AIPayList

Platforms / Mercor

Mercor pay, read from its own job feed

Expert networklive feed
$105/hr
median top rate
$70–$150
typical range
$450/hr
highest rate
250
live roles

How much does Mercor pay?

Mercor advertises a median top rate of $105/hr, measured from 83 distinct advertised hourly rates among its 250 live roles on 2026-10-13. The middle half of those rates runs from $70 to $150/hr and the highest is $450/hr. Each rate is the top of a listing's advertised band, the most that role says it can pay, not a promised wage. Of the 250 live roles, 27 pay per task. That pay is left out of these figures and never turned into an hourly rate. 8 roles publish no rate at all.

How we measure pay · Pay over time

What it advertises vs what its feed shows

Mercor advertises
Public hourly rates on every role, typically $10–$120/hr (plus per-task projects up to $2K)
Its live listings show
Top rates of $70–$150/hr typical, median $105/hr, from 83 distinct advertised rates.
Workers report earning
$25 to $100/hr effective, once unpaid onboarding and waiting for tasks are counted. Mercor's hourly projects really pay $50 to $125 an hour, but getting and keeping one is the job, and a per-task contract can turn a $60 listing into single digits.

Where the reported figure comes from

Public worker reports, the platform's own published rates and help pages, and reporting, gathered by hand on 2026-09-12. Evidence rated medium. It is not measured from our job feed, and it never enters our medians, percentiles, sorting or alerts, which read published rates only.

Country: US-centred, with Canada and the UK reporting the same $70 generalist rate. India-based applicants report hundreds of applications for one project and the lowest offers, and the $21 to $16 project in the press story was a low-tier video job.

  • ▲ Hourly with time tracking on most projects, paid weekly, with a growing number of per-approved-task contracts. Instant offers cluster near $35 an hour, generalist projects run $50 to $125, experts $100 to $350. Per-task contracts at $10 to $20 for multi-hour tasks pull the effective rate under $10.
  • ▲ Task availability is the constraint, with waiting time exceeding paid time on busy projects.
  • ▲ Per-task contracts have replaced hourly ones on several projects, and a 4 to 5 hour task at $20 is $4 to $5 an hour.
  • ▲ AI-use flags are not appealable and withhold owed pay.
  • ▲ Projects end in weeks, offboarding is sudden, and one applicant paid 34 euros for a background check before being dropped 12 hours later.

Sources: reddit.com (2026-07-21) · reddit.com (2026-08-18) · reddit.com (2026-06-14) · reddit.com (2026-08-17) · reddit.com (2026-07-22) · aol.com (2025-11-14) · teamblind.com (2025-03-02) · trustpilot.com (2026-08-26) · trustpilot.com (2026-07-27) · breakingeven.online (2026-06-06)

27 roles pay per task rather than per hour. We show those as per-task and never convert them into an hourly figure.

That median is 50% above the $70/hr median across every platform we track.

Before you apply to Mercor

Rate before you apply
Published rates on listings this directory reads
How you get in
Open listings you can apply to
Screen in front of the rate
AI interview before you are matched
Listings
One listing per role in our feed
Who they say they will not hire
Publishes a no-hire list of 146 countries and regions, checked 2026-10-11.

What Mercor says, in its own pages

Getting paid
Hourly work is paid every Wednesday for the previous week, through Stripe Connect or Wise, whichever Mercor assigns to your region. Stripe holds the first payout for 7 days. talent.docs.mercor.com/how-to/payments, talent.docs.mercor.com/policies/contracts
Before your first paid task
An AI interview of about 20 minutes, reused for other roles that need it, then any assessments the role asks for. Before logging hours: ID verification through Persona, a tax form, the contract documents, the Insightful time tracker, and a background check the onboarding guide says usually takes one to two weeks. talent.docs.mercor.com/support/ai-interview, talent.docs.mercor.com/how-to/apply, talent.docs.mercor.com/policies/contracts, talent.docs.mercor.com/how-to/id-verification, talent.docs.mercor.com/working/project-onboarding
How much work
Hearing back after the AI interview usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. When a project ends you are not moved to a new one automatically. talent.docs.mercor.com/support/ai-interview, talent.docs.mercor.com/support/project
Contract
Independent contractor with Mercor.io Corporation of San Francisco, which deducts no taxes. talent.docs.mercor.com/policies/taxes-work-authorization, talent.docs.mercor.com/support/legal

Read on the pages linked above on 23 Sep 2026. Platforms change these terms, so check the linked page before you rely on one.

What people run into

  • ▲ The AI interview is a real time cost, and many people then wait with no match.
  • ▲ Projects can be overstaffed or paused, so a passed screen is not a queue of work.
  • ▲ Payments, when work exists, are the part reviewers consistently praise: weekly and on time.

What they wish they could see

  • A listed rate before the interview.
  • A signal that work will actually be there after they pass.

What this directory already shows

  • Advertised top rate on each listing we read from Mercor's public board.
  • Who the listing is open to, in the posting's own words.

What we cannot measure

  • Wait time after the interview, or whether a project still has hours left.

Public worker reports and the platform's own pages, gathered by hand on 2026-09-03. Evidence rated high. Same rules as the reported pay above.

Sources: the reports cited under the pay figure above · Methodology

What people say about Mercor

Praised most

  • ▪ “Onboarding was smooth, payments were always on time, the pay was competitive, and the flexible schedule was a big plus.” reddit.com (2026-07-25)
  • ▪ “Then Mercor took me in a few months ago. I've already made close to $60k since then. It's unreal!” reddit.com (2026-06-29)
  • ▪ “they always pay very well. The project managers have always been remarkable.” trustpilot.com (2026-09-06)

Complained about most

  • ▲ “I'm being offboarded because of one single reviewer. I've submitted dozens of tasks, and every other reviewer has liked and praised my work.” reddit.com (2026-08-20)
  • ▲ “offboards from project without explanation, no actual support, sporadic work” trustpilot.com (2026-09-11)
  • ▲ “Performance is gamified and used as a stick to degrade contractors and create a sense of no job security.” glassdoor.com

Where workers talk. r/mercor_ai, 40,287 members · r/mercorai_workers, run by workers · Per-project Slack workspaces, run by the company

Recent developments

  • 2026-07-09 TechCrunch, citing Bloomberg: Mercor in talks to raise at a 20B USD valuation, Forbes puts the round at 500M USD, no close confirmed by 11 Sep 2026. techcrunch.com
  • 2026-07-09 Mercor announced the acquisition of Deeptune, a reinforcement-learning environments company, claiming more than five million domain experts. (company claim) mercor.com
  • 2026-07-06 Dealroom, citing The Information: gross annualized revenue passed 2B USD in June 2026, with 60 to 70 percent paid to contractors. dealroom.co
  • 2026-06-25 Mercor disclosed a March 2026 credential-theft incident via compromised LiteLLM packages, affecting a subset of its nearly five million experts. (company claim) mercor.com
  • 2026-05-08 White v. Mercor.io Corp. filed in N.D. Tex., a proposed misclassification class action on behalf of 30,000 experts. independentcontractorcompliance.com
  • 2026-05-08 Company claims over 2M USD paid out daily to more than 30,000 weekly active contractors and 1B USD annualized revenue. (company claim) mercor.com

Gathered by hand on 2026-09-11 from the linked pages. Ratings are other sites' scores, quoted with their counts and scope. A figure a company states about itself is marked as a claim. Nothing here enters our pay figures, rankings or alerts.

Worker ratings

No ratings of Mercor here yet. The summary appears once there are 10, so no single rating can speak for everyone.

Worked on Mercor? Rate it in 20 seconds
How would you rate Mercor overall?
Were you paid what you earned, on time?
How long from sign-up to your first paid task?
Was there work when you wanted it?
When did you last work on Mercor?

One rating per connection per platform. We keep your answers and a scrambled key made from your connection, so a second rating from the same connection replaces the first. We never store your IP address. Details in the privacy policy.

What it hires for

Where its roles are open

plus 147 worldwide-remote roles

Where Mercor says it cannot hire

Mercor cannot onboard experts or issue contracts in any of these locations, or in any location that does not appear on this page. If yours is one of them, please do not begin work.

talent.docs.mercor.com, read 2026-10-11

The 146 they name

Afghanistan, Åland Islands, American Samoa, Andorra, Anguilla, Antarctica, Armenia, Aruba, Azerbaijan, Bahamas, Barbados, Belarus, Belize, Bermuda, Bhutan, Caribbean Netherlands, Bouvet Island, British Indian Ocean Territory, British Virgin Islands, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cambodia, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Cayman Islands, Central African Republic, Chad, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Comoros, Cook Islands, Crimea, Cuba, Curaçao, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Dominica, Donetsk, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Falkland Islands, Faroe Islands, Fiji, French Guiana, French Polynesia, French Southern Territories, Georgia, Gibraltar, Greenland, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guam, Guernsey, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Haiti, Heard Island and McDonald Islands, Honduras, Hong Kong, Iran, Iraq, Isle of Man, Jersey, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kiribati, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Liechtenstein, Luhansk, Macau, Malawi, Maldives, Mali, Marshall Islands, Martinique, Mauritania, Mayotte, Micronesia, Moldova, Montenegro, Montserrat, Myanmar, Nauru, New Caledonia, Nicaragua, Niger, Niue, Norfolk Island, North Korea, Northern Mariana Islands, Pakistan, Palau, Palestine, Papua New Guinea, Pitcairn Islands, Puerto Rico, Republic of the Congo, Réunion, Russia, Saint Barthélemy, Saint Helena, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Martin, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Samoa, São Tomé and Príncipe, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Sint Maarten, Solomon Islands, Somalia, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, South Sudan, Sudan, Suriname, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Syria, Tajikistan, Timor-Leste, Togo, Tokelau, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Turks and Caicos Islands, Tuvalu, United States Virgin Islands, Uganda, Ukraine, United States Minor Outlying Islands, Vanuatu, Vatican City, Venezuela, Wallis and Futuna, Western Sahara, Yemen, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Also required, wherever you live

  • Government ID and a selfie video. You will upload a government-issued ID and record a short selfie video. source
  • Tax form, individuals only. Complete your tax form (W9 or W8-BEN) as an individual. We are unable to accept W8-BEN-E or other forms related to business entities. source

Mercor's main site lists the same 107 places this page says Mercor can pay, and says Mercor does not engage contractors located anywhere else. When this directory first read the two pages, on 5 September 2026, they disagreed about 12 places, Kenya among them. On 11 October 2026 they agree. source

Mercor presents the page as where it can pay experts, through Stripe or Wise, and says the list is reviewed regularly because both keep expanding where they operate. source

Geography & eligibility

Global: per-job country lists

The honest read

One of the largest AI-work marketplaces; $10B valuation (Oct 2025). Rates and roles verified from their public listings.

Join Mercor ↗What happens after you apply

Live roles on Mercor (top 40 by pay)

See all 250 Mercor roles + filters →

Talent networks for future projects

These listings invite applications for future projects. They are excluded from current-role counts and pay comparisons. Work and advertised rates are not guaranteed.

Compare Mercor with

Platforms we can verify rates for