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Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) was Amazon’s online marketplace where requesters posted small tasks and workers completed them for payment, and many behavioral-science studies used it to recruit participants. It is no longer available: the mturk.com home page states, “Amazon Mechanical Turk permanently closed on September 30, 2026.” This page explains what MTurk was, the closure dates published by Amazon, what the pay research shows, and what the closure means for studies that used it.
What Amazon Mechanical Turk was
MTurk was a crowdsourcing marketplace with two sides. Organisations and researchers (Requesters) posted work; people (Workers, sometimes called Turkers) chose tasks and were paid per completed task. Wikipedia’s article on the service dates the launch to 2005 and notes the name comes from an 18th-century chess-playing automaton. Researchers used it for surveys, experiments and data labelling because a study could reach a large pool of participants quickly.
Key terms: HIT, Requester, Worker, Qualification
- HIT (Human Intelligence Task): a single unit of work a Requester posted, such as answering a short survey or labelling an image.
- Requester: the person or organisation that posted HITs and paid for approved work.
- Worker: the person who completed HITs.
- Qualification: a requirement a Requester could attach to a HIT to limit who could take it, for example a minimum approval rate. For how researchers used such screens, see MTurk data quality: documented problems and how researchers screen for them.
Is MTurk shut down? The closure timeline
Yes. Amazon’s own pages (mturk.com and mturk.com/help) state that MTurk permanently closed on September 30, 2026, and that “Mechanical Turk is no longer available.” The help page also says the Mechanical Turk Worker type is no longer available in Amazon SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. The dates Amazon published:
| Date | What Amazon stated |
|---|---|
| September 30, 2026 | Closure date. The platform is no longer available. |
| October 30, 2026 | Deadline for Workers to verify payment preferences and for Requesters to verify payment information, issue bonuses, and approve or reject pending HITs. After this date, payment updates go through Customer Service. |
| January 28, 2027 | Transaction history remains available until this date. |
On payments, the help page says Workers’ approved HITs are paid in the normal disbursement cycle, that for pending HITs Requesters have 30 days to approve or reject (with automatic approval if no action is taken), and that tax documents will still be distributed. For Requesters, it says a full refund of the prepaid balance is expected within 30 days of closure and that unsubmitted HITs expired without charge.
Why did Amazon close MTurk?
Amazon’s closure pages give no reason for the closure and name no replacement service. Press coverage of the closure (for example TechRadar, TechRepublic and The Next Web) likewise reports that Amazon did not give a specific reason. Any explanation beyond that is speculation, so this page does not offer one.
How much did MTurk pay?
MTurk did not set pay. Amazon’s pricing page (mturk.com/pricing, while the platform operated) said, “You decide how much to pay Workers for each assignment,” with no platform wage floor. Requesters also paid Amazon a base fee of 20% of the reward, with additional fees for HITs with 10 or more assignments or restricted to Masters-qualified Workers.
How much did you earn on Amazon Mechanical Turk per hour?
Published studies, as summarised in Wikipedia’s article, put typical earnings low and variable. Hara et al. (2018), analysing about 3.8 million tasks from 2,767 workers, reported a median of roughly $2 per hour, with 4% of workers earning above $7.25 per hour. Studies of researcher-oriented samples reported higher figures: Litman et al. (2020) found an average of at least $5.70 per hour for a US-focused sample, and Moss et al. (2020) about $6.61 per hour. Because pay depended on the task, the Requester and the Worker’s speed, no single hourly rate described the platform.
Can you make $100 a day on MTurk?
None of the published wage figures above supports that as a typical outcome. At a median near $2 per hour, or an average of $5 to $7 per hour in researcher-oriented samples, reaching $100 in a day would have required roughly 14 to 50 hours of paid work, more than a day contains at the lower rates. The platform is now closed in any case.
What the closure means for research
- Records: Amazon states transaction history is available until January 28, 2027. Studies that need payment, HIT or participant records for audit, funder reporting or IRB files should export them before then. This is an editorial recommendation, not an Amazon requirement.
- Approved protocols: an IRB protocol that names MTurk as the recruitment platform will need a protocol amendment before another platform is used, and consent text that mentions MTurk may need revising (see informed consent). Check with your IRB.
- Published work: studies that used MTurk samples remain citable. Methods sections should describe the platform in the past tense and report the screens used.
- Replication: a replication cannot recruit from the same platform, so differences in sample composition are a plausible source of different results; see generalizability in research and sampling bias.
Alternatives researchers have compared
Amazon names no replacement. The closest sourced comparison is Douglas, Ewell and Brauer (2023), PLOS ONE 18(3): e0279720 (doi 10.1371/journal.pone.0279720), which compared MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics and SONA (a university undergraduate participant pool) on data quality. The table gives the cost per high-quality respondent that the paper reports.
| Option | Cost per high-quality respondent (Douglas et al., 2023) | Other findings |
|---|---|---|
| Prolific | $1.90 | Participants were more likely than MTurk participants to pass the study’s five attention checks. See Prolific vs MTurk and attention checks on Prolific. |
| CloudResearch | $2.00 | Higher share of high-quality respondents than MTurk. |
| Qualtrics | $8.17 | Somewhat better than MTurk on quality, below Prolific and CloudResearch. |
| SONA (university participant pool) | $0.00 (course credit instead of payment) | Somewhat better than MTurk on quality, below Prolific and CloudResearch. |
| MTurk (for reference) | $4.36 | Lowest share of high-quality respondents in the comparison. |
Whatever the platform, careless and fraudulent responding remains a design issue; see detecting careless responding in survey data.
FAQ
Can I still sign in to MTurk?
The mturk.com home page links to Worker and Requester sign-in pages and to Help, but states that Mechanical Turk is no longer available. Use the Help page for closure and payment questions.
Why is Amazon shutting down MTurk?
Amazon has not stated a reason on its closure pages. The closure took effect on September 30, 2026.
What was a HIT?
A Human Intelligence Task: one unit of work posted by a Requester for Workers to complete.
When can I still get my MTurk records?
Amazon states transaction history is available until January 28, 2027.
Sources
Checked 2026-11-07 unless noted.
- Amazon Mechanical Turk home page: https://www.mturk.com/
- Amazon Mechanical Turk Help (closure FAQ): https://www.mturk.com/help
- Amazon Mechanical Turk pricing (checked 2026-08-31, before closure): https://www.mturk.com/pricing
- Douglas BD, Ewell PJ, Brauer M (2023). Data quality in online human-subjects research: Comparisons between MTurk, Prolific, CloudResearch, Qualtrics, and SONA. PLOS ONE 18(3): e0279720. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0279720
- Wikipedia, “Amazon Mechanical Turk”, for the wage studies of Hara et al. (2018), Litman et al. (2020) and Moss et al. (2020) as summarised there: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Mechanical_Turk
