Key findings
- 1
US data vendors (Surge AI, Mercor, AfterQuery, Turing) and Tencent, Alibaba, ByteDance and other Chinese labs: About $500M a year of training data sold to Chinese labs (paid by the buyer; training data services, reported, 8 Aug 2026).
- 2
Mercor: $93/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts; oncologist roles $350 to $450 an hour (paid to the worker; expert human data (all domains), stated, 30 Oct 2026).
- 3
Mercor, Handshake, micro1: Roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income paid out to domain specialists (kept by the vendor; expert human data, reported, 22 Sep 2026).
- 4
RL environment vendors (interviews) and frontier labs: Contract sizes often six to seven figures per quarter; one founder said often seven figures per quarter or more (paid by the buyer; RL environment, reported, 12 Jan 2026).
- 5
Spirit Airlines (bankruptcy estate, seller) and micro1 (bidder): micro1 proposed $12.5M, beating Google's $10M top bid; Mercor had bid $7.5M (paid by the buyer; enterprise records (emails, documents, Teams data), stated, Sep 2026).
- 6
Human Archive: Raw data $1 to $10 per hour (Rs 95 to 946), priced by task complexity (paid by the buyer; egocentric video (raw), reported, 1 Jul 2026).
Figure 1
What the experts are offered today (live)
What hourly rate do open AI training roles advertise to the people who do the work, by kind of work?
| Kind of work | Median advertised rate | Roles open to US residents |
|---|---|---|
| Red-Teaming & AI Safety | $78 | $83 |
| Law, Medicine & Finance | $75 | $83 |
| Research Studies & Surveys | $75 | $88 |
| Coding & Software Evaluation | $60 | $65 |
| Writing & Content | $55 | $60 |
| Agentic Tasks & RL Environments | $50 | $65 |
| AI Evaluation & Rating (RLHF) | $45 | $50 |
| Math & STEM | $40 | $75 |
| Multilingual & Localization | $33 | $33 |
| Transcription, Audio & Speech | $30 | $30 |
| Data Annotation & Labeling | $21 | $30 |
| Robotics & Physical-AI Data | $10 | $15 |
Sample. 3,565 roles open on 31 Oct 2026 on the job boards this site reads every hour, that state an hourly rate. Recomputed daily.
The worker's side of the bill: what a posting offers per accepted hour. The buyer's side (what labs pay vendors) is in the sourced figures below, as published.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 2
What labs spend on human data
How much do AI labs spend on human data, and how much of a vendor's revenue do they make up?
Sample. 11 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 3
Bill rates, worker pay and the vendor's share
What do labs pay a vendor per hour or task, what does the worker receive, and what do vendors keep?
Sample. 68 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
A bill rate is what the buyer pays the vendor; worker pay is what the person doing the work receives; the difference funds recruiting, quality control, tooling and margin.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 4
What RL environments cost
What do labs pay for reinforcement-learning environments and tasks?
Sample. 7 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 5
Prices per task, item and hour of data
What does one unit of human data cost: a preference pair, an expert evaluation, an hour of video?
Sample. 18 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 6
Contract sizes
How large are the contracts between labs and data vendors?
Sample. 21 figures, to 30 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
Figure 7
Figures by kind
Which parts of the human-data economy are documented?
| Kind | Records |
|---|---|
| Worker pay vs bill rate | 42 |
| Contract size | 21 |
| Take rate or margin | 16 |
| Lab spend | 11 |
| Vendor bill rate | 10 |
| Price list | 9 |
| Price per item | 9 |
| RL environment price | 7 |
Sample. 125 figures.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition.
For labs, data vendors and researchers
Buy the data behind this report
The figures above are a summary. Behind them are records we collect ourselves, every day:
11,482 roles tracked, each with its history
Every role on 62 job boards, read since 13 Jul 2026 (every hour since 18 Oct 2026): its pay and place, and the first and last day it was open.
58,632 apply clicks in 28 days
Which roles people actually apply to, by field, pay and kind of work. It happens on this site, so nobody else can count it.
39 lab and vendor hiring boards
The job boards of 25 AI labs and 14 human-data vendors, read every day: who is hiring for human data, and who is hiring to buy it.
What you can buy
The records
The rows behind any figure, with their history, not only the totals.
A regular feed
The same figures every week or month, as files.
A custom cut or benchmark
Your countries, languages or fields, or your own platform against the market.
Building AI and need the experts behind this data? (you contract them yourself) or (we deliver the expert work).
Investing in AI-data companies? Hiring radar is these records role by role, every day, as files.
Method and definitions
The public job boards of the AI training platforms this site tracks, read every hour. Sourced figures: filings, company statements and reporting by major outlets, each linked beside its row. The live figures are computed every day from this site's own data, the same way for every reader; every sourced row links the publication it is taken from, with the figure as that publication states it. Each figure states its sample beneath it.
- Advertised rate (live)
- The hourly figure an open AI training role states, the median by kind of work, recomputed every day from the job boards this site reads.
- Bill rate and worker pay
- What the buyer pays the vendor, and what the person doing the work receives, as the source states them.
- Stated, reported, estimate
- Stated: the company or a filing. Reported: press from unnamed sources. Estimate: a third party's estimate or a vendor's price guide, not a transaction.
What this data cannot tell you
- Each report sets its sourced records beside a live figure computed from this site's own data every day; the sourced records are added as they are published and reviewed.
- Compiled from public sources: an event that was never announced or reported is missing, and private companies' figures are what they or the press stated, not audited.
- Few vendors disclose what they bill a lab per hour; most figures are reported, and each row says how firm it is.
How the job feeds are read and roles are classified: site methodology. How fresh, complete and consistent the data is, checked every day: data quality and coverage.
Editions
The live report is the dataset as last reviewed, beside figures recomputed every day from this site's own data; new events are added as they are published. Each complete month is also published as an edition, frozen two days after the month ends, so a figure you cite from an edition never moves.
- Live dataSources as last reviewed, live figures daily
- October 2026 edition (this page)Freezes on first reading
Cite and reuse
Free to quote, chart and republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. This edition is frozen, so its figures will read the same later.
Citation
AITraining.jobs (2026). What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition. https://aitraining.jobs/research/what-ai-labs-pay-for-human-data/2026-10
BibTeX
@misc{aitrainingjobs_what_ai_labs_pay_for_human_data_2026_10,
author = {{AITraining.jobs}},
title = {What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, October 2026 edition},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://aitraining.jobs/research/what-ai-labs-pay-for-human-data/2026-10}},
}More research
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- Where Human-Data Vendors Are BuildingHow fast are the human-data vendors hiring their own staff, and for which functions?Read the report
- Who Is Buying AI Training DataWhich AI labs and data vendors have people whose job is to source, license or acquire training data right now?Read the report
- What AI Labs Are BuyingWhich kinds of training data are in rising demand, and which are cooling?Read the report
- AI Training Data Licensing DealsWho has licensed content and data to which AI companies, on what terms and for how much?Read the report
- Lawsuits and Settlements Over AI Training DataWhich copyright, privacy and data-rights disputes over AI training data have been filed, ruled on or settled, and what did they cost?Read the report
- Company Data Brokerage: Buyers, Prices and TermsWho buys companies' records and the archives of defunct companies to train AI, at what prices and on what terms, and what do brokers earn?Read the report
- Human Data Quality, Fraud and SecurityHow often do workers use AI to do human-data tasks, how do fake and resold accounts get in, and which vendors have had quality failures or breaches?Read the report
- The State of AI Training PayWhat does AI training work pay, by kind of work and by platform?Read the report