Research
The market for human AI training work, measured: 78 reports built from the job boards of the AI training platforms and the apply clicks of the people who use AITraining.jobs, read every day, and from the industry's own filings, announcements, court records and studies.
Monthly data story
The AI Training Job Market in September 2026
What happened in the market that month, in one article. Every figure links to the frozen edition it is quoted from.
Benchmark what each vendor pays experts, see where expertise is scarce, check how vendors screen, and track which labs are building human-data teams.
See which expertise labs are pushing into, how rivals are hiring and pricing, and where applicants are most and least available.
Find the teams buying training data, what licences and archives sell for, what the courts have priced, and which kinds of data labs want next.
Is the market for human AI training work growing, week by week?
From 3 Aug 2026 to 11 Oct 2026, open AI training roles on the platforms tracked throughout went up 10.5% (index 110.5); platforms listed 232 new roles in the last week and the advertised median stood at $55/hr.
3 Aug 2026 to 11 Oct 2026
Which kinds of expertise are AI training platforms hiring more of, week by week?
From the week of 3 Aug 2026 to the week of 5 Oct 2026, on the 15 platforms tracked throughout, Medicine & nursing grew fastest among expert fields (+76.4% open roles), Spanish among languages (+59.4%) and Transcription, Audio & Speech among kinds of work (+73.2%).
3 Aug 2026 to 11 Oct 2026
Which AI training platforms are growing, holding or shrinking their hiring, and how are their rates moving?
From 20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026, open roles on the 17 AI training platforms tracked throughout went up 3.7%: 7 grew and 6 shrank by 10% or more while 3 held steady, and the largest moves in roles were OpenTrain AI (-609 roles, -93.5%) and Alignerr (+348, +915.8%).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How many AI training roles are open, who lists them, how fast do they turn over and who can apply?
On 17 Oct 2026, 3,668 AI training roles were open across the job boards of 29 platforms. On the platforms tracked since 20 Sep 2026, open roles went up 3.7%, from 2,595 to 2,690; SuperAnnotate (SME), OneForma, Turing, Anyone AI, Sovrano AI, RemoExperts, Pasiflora AI, Babel Audio, Vetto, Claru, Perle Labs and Pila8, first tracked during the window, added 978. 2,252 roles were newly listed and 2,181 removed in between.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How do the AI training platforms compare on listings, pay, reach and turnover?
On 17 Oct 2026, 3,668 AI training roles were open across the job boards of 29 platforms; Invisible listed the most (14.5%) and Babel Audio advertised the highest median pay ($105/hr).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How many platforms compete for each kind of AI training work, and how much of it does the leader hold?
On 17 Oct 2026, AI training listings were unconcentrated overall (HHI 742 across 29 platforms); Robotics & Physical-AI Data was the most concentrated kind of work, led by Claru with 61.5% of its open roles.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How long do AI training roles stay listed, and which kinds of work turn over fastest?
Half of the AI training roles listed from 3 Aug 2026 to 17 Oct 2026 came down within 18 days of being listed; Agentic Tasks & RL Environments turned over fastest (median 8.3 days), and counting only removed roles would put the median at 12.5 days.
3 Aug 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
When are AI training roles posted, and when do people apply?
From 20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026, 92.4% of dated AI training postings fell on a weekday (Wednesday the busiest day), while people applied most on Thursday and in the 17:00 UTC hour.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which AI labs are hiring for the teams that buy, run and evaluate human data, and for what roles?
On 18 Oct 2026, 16 of 25 AI labs with a public job board had 101 roles open on the teams that buy, run and evaluate human data, xAI the most (24).
18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026
Which AI labs and data vendors have people whose job is to source, license or acquire training data right now?
On 18 Oct 2026, 15 roles at AI labs and human-data vendors had the job of sourcing, licensing or acquiring training data, the most at OpenAI, and 20 more were building RL environments: the desks data owners and brokers sell to.
18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026
How fast are the human-data vendors hiring their own staff, and for which functions?
On 18 Oct 2026, 14 human-data vendors had 671 staff roles open on their own boards, Scale AI the most (182); engineering and product is the largest function.
18 Oct 2026 to 18 Oct 2026
What do AI labs spend on human data, what do vendors bill, what do the experts receive, and what do RL environments and tasks cost?
59 published figures on what AI labs pay for human data, from 2021 to 11 Oct 2026: lab spend, vendor bill rates against worker pay, vendors' take, RL-environment prices, prices per task and contract sizes; the largest spend figure recorded: Surge reportedly generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024 from work with AI labs (Surge AI, reported).
1 Jan 2021 to 11 Oct 2026
Which kinds of training data are in rising demand, and which are cooling?
To 11 Oct 2026, the evidence shows labs buying more coding (production-like environments), computer-use app and website clones and egocentric and robotics demonstration data and less generalist annotation and microtasks and static maths and verifiable coding tasks.
20 Jun 2023 to 11 Oct 2026
Who has licensed content and data to which AI companies, on what terms and for how much?
From 11 Jul 2023 to 11 Oct 2026, 89 content and data licensing deals between AI companies and data owners are recorded, 22 with a published price; the largest is News Corp with OpenAI ("Could be" close to $250 million over five years, per The Wall Street Journal (as reported by VentureBeat); terms not disclosed by the parties).
11 Jul 2023 to 11 Oct 2026
Who buys companies' records and the archives of defunct companies to train AI, at what prices and on what terms, and what do brokers earn?
Companies' records (email, chat, tickets, code, CRM) and the archives of defunct companies now sell to AI labs and principal vendors as raw material for RL environments: 62 prices, programs and terms recorded to 11 Oct 2026, up to $12,500,000 for a single archive and a $1 billion over the next 12 months buying program at micro1.
12 Jan 2026 to 11 Oct 2026
Which copyright, privacy and data-rights disputes over AI training data have been filed, ruled on or settled, and what did they cost?
From 20 Sep 2023 to 11 Oct 2026, 68 lawsuits, rulings, settlements and regulatory actions over AI training data are recorded; the largest amount is Bartz v. Anthropic ($1.5 billion, approximately $3,000 per work).
20 Sep 2023 to 11 Oct 2026
How 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?
From 13 Jun 2023 to 11 Oct 2026, 41 studies, incidents and vendor statements document the quality risks of human data: workers using AI models to do the tasks (33-46% of crowd workers (range estimate) in the first measurement), fake and resold accounts, quality failures on lab projects and breaches at vendors.
13 Jun 2023 to 11 Oct 2026
Where do people who want AI training work apply, and which roles are short of applicants?
From 20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026, people on AITraining.jobs made 6,200 apply clicks; per open role, interest was highest in Writing & Content (3.34x the average role) and lowest in Multilingual & Localization (0.59x).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which traits of an AI training role draw more applicants, compared within the same kind of work?
Compared within the same kind of work from 20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026, 'freelance' in the title went with 80% fewer clicks per open role, a listing under 14 days old with 3.8 times and being open worldwide with 2.5 times: associations among the people who use AITraining.jobs, partly the site's own ranking of roles.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How much AI training work is open to people without a degree or professional experience, and what does it pay?
On 17 Oct 2026, 28.5% of open AI training roles (1,046) asked for no expert field, level or credential in their title and advertised a median $45/hr, and 46.8% of the roles with a full description mentioned no degree, years of experience or credential, though 9.4% of those still mentioned a test.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
What do AI training application forms ask, and how long are they?
Across 1,457 application forms of AI training roles open on 17 Oct 2026, 92.9% require a resume, 65.2% ask for a LinkedIn profile and a typical form has 10 fields.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How do AI training platforms screen and verify the experts they hire, and how much do they ask of applicants?
Of the 3,260 open roles whose full description is read (28 platforms), 12.6% state a test, interview or check, most often an assessment, test or trial task (9.2%), and 10.5% name a professional credential or licence; the 1,457 application forms read on 12 platforms require a median of 10 fields, and 92.9% require a resume.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
What tasks does AI training work involve: writing prompts, rating answers, red-teaming, coding?
Of 3,260 open AI training roles with a full description on 17 Oct 2026 (88.9% of open roles, at the expert networks that publish descriptions), 46.2% mention writing prompts, ideal answers or evaluation tasks, 38.5% rating, scoring or ranking model answers, 19.9% recording or transcribing audio and video, 9.9% writing or reviewing code and 2.9% red-teaming.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which languages are AI labs hiring for, what do they pay and how much competition is there?
On 17 Oct 2026, open AI training roles named 95 languages; English, Spanish and German had the most openings, and Arabic roles advertised the highest median pay ($100/hr).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which professions and disciplines are AI labs hiring to train models, and what do they pay?
On 17 Oct 2026, 1,528 open AI training roles named an expert field; Software & computer science, Finance, accounting & economics and Medicine & nursing had the most openings, and Law advertised the highest median pay ($109/hr).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which expertise and languages are hardest to recruit for AI training work right now?
On 17 Oct 2026, Chemistry was the hardest expert field to recruit for AI training work (scarcity index 1.78x, 1.00 = the market), Dutch the hardest language (1.84x) and Multilingual & Localization the hardest kind of work (1.26x); 3 groups were scarcer than the market on all three measures: applicants per opening, time to close and pay.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Which programming languages are AI labs hiring coders to train models in, and what does each pay?
Of 284 Coding & Software Evaluation roles open on 17 Oct 2026, 69.4% name a programming language, Python most often (35.6%); where enough roles on two or more platforms state pay, median advertised rates run from $50/hr (Python) to $160/hr (Lean (theorem prover)).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
What do AI training roles ask for: degrees, credentials, experience, hours, tests?
Of 3,260 open AI training roles with a full description on 17 Oct 2026, 25.5% mention a PhD or master's degree, 10.5% a professional credential and 14.7% an assessment or test.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
What is AI training work called, and does the title say anything about the pay?
On 17 Oct 2026, AI training roles were most often titled "Expert or SME", "Trainer" and "Specialist"; roles titled "Voice actor or speaker" advertised the highest median pay ($100/hr).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Who is hiring people to collect real-world data for robots and physical AI, where, and at what pay?
On 17 Oct 2026, 109 roles on 10 AI training platforms recruited people to collect real-world data for robots and physical AI, Claru the most (40), at a median advertised $10 an hour; 25.7% had to be done at a site, and 4 AI labs listed 14 robot data-collection roles on their own boards.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
For the same kind of work, the same expertise and the same language, what does each platform advertise per hour?
On 17 Oct 2026, for roles open to US residents, the best-paying platform advertised 2.05 times the rate of the worst-paying one in the typical kind of AI training work, and up to 6.67 times in Multilingual & Localization ($100 at Mindrift against $15 at Turing).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
For the roles a resident of each country may apply to, how does advertised AI training pay compare with that country's minimum wage?
On 17 Oct 2026, the median advertised AI training rate open to residents of 19 countries ran from 3.5 times the local minimum wage (Australia) to 259 times (India).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How often do AI training roles state their pay, how are the rates distributed and how wide are the ranges?
On 17 Oct 2026, 82.6% of 3,668 open AI training roles stated an hourly rate, with a median of $65/hr and 60.4% at $50/hr or more.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Is the advertised rate for each kind of AI training work rising or falling?
From the week of 31 Aug 2026 to the week of 5 Oct 2026, on the same platforms, 9 kinds of AI training work had a market rate at both ends; Data Annotation & Labeling moved most (+25.8%), and Law, Medicine & Finance paid the highest median ($80/hr).
31 Aug 2026 to 11 Oct 2026
Which traits of an AI training role come with higher advertised pay, compared within the same kind of work?
Compared within each kind of work on 17 Oct 2026, a US-only location rule went with +55.2%, a professional credential in the description went with +21.7%, a profession named in the title went with +11.0% and a language named in the title with -20.8% in advertised pay.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How is AI training work paid: by the hour, by the task or by salary, on what contract, and how often?
On 17 Oct 2026, 95.8% of the 3,166 open AI training roles quoting pay quoted it by the hour, 67.0% of roles stating an engagement type were contract or freelance, and among roles with a full description 5.5% paid per task or other output while 3.2% stated a payout schedule.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
Who may apply to AI training roles, country by country?
On 17 Oct 2026, 28.8% of open AI training roles accepted applicants from any country; residents of the United States could apply to the most (2,443 of 3,668).
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
How much AI training work is on-site rather than remote, where is it, and what is it?
On 17 Oct 2026, 2.3% of 3,668 open AI training roles had to be done on-site or hybrid, 96.9% were remote and 0.9% did not say; the largest group of on-site roles was in-person data collection, and most were in the United States, the United Kingdom and India.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
What does AI training work pay, by kind of work and by platform?
Advertised hourly pay across thousands of live roles, by kind of work and platform, updated daily.
Open roles today
How much money has gone into the companies that supply human data to AI labs, and at what valuations?
From 1 Jan 2024 to 10 Oct 2026, the companies that supply human data to AI labs disclosed $3.1B in 38 funding rounds, and Scale AI carries the highest valuation at $29B.
Sourced dataset, reviewed 10 Oct 2026
How much revenue do the companies that supply human data to AI labs make, and how many people do they say work for them?
The listed human-data companies report their revenue in filings and the private ones through statements and press reports; the largest private figure recorded is Mercor's over $2 billion in gross revenue run rate (run-rate Jun 2026), and Innodata's revenue rose 47.6% in FY2025.
Sourced dataset, reviewed 10 Oct 2026
Which lawsuits, rulings, investigations, laws and labour actions concern the people who train AI, and where do they stand?
From 1 Jan 2023 to 10 Oct 2026, 30 lawsuits, rulings, investigations, laws and labour actions concerned the people who train AI; Scale AI is named in the most.
Sourced dataset, reviewed 10 Oct 2026
What have researchers and reporters measured about pay and conditions in data annotation and AI training work, and how does it compare with today's advertised rates?
Studies of data work have measured hourly earnings as low as an average of a little more than 90 cents an hour (How the AI industry profits from catastrophe) and a median of $3.31 across 26 measured figures, while the AI training roles open today advertise a median of $65 an hour, most of it expert work.
Sourced dataset, reviewed 10 Oct 2026
One report per kind of AI training work: who lists it, what it pays, how much applicant demand each opening draws and what it asks for. Live figures to 17 Oct 2026.
One report per platform: what it lists, what it pays, who may apply, how fast its roles turn over and how it compares with the market. Live figures to 17 Oct 2026.
How fresh, complete and consistent is the data behind these reports?
5 of 7 independent cross-checks match exactly; the 29 job boards behind these reports were last read by 18 Oct 2026, 06:01 UTC, and 83% of open roles state an hourly rate.
20 Sep 2026 to 17 Oct 2026
For labs, data vendors and researchers
The figures in these reports are a summary. Behind them are records we collect ourselves, every day:
9,572 roles tracked, each with its history
Every role on 29 job boards, read daily since 13 Jul 2026: its pay and place, and the first and last day it was open.
6,200 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.