As you recognize Subz, those are business expenses and legitimately come off their gross. This sort of poll is just amusing BS (and I don't mean bodyslide) unless some effort is made to get down to apples vs apples comparisons.
Ist step: Eliminate all the dodgy, immigration-scam places and their victim/MPAs. Police matters, beneath contempt, beyond analysis.
2nd step: Eliminate from the customer side all the wage-slaves. Sorry guys. MPAs are not employees, any more than MDs are. There's no way to compare their income with say a civil service janitor. Not unless you gross up his pre-tax pay by the value of his health plan, cafeteria meals, salary deferred as pension, on-site, maybe subsidized day care, work clothes provided and so on. And if he's reporting in the customer poll, I'll bet he just remembers the net that arrives in his bank account each week. The real gross amount he is earning for just himself actually isn't easy to calculate. Nor is it easy to calculate a freelancer's income from a given week's receipts, since next week may bring no income at all. And their idea of an average week's after expenses take is likely about as reliable as the guy's idea of his real gross.
3rd step: Sort out the business expenses: Whole library stacks of tax cases deal with business expenses. Good luck. Trashy clothes you can't wear to grandma's, bolt-ons (still expenses, even if ya don't like'em), after hours child care etc. for MPAs. And of course, the remaining [see Step2], free-lance massageplanet.netinoids have business expenses too. Until they're off the gross you've still got oranges in with the apples. So for both customer and provider it's net after expenses before taxes. If you think you can get at those 'real' numbers you're in for a long, dirty haul, and if you've never done anything like her job