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 (training data services, reported, 8 Aug 2026).
- 2
Mercor: $109/hr average contracted rate; $4M+ daily payouts (expert human data (all domains), stated, 11 Oct 2026).
- 3
Mercor, Handshake, micro1: Roughly 60% to 70% of top-line income paid out to domain specialists (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 (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 (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 (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?
Sample. 3,031 roles open on 17 Oct 2026 on the job boards this site reads every day, 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, live data.
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. 10 figures, to 11 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, live data.
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. 18 figures, to 11 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, live data.
Figure 4
What RL environments cost
What do labs pay for reinforcement-learning environments and tasks?
| Company | Figure as published |
|---|---|
| RL environment vendors (interviews) (frontier labs)Epoch AI | Contract sizes often six to seven figures per quarter; one founder said often seven figures per quarter or more |
| RL environment vendors (interviews) (neolabs)Epoch AI | Contracts in the $300k to $500k range |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | Around $300k for high-quality replicas of complex products like Slack |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | $200 to $2,000 per task; $20k per task rare but possible |
| RL environment vendors (interviews)Epoch AI | Exclusive deals roughly 4 to 5 times more expensive than non-exclusive |
| UI-gym builders (unnamed) (OpenAI)SemiAnalysis | About $20,000 per website; OpenAI has purchased hundreds of sites |
| MechanizeMechanize | Inefficient to spend much less than about $500 per RL task; expected to rise about fivefold to a few thousand dollars within a year; compute about $480 per task per run, $2,400 over five reuses |
Sample. 7 figures, to 11 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, live data.
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. 16 figures, to 11 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, live data.
Figure 6
Contract sizes
How large are the contracts between labs and data vendors?
Sample. 8 figures, to 11 Oct 2026, each from the publication linked beside it.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, live data.
Figure 7
Figures by kind
Which parts of the human-data economy are documented?
| Kind | Records |
|---|---|
| Take rate or margin | 11 |
| Lab spend | 10 |
| Price per item | 10 |
| Contract size | 8 |
| RL environment price | 7 |
| Worker pay vs bill rate | 7 |
| Price list | 6 |
Sample. 59 figures.
Source. AITraining.jobs Research, What AI Labs Pay for Human Data, live data.
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:
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.
Method and definitions
The public job boards of the AI training platforms this site tracks, read every day. 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
Cite and reuse
Free to quote, chart and republish under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. Live figures change daily: cite a monthly edition for numbers that will read the same later, or keep the access date.
Citation
AITraining.jobs (2026). What AI Labs Pay for Human Data (live data, 1 Jan 2021 to 11 Oct 2026). https://www.aitraining.team/research/what-ai-labs-pay-for-human-data (accessed 18 Oct 2026)
BibTeX
@misc{aitrainingjobs_what_ai_labs_pay_for_human_data_live,
author = {{AITraining.jobs}},
title = {What AI Labs Pay for Human Data (live data, 1 Jan 2021 to 11 Oct 2026)},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://www.aitraining.team/research/what-ai-labs-pay-for-human-data}},
note = {Accessed 18 Oct 2026},
}More research
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