How Much Does AI Training Pay? What I've Made Since June 2026

By Luke Lashley · Published July 13, 2026 · Updated October 9, 2026

Some links here are referral links. If you sign up and do paid work, the platform may pay me; it costs you nothing. Full disclosure.

I’ve made nearly $30,000 from AI training work since June 2026. That’s about four months at about 20 hours a week, and most of it came from two platforms: $14,263.79 from DataAnnotation and $12,408.75 from micro1. My best month was $4,726.68, on DataAnnotation in August. My worst platform, Outlier, has paid me $0.

Most of my work pays between $50 and $100 an hour. Getting enough of those hours is the hard part. Every number here comes from my own payout dashboards and emails.

I’m a programmer, so these numbers come from coding and technical roles. If you’re coming from writing, teaching, law or medicine, your rates and odds will look different, and the listed-pay table further down covers those fields better than my earnings can.

What each platform has paid me

Mercor’s $95 an hour has brought in a small fraction of what micro1’s $80 to $90 has. The difference is hours: micro1 gave me 10 to 20 a week while a project ran, and Mercor has billed 7.88 hours in total.

What open roles list right now

My job finder pulls open roles from five platforms. On October 7, 2026, it had 1,167 of them, and 1,090 listed an hourly rate. Here’s the median listed hourly rate on each platform:

For each role I took the midpoint of its listed range, then the median across the platform. Treat these as offers. The first table is what offers like these have turned into for me.

Listed pay climbs fast with credentials. Here’s a July 2026 snapshot of listings and dashboard rates:

The top rows are real, just rare. I once saw a precious-metals markets role listed at $300 an hour.

Where the money leaks

The hourly rate assumes every hour you spend gets paid. Mine haven’t:

• Unpaid screening. Outlier’s screening took real time and paid me nothing. Ethos went the other way: its practice task and the client’s screening task are both paid.
• Tasks that have to pass. For a while my Alignerr role paid only for passing tasks, so one four-hour task that failed paid nothing.
• Gaps between projects. My micro1 projects have run anywhere from a few days to one that’s still going in October, with no pay between them. Mercor’s sprints can be weeks apart.
• Time caps. Some Handshake projects pay per task. Some hourly ones cap the time you can bill for each task, and anything past the cap is unpaid.

How you get paid

Where you can be paid isn’t the same as where a platform will hire you. PayPal also can’t receive money in every country, so make sure yours can before you count on DataAnnotation or Alignerr.

What about the “$4,000 a week” posts?

My best month worked out to a bit over $1,000 a week, and one late-September week on DataAnnotation came to $2,338.92. Both are a long way from $4,000. Listed specialist rates of $200 an hour do exist, and 20 hours at that rate is $4,000, so the posts aren’t impossible. The question is how many weeks in a row those hours last.

Can it be a full-time income?

It’s possible, if you’re comfortable with uncertainty. I treat it as side income: about 20 hours a week, spread across several platforms, and I keep applying. DataAnnotation, where I’ve had my steadiest work, has slowed down a bit lately, and that’s the point. Even a good platform’s hours move around. Earn while it’s strong; just don’t build your life on any one platform.

If you’re just starting, my guide to applying covers the order I’d go in, and the platform comparison lines the platforms up against each other.