Reviews · Mercor
Mercor Pay Rates (September 2026): Posted Hourly Rates on 417 Live Listings, by Field
Across 417 live Mercor listings with a readable hourly rate, all live at their last check between September 2 and 13, 2026, the median posted rate was $84 per hour, the middle half of the board sat between $55 and $100, and about 37% posted $100 or more at the midpoint of their range. Posted ranges have a median floor of $70 and a median ceiling of $100, so the number you actually land on inside that range is not guaranteed.
By Daichi Kishida (Remote AI Talent Connector) · Published · Last verified
Mercor links on this site are my referral links. If you sign up through one, Mercor may ask whether Daichi Kishida referred you. If you found the listing here, that's me and yes is accurate. It doesn't change your pay or your application. Already have a Mercor account? Then this doesn't apply to you. Details in the disclosure.
Key takeaways
- Across 417 live listings with a readable hourly rate, as of September 13, 2026, the median posted rate is $84/hr, the middle half of the board runs $55 to $100, and about 37% post $100 or more at the midpoint.
- Most listings post a range, not a single number: 358 of 417 do, with a median range width of $30 (typically something like $70 to $100). The single number some listings show is the exception, not the rule.
- Medicine, Law, Finance and Business Operations post the highest per-field medians ($90 to $105); Arts & Design posts the lowest ($30).
- 36 listings pay per task, per year, or as a one-time study rather than hourly, and 27 more don’t print a readable rate on the page at all (23 of those are Talent Network catalog listings). None of these are counted in the hourly figures above.
- Among listings that show a hired count, the $50-99/hr band has a higher median hired figure (55) than the $100+/hr band (11), so hiring doesn’t concentrate only at the top of the pay scale.
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I run a database of Mercor listings that I re-check by hand, and “how much does Mercor pay” is the question I get most. This page is the full distribution behind that question: not just a median, but the percentiles, the per-field breakdown, what the posted range actually means, and which listings don’t pay hourly at all. For the wider review, the AI interview and how payouts work, see my Mercor review. For country eligibility, see Mercor’s eligible countries by listing.
How much does Mercor pay per hour?
As of September 13, 2026, I have 417 live Mercor listings with a readable hourly rate printed on the listing page, out of 480 listings live at their last check between September 2 and 13, 2026. Using the midpoint of each listing’s posted range:
- Median: $84/hr.
- p10: about $27/hr. p25: $55/hr. p75: $100/hr. p90: $125/hr.
- Range: $1.50/hr at the low end up to $270/hr at the high end.
Put in buckets, here’s how the 417 listings split by midpoint:
| Posted rate (midpoint) | Listings | Share |
|---|---|---|
| $150+ | 22 | 5% |
| $100-149 | 133 | 32% |
| $75-99 | 120 | 29% |
| $50-74 | 49 | 12% |
| $30-49 | 35 | 8% |
| Under $30 | 58 | 14% |
About 37% of listings post $100/hr or more at the midpoint, and about two thirds post $75 or more. The under-$30 tail is real, 58 listings as of September 13, 2026, but it’s concentrated in specific fields (see below), not spread evenly across the board.
Is the posted range what you actually get?
Most Mercor listings post a range, not a fixed number: 358 of the 417 hourly listings do, and only 59 show a single rate. As of September 13, 2026, the median posted floor across those ranges is $70/hr and the median posted ceiling is $100/hr, with a median range width of $30. The lowest floor on any listing is $0 and the highest ceiling is $270. 64 listings post a floor of $100 or more, and 220 post a ceiling of $100 or more (74 of those go to $150 or higher).
What this means practically: a listing showing “$70-100/hr” is telling you the band your offer will land in, not that $100 is what you’ll be paid. I don’t have data on where inside the range individual offers land, so I’m not going to guess. What the numbers do show is that the gap between floor and ceiling is real and typically about $30, so “up to $100” and “$70” are both accurate descriptions of the same listing, and neither one is the whole picture.
Which fields pay the most on Mercor?
Using Mercor’s own category labels, here’s the per-field breakdown for categories with 10 or more live listings, listings live at their last check between September 2 and 13, 2026 (median and quartiles are the midpoint of each listing’s posted range):
| Field (Mercor category) | Listings | p25 | Median | p75 | Min | Max | Posting $100+/hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Medicine | 15 | $90 | $105 | $120 | $70 | $230 | 10 |
| Law | 61 | $82 | $100 | $145 | $13 | $180 | 36 |
| Finance | 44 | $78 | $96 | $100 | $24 | $162 | 21 |
| Business Operations | 71 | $80 | $90 | $100 | $0 | $210 | 32 |
| Other Engineering | 14 | $75 | $85 | $90 | $61 | $175 | 2 |
| Software Engineering | 12 | $63 | $82 | $98 | $25 | $160 | 3 |
| Life, Physical, and Social Science | 39 | $69 | $80 | $100 | $20 | $200 | 13 |
| Language and Audio | 23 | $28 | $75 | $75 | $11 | $150 | 3 |
| Data Analysis | 21 | $21 | $60 | $100 | $12 | $170 | 8 |
| Miscellaneous | 23 | $27 | $54 | $100 | $12 | $160 | 6 |
| Arts & Design | 43 | $20 | $30 | $46 | $11 | $250 | 5 |
(Categories with fewer than 10 listings, Humanities at 4 and Media/Journalism at 1, plus 46 listings with no category assigned, are left out of the table.)
Medicine, Law, Finance and Business Operations sit at the top on median. Medicine (10 of 15) and Law (36 of 61) are the two fields in the table where more than half of listings post $100 or more at the midpoint. Arts & Design has by far the lowest median at $30, though even there the max is $250 (a single senior design research study, see below).
The highest posted rates, ordered by the top of the posted range, as of September 13, 2026:
| Listing | Posted range | Field | Hired shown |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dermatologist, U.S. Licensed | $270 | (none) | not shown |
| Senior Design Expert, Paid AI Design Research Study | $150-250 | Arts & Design | 2 |
| Disease-Area Clinician, Trial Endpoints & Prescribing | $150-230 | Medicine | 3 |
| Pharma Commercial Forecasting Expert, Launch Curves | $130-210 | Business Operations | not shown |
| Payer & Market Access Expert, Gross-to-Net & Formulary | $175-200 | Life, Physical, and Social Science | not shown |
| Biotech Investment Analyst, Drug Asset & Company Assessment | $120-200 | Life, Physical, and Social Science | not shown |
| Compensation & Equity Expert (Total Rewards) | $50-200 | Business Operations | not shown |
At the other end, the lowest posted floors on any live listing, as of September 13, 2026:
- Google Workspace & Business Profile Owners: $0-60/hr
- Free Video Editing For Small Businesses and Creators: $1-2/hr
- Peruvian Spanish expert: $8/hr
- Mexican Spanish expert: $10/hr
- Music & Lyrics Expert (Telugu, Bengali): $11-19/hr
- Music & Lyrics Expert (Indonesian): $11-30/hr
- Music Production Expert (Bengali): $11-19/hr
These low-floor listings are almost all in Arts & Design or the language and music niches, and they exist alongside $150+ specialist work on the same board. They’re the reason a single average is misleading; the field-by-field table matters more than the headline median.
By contract type, listings live at their last check between September 2 and 13, 2026, hourly contracts have a median posted rate of $85 (n=336), Part-time listings also median $85 (n=36), Full-time listings median $75 (n=6), and listings without a labeled contract type median $80 (n=39).
What about listings that don’t pay hourly?
Not every Mercor listing prints an hourly figure, and I don’t include these in the numbers above. As of September 13, 2026, out of the listings I checked, 36 pay in a non-hourly unit, and 27 more print no readable rate at all.
The 36 non-hourly listings break down as 31 paid per task, 3 as a one-time payment, and 2 as a yearly salary. Examples of the per-task rate, as printed on the listing page:
- CUDA Engineering Expert: $300/task
- Corporate Development, Strategic Finance Expert, Corporate Tax Expert, Investor Relations Expert, Corporate Treasury Expert: $2,000/task each
- Surety Underwriter & Bond Specialist, Disability Claims & Underwriting Specialist, Life & Annuity Specialist, and several other insurance-specialist roles: $800/task each
- Software Engineer, TypeScript/C/Python/Go, Codebase Q&A: $130/task each
- Bilingual Writer roles (Thai, Portuguese, Korean, Japanese, Italian, Hindi, Mandarin Chinese): $12.60 to $18/task
- Software Engineer, Agentic Search Systems: $80-150/task
The one-time payments include a Medicare Advantage Members (Devoted Health) insight study at $120, a Medicare Advantage Brokers survey, and a Health Plan PBM Contracting survey. That $120 insight study is worth calling out by name because it also shows the largest hired count of any listing I’ve checked, 3,203, but it’s a one-time payment, not an hourly rate, so it doesn’t belong next to the $120/hr figures above.
The two yearly-salary listings are both Customer Success Engineer roles (LatAm and India), posted at $35,000-50,000 and $30,000-45,000 per year rather than an hourly figure.
Separately, 27 listings don’t print a readable rate on the page at all, and 23 of those are Talent Network listings, a catalog format that shows a broad range for the role category (for example, Physician Talent Network at $110-250 or Machine Learning Engineer Talent Network at $70-250) rather than a rate tied to a specific listing. Applying to a Talent Network entry is still free, but I’d treat the catalog range as a ballpark, not a posted offer, since there’s no individual listing page rate behind it.
Where does the hiring actually happen?
Rate and hiring volume don’t move together the way you might expect. Looking at listings that show a hired count on the page, as of September 13, 2026:
| Rate band (midpoint) | Listings in band | Listings showing a hired count | Median hired (shown only) | Total hired (shown listings) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $100+/hr | 155 | 82 | 11 | 8,158 |
| $50-99/hr | 169 | 82 | 55 | 6,940 |
| Under $50/hr | 93 | 47 | 15 | 827 |
Read this as: among listings that display a hired count (a missing count means Mercor isn’t showing one on that listing, not that hiring is zero), the $50-99/hr band has a much higher typical hired figure, 55, than the $100+/hr band, 11. The $100+ band’s total is still the largest in absolute terms, 8,158, but that’s driven by a few very high-volume listings rather than being typical of the band.
The individual listings with the largest hired counts among hourly-readable listings, as of September 13, 2026: a Financial Crime, AML & KYC Analyst role at $75-100/hr with 926 hired, an FP&A Expert at $100/hr with 880 hired, an Incident management / reliability / SRE Evaluator at $80-120/hr with 801 hired, a Frontend Engineer at $90/hr with 743 hired, and a Public-sector procurement / RFI response Evaluator at $80-120/hr with 565 hired. The bigger number I mentioned above, the 3,203-hired Medicare Advantage insight study, is the one-time $120 payment, not an hourly listing, so it’s a separate case.
How to read a Mercor rate before you apply
A few things worth checking on the listing itself, based on what’s actually printed on the page:
- Check whether the number is hourly at all. Most of the board is, but per-task, per-year and one-time payments show up too, and they can look similar to an hourly figure at a glance.
- If it’s a range, both ends are real. The typical range is about $30 wide, so the floor and the ceiling both describe the same listing accurately. Neither one alone is the promise.
- Compare within the field, not across the whole board. A $60/hr Arts & Design listing and a $60/hr Data Analysis listing sit in different places relative to their own field’s median.
- A missing hired count isn’t a red flag by itself. Many listings simply don’t show one; it’s not the same as zero hires.
Applying costs nothing and one AI interview carries across listings, so the practical move is to apply to whatever fits, check the field median as context, and let the offer tell you where in the range you land. For more on the interview itself and how payouts work, see my full Mercor review, and for a running list of specific open listings, see the weekly jobs digest.
Create a free Mercor account through my referral link and check the rate line on the listings that fit your field.
FAQ
What’s the average pay on Mercor?
Across 417 live listings with a readable hourly rate, as of September 13, 2026, the median posted rate is $84/hr (midpoint of each listing’s range), with the middle half of the board between $55 and $100.
Does Mercor pay per hour or per project?
Most listings are hourly: 417 of the listings I checked print a readable hourly rate. But 36 listings pay per task, per year, or as a one-time study instead, so it’s worth checking the pay unit on the specific listing before assuming it’s hourly.
Which Mercor category pays the most?
By median, Medicine ($105/hr), Law ($100/hr), Finance ($96/hr) and Business Operations ($90/hr) post the highest rates among fields with 10 or more live listings, as of September 13, 2026.
Is the top of a Mercor pay range guaranteed?
No. 358 of 417 hourly listings post a range rather than a single number, with a median width of about $30 between floor and ceiling. The posted range describes where an offer can land, not a guaranteed figure.
Do the highest-paying Mercor listings hire the most people?
Not necessarily. Among listings that show a hired count, the $50-99/hr band has a higher median hired figure (55) than the $100+/hr band (11), as of September 13, 2026.
How I checked this
I pulled the posted rate directly from each Mercor listing page, not from the referrals dashboard (which shows a referral bonus, not the talent’s pay). The population is 417 listings with a readable hourly rate, out of 480 listings that were live at their last check between September 2 and 13, 2026. Median, p25 and p75 figures use the midpoint of each listing’s posted range where one is given. Listings paid per task, per year, or as a one-time study (36 of them) and listings with no readable rate on the page (27, mostly Talent Network catalog entries) are counted separately and excluded from the hourly figures. I don’t have data on where an individual offer lands within a posted range, so I didn’t estimate it. More on the method on the About page.
Mercor links on this page are my referral links. If you sign up through one, Mercor may ask whether Daichi Kishida referred you. If you found the listing here, that’s me and yes is accurate. It doesn’t change your pay or your application. Already have a Mercor account? Then this doesn’t apply to you.