State of AI Training Pay: August 2026

2026-09-08 · Expert Match AI team

This is the second edition of our monthly data report on what AI training and expert-evaluation work actually pays, computed from live listings rather than surveys or anecdotes. It closes on the September 7 snapshot: 330 live roles across 10 platforms, of which 236 disclose an hourly rate. Those 236 are the basis for every average below (midpoint of each posted range). The July edition froze 223 priced roles on July 31; this is the first time we can put two month-ends side by side.

The short version: the board got bigger, the top got richer, and the bottom got much more crowded.

August vs July, by field

| Field | Jul 31 | Sep 7 | Move | Priced roles now | |---|---|---|---|---| | Legal | $138 | $180 | +$42 | 25 | | Healthcare | $136 | $109 | −$27 | 12 | | Science | $70 | $109 | +$39 | 16 | | Finance | $72 | $100 | +$28 | 12 | | Software | $84 | $97 | +$13 | 58 | | Business | $43 | $79 | +$36 | 12 | | Linguistics | $46 | $54 | +$8 | 18 | | ML, Data & AI | $65 | $54 | −$11 | 78 |

Six of eight fields moved up. Two went the other way, and they are the two most interesting rows.

Legal, +$42, is now alone at the top. On July 31 legal led healthcare by $2/hr. It now leads by $71. The driver is micro1's BigLaw wave - Corporate, Litigation, M&A, Immigration and Family Law attorney roles all listed at $140–400/hr - stacked on top of Surge's $500–1,000 attorney tier. Legal actually peaked higher: our August 27 trend check had it at $196 after touching $218 mid-month, so $180 is a field that has cooled from its high, not one still climbing. See the legal field guide for who qualifies.

Healthcare, −$27, is the month's only real decline - and it is a composition story. The premium tiers did not get cheaper: Surge's physician tier is still $250–450 and Mercor's specialty MD networks are still $170–250. What changed is that micro1 added a block of clinical roles below the old average - hospitalist reviewers at $70–100 and a set of adolescent mental-health specialist roles (eating disorders, substance use, self-harm, safeguarding) at $45–95. Four new listings in a twelve-role field pull the average hard. More seats, lower midpoint. If you are a physician the ceiling has not moved; if you are a clinician without an MD there are more doors than there were.

Science, +$39, is the fastest-growing field on the board. micro1's physics PhD roles at $100–200 and a "PhD & Academic Expert" listing at $245–280 did most of the work. The life-sciences post covers the catch: almost none of the science money is biology.

Business, +$36, and finance, +$28, both got there the same way: a handful of $90–140 specialist roles (product, operations, analyst) replacing a base that used to sit in the $40s. Small fields; single listings swing them. The CPA post has the finance detail.

ML, Data & AI, −$11, is the volume category absorbing the cheap end. It is the biggest field on the board at 78 priced roles, and it is where micro1's video- and data-collection listings at $6–20/hr get filed. The field's ceiling is unchanged at $280; the floor got a lot more populated.

By platform: the spread is now 18x

| Platform | Jul 31 | Sep 7 | Priced roles now | |---|---|---|---| | Surge | $406 | $406 | 4 | | Mercor | $102 | $124 | 17 | | Braintrust | $105 | $105 | 24 | | micro1 | $65 | $88 | 145 | | Stellar | $87 | $87 | 4 | | Mindrift | $71 | $65 | 3 | | DataAnnotation | $52 | $52 | 5 | | Outlier | $32 | $32 | 5 | | Alignerr | $64 | $22 | 29 |

Two things moved. micro1 climbed $23/hr to $88 - remarkable for a board of 145 listings, and entirely down to the attorney and PhD tiers arriving at the top. We look at micro1's board in detail in a companion post. Mercor climbed $22 as its mix tightened toward specialist networks.

Alignerr's drop from $64 to $22 needs a caveat. Part of it is real: Alignerr shipped a wave of audio-transcription roles (Brazilian Portuguese, Cantonese, and others) listed at $10–35/hr. Part of it is us: in the last week we changed how we group Alignerr's postings - by their underlying master job rather than by title - which roughly tripled the count we show and reweighted the average toward that transcription tier. Treat the July and September Alignerr rows as two different measurements of the same platform, not a $42 pay cut.

Surge, Braintrust, Stellar, DataAnnotation and Outlier did not move a dollar. The highest-to-lowest platform spread has widened from roughly 12x to roughly 18x, and the conclusion from July stands, only more so: where you apply matters more than what you know.

The number we are watching: what new listings pay

In our August 27 trend post we retracted an earlier claim that new listings were arriving at a premium. Here is the same calculation, one more time, on the September 7 board:

| Cohort | Priced roles | Avg rate | |---|---|---| | First seen before August | 51 | $116/hr | | First seen in August or later | 182 | $81/hr | | First seen September 1–7 only | 75 | $61/hr |

Read the last row carefully. Seventy-five priced roles arrived in the first week of September - nearly a third of the board turned over - and they average $61/hr, well under the $88 board-wide figure. The first-week arrivals are dominated by micro1 video-recording and data-collection listings at $6–20 and Alignerr transcription at $10–35, with a thinner layer of $80–150 engineering and specialist roles on top.

The survivorship warning from last time still applies to the "before August" row (the cheap listings churned; the premium evergreen tiers remain). But the September row has no survivorship in it yet - it is just what the labs posted last week. Right now, the market is restocking from the bottom.

Superlatives, August 2026

• Biggest listed rate: unchanged - Surge AI's Attorneys & Senior Executives at $500–1,000/hr, still the only four-figure hourly on the board.
• Biggest single-field move: legal, +$42/hr month over month.
• Deepest field: ML, Data & AI has overtaken software, 78 priced roles to 58.
• Most-clicked role on our board in the last two weeks: Surge's Physicians & Clinicians tier, for the second month running.
• Notable arrivals: micro1's BigLaw attorney set ($140–400), its physics PhD tracks ($100–200), and a run of engineering-specialist roles (aerodynamics, CFD, circuit design, CAD) at $50–150 - the first hardware-engineering cluster we have seen.
• Notable exit: Mindrift's board shrank from 9 priced roles to 3.

Methodology, briefly

Averages use the midpoint of each listing's disclosed hourly range across every priced role live at the snapshot; per-project, annual-salary and undisclosed-rate roles are tracked but excluded from averages. This is listing data, not accepted-offer data - read what "listed rate" actually means before mentally spending it. The July comparison uses our July 31 snapshot of the same pipeline; cohort dates are when a listing first appeared in our tracker, which began July 2. Small fields (healthcare, finance, business) can swing on a handful of listings, and the Alignerr grouping change noted above affects its row only.

The September edition will publish at the start of October. Until then the salary report recomputes every 6 hours, the jobs board carries every role behind these numbers, and you can upload a resume on the homepage to see today's board ranked against your background - free, no account, resume never stored.

Published by the Expert Match AI team. Pay figures are listed rates from live postings, not a survey of accepted offers. Some outbound application links on this site carry disclosed referral codes; rankings and recommendations are never influenced by them.