the ground running.
Investing In A Small Startup
Every major brand that you can think of today was once a small business. Without their initial investors, they may never have become the global icons of industry that we now know and love. Investing some money in a small start-up is a great way to support local, but also to minimize risks and reduce your need to manage your money once you've invested it. Find a small business that you believe in and put your money into it, if you can.
Mobile Apps
If you're a techy person who designs applications for a living, then the world of mobile apps is a fantastic way to make passive income. With built-in marketing through the various App Stores across Apple and Android, even if your app is free to download, you could build paid-for options into the app, whether you're creating a game for people to play, or a service-based app, they're a great way to earn passive income once they're on the app store.
Royalties
Despite the prevalence of artificial intelligence, inventors and creatives aren't a thing of the past. If you've invented something (and have a patent) or have licensed a creative product, you could be earning royalties every time that product is sold, or your invention is used. Royalties can range from a few dollars, to hundreds of dollars per use.
Audiobook Narration
If you've been told that you've got a great voice for audio narration—maybe you should start listening! You'll need to learn how to narrate a book first (there are courses on this), but before long, you could be auditioning to narrate great books and making a staggering $50,000 per year.
Vending Machines
If you've always thought that your local coffee shop or favorite laundromat could use a vending machine, why don't you put one there? You'll need to purchase the vending machine first—and ensure it's re-stocked appropriately, but after that, your income stream could be secure and your overheads quite low.
Sell Spreadsheet Templates
Not everyone knows their way around an Excel or Google Sheets spreadsheet. If you do, you could make some extra money by creating easy-to-use templates that simplify people's financial lives. Whether people are budgeting for retirement, or their monthly expenses, or business are tracking large amounts of data, your spreadsheets could be like gold dust to these people.
Texas State Library and Archives Commission, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons
High-Yield Savings Accounts
If you have some extra money sitting around and want to make a bit more on that amount every year, without having to think about it too much, consider putting it in a high-yield savings account. While you'll want to talk with a financial advisor about the particulars, a high-yield savings account could earn 4+% returns every year.
Parking Space Rentals
If you have a parking space that you're not using because you don't have a vehicle, then you could rent out your parking spot to nearby businesses for their employees for a monthly fee. You're not responsible for parking-lot maintenance, so you'd only need to ensure that the spot is free for those who need and you've got a reliable monthly income stream.
Make Your Car An Advertising Board
If you don't much care about what your car looks like and want to make some extra money every month, consider using a service like Wrapify, which advertises companies looking to put their logos on your vehicle. They pay you to advertise on your car, and you make the income whether those ads get them sales or not.
Vehicle Storage
If you have an empty garage, or a plot of land, you could look into using the space as a vehicle storage unit for other people. Especially if you live in a cold part of the United States, people are crying out for heated storage units for their cars, boats and other large vehicles. Depending on the size of your space, you could make an extra $500/month for letting someone store their RV there!
Renting Out Specialty Items You Own
Let's say that you have a drone, or a piece of camera equipment that nobody else in your area has, but people use (or could use), one great passive income opportunity is to rent out that piece of equipment for a daily fee. University students studying photography might not have their own cameras, or a film crew in town might need a drone for a week. It's a great option to make from $25 to $100 per day.
Create An E-commerce Subscription Box
People love all kinds of niche, specialty things. Use this to your advantage to create a specialty curated box every month that gets shipped out to customers worldwide who love the things that are in these subscription boxes. Often no bigger than a shoebox, you could earn $20 to $100 per subscriber per month by sending out these customized, curated boxes filled with all of the little things that people love.
Create A YouTube Channel
If you love expressing your creativity through videos, then creating a YouTube channel is the next logical step. If you begin to get a following and an audience, you could utilize ads on YouTube and get paid-per-click, and/or utilize affiliate marketing and have your watchers buy products that you get a kick-back from. You could even use Patreon or other subscription-based service to give perks to followers who contribute an amount every month for your content.
Renting Out Tools
Another option for renting out gear that you're not using is specialty tools—power tools and such that small-time carpenter or handymen might not have the money just yet to go out and buy, they can rent it from you for a fraction of that cost, while saving up for their own. You could rent these tools out on a daily or weekly basis, with liability contracts to minimize your risk if they end up broken, lost or stolen.
Start A Podcast
While not exactly "passive income" as you still need to produce the content, podcasts are among the fastest growing mediums by which people consume information and media. If you've got something to say on a topic, why not start a podcast? The more you grow your audience, the more money you stand to make from advertising, sponsorships and much more. While you'll need to invest in decent equipment upfront, your income stream could still be very high after that initial investment.
A Drop-Shipping Surprise
Even if your budget is razor thin, beginning a passive income as a drop-shipper is a great way to make a few extra dollars. Drop-shippers fulfill customer orders by passing them on directly to a supplier, who then ships them to the customer. Your overheads are minimal, as you'll need to set up a small online storefront, but you'll make money by selling the items at a higher price than what you pay for them at wholesale. On average, a drop-shipping business through Ebay in the United States made $92,000 in 2024.
