Amazon Mechanical Turk

Earn money completing simple online tasks

Microtasks
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Seattle, WA, USA HQ
1000+ company size
2005 founded

What is Amazon Mechanical Turk?

Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is a crowdsourcing marketplace where businesses post small "Human Intelligence Tasks" (HITs) – such as identifying specific content in images or videos, writing product descriptions or answering survey questions – that workers complete for a fee.

Mission & values

Power "artificial artificial intelligence" — use a global on-demand crowd to perform discrete tasks computers can't economically do, on Amazon-grade infrastructure.

Qualifications

Workers sign up as independent contractors and are free to choose tasks and set their own hours. Requesters can require workers to pass qualification tests before accepting a task. There are no formal educational prerequisites, but workers need an Amazon account and, in most cases, must reside in an approved country to receive payments.

Leadership

A

Andy Jassy

CEO, Amazon (parent company)

Hiring process

  1. 1

    Create a Worker account

    Sign up at mturk.com — currently US-only for new Worker accounts; some legacy non-US workers remain.

    About 2 days

  2. 2

    Account approval

    Amazon reviews the application — approval can take days and not all applicants are accepted.

    About 5 days

  3. 3

    Browse HITs

    Find available Human Intelligence Tasks (image labeling, transcription, surveys, classification).

  4. 4

    Complete & submit

    Submit completed HITs; Requesters approve or reject within their stated review window.

    About 7 days

  5. 5

    Get paid

    Approved earnings move to your Amazon Payments balance — withdraw to bank account or Amazon gift card.

    About 10 days

Funding

StagePublic

Company information

Frequently asked questions

What is a HIT?
A Human Intelligence Task — a single discrete unit of work posted by a Requester (image label, survey response, classification, etc.).
How much does MTurk pay?
Pay is set per-HIT by the Requester. Independent academic studies put median earnings at ~$2/hr with most HITs paying 10¢ or less; only ~4% of workers exceed federal minimum wage.
Is MTurk open globally?
New Worker accounts are limited to the US for many years. Some legacy international workers remain on the platform.
How does Amazon make money?
Amazon charges Requesters a 20% commission on each HIT reward, with an additional 20% surcharge for HITs configured with 10 or more assignments.

Stay in the loop.

One email per week, 5 hand-picked roles.