Self-employed persons

11.15 Definition:

Self-employed persons are defined as persons who are the sole owners, or joint owners, of the unincorporated enterprises in which they work, excluding those unincorporated enterprises that are classified as quasi-corporations. Self-employed persons are classified here if they are not also in a paid employment which constitutes their principal activity: in that latter case they are classified under employees.

They may be temporarily not at work during the reference period for any specific reason. The compensation for self-employment is mixed income.

11.16 Self-employed persons also include the following categories:

  1. unpaid family workers, including those working in unincorporated enterprises engaged wholly or partly in market production;
  2. outworkers whose income is a function of the value of the outputs from some process of production for which they are responsible, however much or little work was put in;
  3. workers engaged in production undertaken entirely for their own final consumption or own capital formation, either individually or collectively.
Unpaid voluntary workers are included in self-employed persons if their volunteer activities result in goods, e.g. the construction of a dwelling, church or other building. But if their volunteer activities result in services, e.g. care taking or cleaning without payment, they are not included in employment, because those volunteer services are excluded from production (see paragraph 3.08).

There is no labour input into the production of the services of owner-occupied dwellings; the owner-occupiers of dwellings are not, as such, considered as self-employed persons.