Guide · pay
How much do AI training jobs pay?
By Alex. First published 2026-09-01. Pay figures as of 2026-10-25, from live platform feeds.
As of 2026-10-25, AI-work platforms show typical top rates of $34–$110/hr (median $70/hr, from 545 distinct listed rates across 25 platforms), drawn from 3,722 live listings. That is the number this site will defend. A page that quotes a twenty-to-two-hundred span with no date and no n is repeating marketing copy.
Two caveats sit next to every figure. First, the number is the top of the posted band: the most the role says it can pay, not a promise you will land there. Second, a role must show at least $10/hr (or $10 per task) to be listed, so these figures describe this directory, not the whole market. Lower-paid rating work exists on the platforms' own boards.
Pay by kind of work
The same hour is not worth the same amount. Credentialed expert work sits far above general annotation. The table is live, and each row shows the same figures as its field's page, linked under the table.
| Field | Median | Typical | Highest | Distinct rates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medicine & health | $100/hr | $70–$128 | $450/hr | 88 |
| Software engineering | $90/hr | $65–$120 | $400/hr | 138 |
| Law & legal | $125/hr | $100–$150 | $400/hr | 48 |
| Finance | $100/hr | $80–$140 | $350/hr | 80 |
| Business & ops | $75/hr | $50–$100 | $350/hr | 44 |
| Voice & audio | $30/hr | $20–$50 | $280/hr | 93 |
| Cybersecurity | $90/hr | $60–$110 | $250/hr | 26 |
| Multilingual | $35/hr | $20–$60 | $200/hr | 83 |
| Science & math | $77/hr | $55–$115 | $200/hr | 74 |
| Model evaluation & rating | $40/hr | $25–$60 | $200/hr | 53 |
| Education | $60/hr | $50–$85 | $150/hr | 17 |
| Marketing & sales | $70/hr | $50–$85 | $150/hr | 15 |
| Writing & content | $55/hr | $40–$80 | $140/hr | 24 |
| Data annotation | $28/hr | $15–$50 | $125/hr | 31 |
Medicine & health roles →Software engineering roles →Law & legal roles →Finance roles →Business & ops roles →Voice & audio roles →Cybersecurity roles →Multilingual roles →Science & math roles →Model evaluation & rating roles →Education roles →Marketing & sales roles →Writing & content roles →Data annotation roles →Full pay index, with citation formats →Machine-readable pay.json →
Pay by platform we can actually measure
Only platforms with a public feed and at least 5 distinct listed rates earn a median here. A brand with no feed can still be real. It just cannot be ranked on pay from this dataset.
| Platform | Median | Typical | Highest | Distinct rates |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mercor | $105/hr | $70–$150 | $450/hr | 82 |
| Turing | $100/hr | $25–$150 | $150/hr | 8 |
| Workada | $100/hr | $50–$120 | $130/hr | 5 |
| AfterQuery | $93/hr | $63–$123 | $175/hr | 43 |
| Terac | $90/hr | $60–$112 | $210/hr | 16 |
| micro1 | $80/hr | $40–$125 | $400/hr | 122 |
| Handshake AI | $77/hr | $50–$110 | $300/hr | 31 |
| Alignerr | $75/hr | $50–$110 | $400/hr | 66 |
| SME Careers | $50/hr | $27–$80 | $120/hr | 26 |
| Grayder | $50/hr | $20–$80 | $185/hr | 10 |
| Meridial (Invisible) | $45/hr | $28–$65 | $200/hr | 29 |
| Rise Data Labs | $45/hr | $40–$60 | $150/hr | 11 |
| Claru | $35/hr | $25–$50 | $100/hr | 11 |
| Braintrust | $31/hr | $20–$90 | $150/hr | 18 |
| Lionbridge | $22/hr | $17–$34 | $45/hr | 25 |
| Innodata | $20/hr | $20–$30 | $80/hr | 5 |
| RWS TrainAI | $20/hr | $17–$24 | $36/hr | 21 |
Highest-paying platforms, ranked live →Head-to-head comparisons →Pay over time →
Listed rate is not take-home
- Unpaid onboarding and assessments can eat the first week.
- A quality gate can zero a task you already did.
- Empty queues are common. An hourly rate with no tasks is zero that day.
- Some platforms pay per accepted task against a time budget, which punishes careful work.
When a platform publishes no rate, this directory may show a reported range gathered by hand from public worker reviews. That figure is labelled, dated, and never mixed into the medians above.
Common questions
- What is a typical AI trainer salary?
- There is no salary in the employee sense. Most of this work is contract and paid by the hour or the task. The live typical top rate is $34–$110/hr, median $70/hr, from 545 distinct rates as of 2026-10-25.
- Why do other sites quote much wider ranges?
- They mix marketing pages, ceilings, per-task guesses and old forum posts into one span, then omit the sample size. We refuse to convert per-task pay into hourly and we refuse to count a copied band hundreds of times.
- Does country change the rate?
- Often yes, even on the same job title. Country pages on this site lead with roles posted for that country rather than worldwide copies, so you can see what is actually open where you live.