Mercor: the work, the pay and the screening

What Mercor is

Mercor describes itself as organising human intelligence to power the AI economy. In practice it hires professionals as remote contractors for AI projects, and lists that work publicly with a stated rate on each listing.

We are not part of Mercor, we do not recruit for it, and we are not its agent, representative or partner. How we earn from this sets out the one commercial link there is.

What the work involves

The 242 Mercor listings open this morning cover 21 of the professions on this site.

• Generalists 25
• Business and operations specialists 11
• Software engineers 9
• Lawyers 8
• Bilingual speakers 7
• Engineers 7
• Sales and CRM specialists 7
• Transcribers 7
• Life scientists 6
• Doctors and clinicians 5
• Researchers and academics 5
• Designers 4
• Writers and editors 4
• Medical coders and auditors 3
• Accountants and finance experts 2
• Machine learning engineers 2
• Physicists 2
• CAD and manufacturing specialists 1
• IT support specialists 1
• Mathematicians and statisticians 1
• Video editors and animators 1

It is contract work, not employment: Mercor's own tax policy addresses you as an independent contractor responsible for your own tax. Mercor says hourly contracts are its most common format; some projects pay per completed task, and some pay a single fixed amount. We only list the hourly ones, because a rate per hour is the figure this site compares.

Mercor says some positions start with a paid onboarding period of six hours. What a working week looks like after that, and how long a project lasts, varies by project and is not something we can state.

What it pays

Across the 242 open Mercor listings we track, listed rates span $0–270 an hour in US dollars, exactly as each posting states them, before anything the platform deducts. That is a span, not an average. The only pay figure we ever show is the one on the posting. We do not estimate, and we do not convert currency.

A listing and an opening are different things: one listing can be hiring many people. The 242 listings add up to 6,421 stated openings.

When and how Mercor pays out for completed work is a separate question: see what we do not know.

How the screening works

Mercor's application asks you to upload a resume, complete the assessments a role requires and verify your work authorisation. Then comes an AI interview, which Mercor says takes about 20 minutes for most people and is the only way it screens candidates. There is no human-interview alternative. You can retake an interview up to three times.

Mercor says it usually takes 2 to 4 weeks to hear back after applying.

Who can apply

Mercor sets eligible countries per listing. Where a listing names no region, Mercor's policy says to assume it is open to candidates in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom or the European Union.

Its pages state no general experience requirement; each listing names the background it wants, usually in the title.

Is Mercor legit?

Mercor is a real company with public listings, published contractor policies, a stated weekly pay schedule and published referral terms. That is what we can verify from the outside, and it is all we claim.

We have never been hired by Mercor or done paid work for it. This page carries no testimonials and no placement numbers, because we have none we could verify.

What we do not know

These are the questions we cannot answer yet.

• How long a referral stays credited. Mercor's referral page says a submitted referral does not expire; its referral policy mentions attribution windows without stating one. They disagree, so we repeat neither as fact.
• How much work reaches you once hired. Mercor's pages describe contracts and pay, not the volume of hours a project offers.
• Whether hiring keeps pace with the stated openings. A listing states how many people it wants; how many are actually taken on, we have no way to see.

How we earn from this

This site is paid by referral programmes, and nothing else.

If you reach Mercor through a link here and are hired, Mercor pays this site a fee worth a share of what you earn on that contract, up to a cap. Nothing is paid for a click, an application, an interview or a work trial.

It never changes what you are paid, and it does not decide what appears here: we list every role we find, whether or not it earns us anything.

The rest of the mechanics, as Mercor's terms set them out:

• A share, capped. Mercor's terms set the referral payment at 20% of the referred contractor's earnings, capped on hourly contracts at four times the hourly rate of the first accepted offer. We do not publish per-role figures. Mercor pays it from its own referral programme; it is never taken from your pay.
• Credit requires the link. A referral counts only if you came through the referral link, only the first referrer qualifies, and Mercor does not add or backdate referrals by hand.
• You can reject the referral. Mercor gives a referred person a “Not my Referrer” button in their account. The referrer then has 5 business days to show written evidence of prior communication or familiarity, and Mercor says that evidence must demonstrate the candidate’s explicit acknowledgement of the referral.
• Referrers are registered, not employed. Anyone registered with Mercor can refer; you do not need to work for Mercor. Referrers must verify their identity before any payout.
• Mercor controls the programme. It may modify, pause or end the programme at any time, and its decisions need no explanation or appeal.

What happens when you apply

The apply button sits on each role page, never on a page meant to be shared. Pressing it sends you through our own /go/ redirect, which records that a role was clicked (no cookie, no personal data) and then on to Mercor.

The link opens the role you came from on Mercor. Sign up from there and the credit holds; go around the link and it does not.

Checked 13 Sep 2026. The list is rebuilt every morning; roles that disappear from Mercor are marked closed rather than deleted. Read the full disclosure and who runs this.