Amazon Mechanical Turk

Long-established and widely used by academic researchers, but worker reputation is mixed: studies consistently find low effective pay (~$2–$3/hr) and there are ongoing data-quality and fraud concerns. It closed to new customers on 2026-07-30 and permanently closed on 2026-09-30 (mturk.com), and there is no Amazon successor: AWS also closed new customer access to SageMaker Ground Truth and to Augmented AI, the two services the MTurk workforce fed, on 2026-07-30, and since 2026-09-30 neither can use the MTurk workforce for labeling jobs or human reviews (mturk.com/help, read 1 Nov 2026).

Not any more: Amazon Mechanical Turk permanently closed on 30 Sep 2026. Amazon closed Mechanical Turk to new customers on 30 Jul 2026 and permanently closed it for everyone, its workers included, on 30 Sep 2026 (mturk.com: 'Amazon Mechanical Turk permanently closed on September 30, 2026', read 13 Oct 2026), so there is no signup or work left to send anyone to. How it paid out while it ran: USD per HIT once the requester approved it (requesters had up to 30 days), withdrawn to a bank account in the US and some other countries or as an Amazon.com gift card. After the closing, approved HITs are paid on each worker's usual schedule, the Worker Portal's deadline for verifying payment details passed on 30 Oct 2026, and transaction history stays available until 28 Jan 2027 (mturk.com/help, read 1 Nov 2026).

~$2–$3/hr effective (2018 study); closed. What it paid while it ran. Per-HIT rewards were set by each requester, so MTurk never had one wage. The effective hourly is from independent research, not MTurk: Hara et al., 'A Data-Driven Analysis of Workers' Earnings on Amazon Mechanical Turk' (CHI 2018; 2,676 workers, 3.8 million tasks; read 1 Nov 2026) found a median of $1.77 to $2.11 an hour and a mean of $3.13 to $3.48 counting unpaid time such as searching for work, $3.18 median and $6.19 mean without it, while requesters paid $11.58 an hour on average; only about 4% of workers earned more than the US federal minimum of $7.25. Toxtli, Suri and Savage, 'Quantifying the Invisible Labor in Crowd Work' (CSCW 2021; 100 workers, 40,903 tasks; read 1 Nov 2026) found a median of $3.76 an hour, falling to $2.83 once the 33% of their time spent on unpaid work is counted. MTurk permanently closed on 30 Sep 2026 (mturk.com, read 1 Nov 2026), so there is no current rate.

Amazon Mechanical Turk pays ~$2–$3/hr effective (2018 study); closed (third-party reports). It suits flexible microtask income rather than a dependable hourly wage. Worker sentiment: No official worker rating; mixed coverage.

USD per HIT once the requester approved it (requesters had up to 30 days), withdrawn to a bank account in the US and some other countries or as an Amazon.com gift card. After the closing, approved HITs are paid on each worker's usual schedule, the Worker Portal's deadline for verifying payment details passed on 30 Oct 2026, and transaction history stays available until 28 Jan 2027 (mturk.com/help, read 1 Nov 2026).

Closed for everyone since 30 Sep 2026. While it ran, its workers answered surveys as about 75% in the US and 16% in India (Difallah, Filatova and Ipeirotis, WSDM 2018, from 85,000+ survey answers over 28 months); the authors add that Indian workers are over-counted there and put the real share nearer 10% to 14%.