For teams buying AI training data
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk): closed, and what to use instead
Amazon Mechanical Turk closed for good on 30 September 2026, and SageMaker Ground Truth is closed to new customers. While open, MTurk charged 20% on the reward paid to workers, 40% on tasks with 10 or more assignments; Ground Truth charged per object labeled plus the labelers' pay.
Read against Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)’s own pages and the press on 2 Nov 2026. Every figure below links its source.
The figures
What Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) charges, keeps and pays
Each figure as its source published it, with whose money it is: what a buyer pays, what the vendor keeps, or what the person doing the work receives.
| Figure as published | Whose money | Basis | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0.08 per object for the first 50,000 objects a month and $0.04 for the next tier, plus the labeler's pay ($0.012 or $0.036 per label in AWS's examples)labeling workflow, per object reviewed | Paid by the buyer | Stated by the company | Amazon Web Services, 22 Nov 2024 |
| 20% fee on the reward and bonus; a further 20% on tasks with 10 or more assignments (40% in all); 5% more to use Masters workersmicrotask crowd marketplace (requester fees) | Buyer's price and worker's pay | Stated by the company | Amazon Mechanical Turk, 25 Oct 2026 |
From our dataset of published figures on what AI companies pay for human data: every vendor’s figures in one report.
About Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
What Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) sells
MTurk was a general crowd marketplace for microtasks (labeling, surveys, transcription) where the requester set the reward per task. Amazon's labeling service SageMaker Ground Truth ran on it and on vendor or in-house workforces.
Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)'s own pages describe crowd and generalist work rather than credentialed experts.
Amazon closed MTurk on 30 September 2026 without naming a replacement; the closure also ended the Mechanical Turk workforce for SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI.
- Help: closure notice (Amazon Mechanical Turk, 2 Nov 2026)
- Pricing (archived 30 Dec 2025) (Amazon Mechanical Turk (archived), 30 Dec 2025)
- SageMaker Ground Truth documentation (Amazon Web Services, 2 Nov 2026)
- Amazon Mechanical Turk is closing (The Next Web, 26 Aug 2026)
What an expert hour costs
Start from what the expert is paid
Every vendor's price for an expert hour is the expert's pay plus the vendor's share. We read the pay of every open AI-training role on the major platforms every hour, so here is what each kind of US expert is paid for AI work today.
| Expert | Typical rate | Range | Measured from |
|---|---|---|---|
| Physicians | $125/hr | $100 to $270 | 66 rates, 13 platforms |
| Lawyers | $110/hr | $75 to $400 | 96 rates, 20 platforms |
| Psychologists | $85/hr | $35 to $95 | 9 rates, 5 platforms |
| Accountants | $80/hr | $60 to $125 | 42 rates, 16 platforms |
| Actuaries and insurance experts | $80/hr | $50 to $125 | 18 rates, 8 platforms |
| Finance professionals | $80/hr | $60 to $150 | 166 rates, 21 platforms |
| Cybersecurity experts | $80/hr | $60 to $125 | 31 rates, 7 platforms |
| Biologists | $80/hr | $40 to $125 | 39 rates, 11 platforms |
| Environmental scientists | $80/hr | $45 to $100 | 16 rates, 7 platforms |
| Mechanical engineers | $80/hr | $55 to $135 | 37 rates, 15 platforms |
| Electrical engineers | $80/hr | $65 to $145 | 23 rates, 14 platforms |
| Chemical engineers and materials scientists | $80/hr | $40 to $135 | 18 rates, 10 platforms |
| Economists | $75/hr | $50 to $120 | 16 rates, 6 platforms |
| Software engineers | $75/hr | $40 to $150 | 206 rates, 21 platforms |
| Mathematicians | $75/hr | $40 to $200 | 46 rates, 15 platforms |
| Chemists | $70/hr | $40 to $125 | 36 rates, 13 platforms |
| Pharmacists, dentists and other clinicians | $65/hr | $40 to $135 | 68 rates, 19 platforms |
| Paralegals, law students and notaries | $65/hr | $60 to $150 | 11 rates, 5 platforms |
| Physicists | $65/hr | $45 to $200 | 30 rates, 16 platforms |
| Nurses | $60/hr | $50 to $125 | 12 rates, 8 platforms |
| Nuclear and CBRN experts | $60/hr | $40 to $130 | 19 rates, 8 platforms |
| Civil engineers and architects | $55/hr | $45 to $120 | 16 rates, 11 platforms |
| Writers and editors | $55/hr | $35 to $120 | 18 rates, 8 platforms |
| Teachers | $50/hr | $45 to $75 | 29 rates, 10 platforms |
| Translators and linguists | $30/hr | $20 to $75 | 19 rates, 6 platforms |
Typical rate: the middle of what the open roles naming that profession pay, for roles open to US experts; the range runs from the 25th percentile of those roles to the 90th-percentile advertised ceiling. Read live.
What other vendors keep
- Scale AI: Monetizes per task, marking up the cost of labor, for 50%+ gross margin (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Handshake: AI data business gross margins around 30%, versus about 80% for the job board (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Mercor: Percentage-based recruiting fee, typically 30%, for direct talent placements (analyst estimate, Sacra, 11 Oct 2026).
- Mercor, Handshake, micro1: Roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income paid out to domain specialists (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 22 Sep 2026).
- Mercor: Third-party analysts estimate Mercor's take at roughly 30% to 35% of billed hours, with contractors receiving 60% to 70% of gross billings (analyst estimate, HeroHunt.ai, 6 Sep 2026).
- Handshake AI: Pays about $60 million a month to more than 30,000 individuals, on a run rate of about $1 billion (stated by the company, Handshake (job board), 5 Sep 2026).
- micro1: Gross margins on off-the-shelf data as high as 80% to 90% (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 20 Aug 2026).
- micro1: Net annual run rate $150M to $200M on a $500M gross run rate (about 30% to 40% retained) (reported by a third party, TechCrunch, 20 Aug 2026).
Alternatives
Alternatives to Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
Expert data from US professionals, run end to end
Evaluations, rubrics, fine-tuning data and red-teaming by US doctors, nurses, lawyers, finance professionals, scientists and engineers from our own network. An expert hour is priced at what that kind of expert is paid today (the table above) plus our fee for running the project, and the quote shows both.
Looking for paid work at Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) rather than buying data? Amazon Mechanical Turk: open roles, pay and whether it is legit.
Questions
What teams ask about Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)
How much does Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) charge?
Amazon Mechanical Turk closed for good on 30 September 2026, and SageMaker Ground Truth is closed to new customers. While open, MTurk charged 20% on the reward paid to workers, 40% on tasks with 10 or more assignments; Ground Truth charged per object labeled plus the labelers' pay.
What have buyers paid Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk)?
$0.08 per object for the first 50,000 objects a month and $0.04 for the next tier, plus the labeler's pay ($0.012 or $0.036 per label in AWS's examples) (stated by the company, Amazon Web Services, 22 Nov 2024). 20% fee on the reward and bonus; a further 20% on tasks with 10 or more assignments (40% in all); 5% more to use Masters workers (stated by the company, Amazon Mechanical Turk, 25 Oct 2026).
What does Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) sell?
MTurk was a general crowd marketplace for microtasks (labeling, surveys, transcription) where the requester set the reward per task. Amazon's labeling service SageMaker Ground Truth ran on it and on vendor or in-house workforces.
What should a buyer know about Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) as a company?
Amazon closed MTurk on 30 September 2026 without naming a replacement; the closure also ended the Mechanical Turk workforce for SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI.