Data annotator jobs: what the work is and what it pays
Pay breakdown · 1 week ago
Data annotators label the material AI models learn from. On 3 October 2026, annotation roles on this board paid from $6 to $400 an hour, and the gap came from expertise: entry-level video labelling at the bottom, nurses and radiologists at the top. This guide covers the work, salaried and contractor pay, pay outside the US, and how annotators move up.
The short answer
A data annotator labels the material that AI models learn from: drawing boxes around objects in images, tagging events in video, transcribing documents, or rating which of two chatbot answers is better. The title covers work that pays very different amounts. On this board on 3 October 2026, roles with "annotation" or "annotator" in the title ran from $6 an hour to $400 an hour, and almost all of that spread came from one thing: whether the job needed expertise the annotator already had.
If you are new to the field and want the basics of what annotation is, start with what is data annotation. This guide is about the job itself and what it pays.
What the work involves
Most annotation falls into a handful of task types. The open-source tool CVAT, which many annotation teams use, lists them in its documentation: rectangles (bounding boxes), polygons, polylines, points, ellipses, 3D cuboids, skeletons for body keypoints, brush masks for pixel-level segmentation, object tracks that follow something through a video, and tags that classify a whole image or clip. Text work adds classification, transcription and, increasingly, rating model outputs against a rubric.
The labelling is only part of the day. Listings on this board describe the rest in some detail. micro1's Data Annotator role asks annotators to check other people's labels for consistency, flag ambiguous samples and errors in the source data, and write down why each call was made so it can be audited later. Mercor's Telugu PDF annotation project has five steps per page: screen it, map every heading, table and figure in reading order, link captions to what they belong to, transcribe each region character for character, and record metadata. A second Telugu expert then reviews every task.
Guidelines change while a project runs, and edge cases the guideline does not cover come up all the time. Both of micro1's entry-level annotator ads ask you to raise those cases with the project leads rather than guess.
What the job pays on this board
Eighteen of the 716 open roles on this board on 3 October 2026 had annotation in the title. Grouped by pay:
| Pay | Roles | What separates them |
|---|---|---|
| $6–10/hour | micro1 Data Annotator, Data Annotator ($6–10/hr), Video Data Annotator and two video annotation specialist roles | Entry level, open worldwide, no degree or AI background asked for |
| $12.68/hour | Mercor PDF annotation and transcription in Bengali, Gujarati, Malayalam, Odiya and Telugu | Native command of an Indic script; open to India only |
| $30–45/hour | micro1 Music & Sound Annotation Expert; Mercor's Korean PDF project at $33.58 | A specialist ear, or a language with fewer available annotators |
| $50–90/hour | Four micro1 video annotation roles, including Video Annotation Specialist, which tags footage of robotic arms, and a mechanical engineer variant | Prior annotation experience or a relevant background, such as robotics, video editing or engineering |
| $55–65/hour | Mercor RN Annotators | Recent inpatient nursing experience; US only; 10 hours a week minimum |
| $200–400/hour | Mercor Radiologist (MD): Medical Imaging AI Annotation | Board-certified radiologist with an active licence |
All of these are contractor roles. The $6–10 band and the $50–90 band both say "video annotation" in the title. The lower band takes anyone careful with English; the higher band wants people who have done this kind of labelling before or who understand what is happening in the footage.
For pay across every kind of AI training work, not only annotation titles, see how much AI training jobs pay.
Salaried annotator jobs in the US
Some companies hire annotators as employees. Salary figures for them come from salary sites, and each site measures something different, so they should not be averaged together.
- Salary.com puts the average US salary for the title "Annotator" at $56,244 a year, about $27 an hour, with the 10th to 90th percentile running from $51,080 to $68,489 (figures dated 1 October 2026). The title is plain "Annotator", which also covers annotation jobs outside AI.
- Levels.fyi, which collects self-reported pay and checks some of it against offer letters, shows total compensation of $47,200 to $65,700 a year for Data Annotator at Amazon in the US. It does not show a sample size.
These are full-time figures with whatever benefits the employer provides. A contractor rate has to cover your own tax, equipment, unpaid assessments and the weeks without work, so $27 an hour on a salary and $27 an hour on a platform are not the same income.
What the big contractor platforms publish
Most freelance platforms publish a starting rate or an average rather than a fixed wage.
DataAnnotation's FAQ lists starting rates by track: general work "starting at $25–$50+ per hour", multilingual "$20+", coding "$40–$150+", and STEM and professional (law, finance, medicine) "$40–$125+". It pays through PayPal and says it has paid contractors more than $20 million since 2020. Getting in depends on a single Starter Assessment with no retakes.
Mercor's homepage gives an average contracted rate of $109 an hour. In October 2025 TechCrunch reported the figure as more than $85. Alignerr's homepage gives an average of $80 an hour. These averages include doctors, lawyers and engineers, so they say little about what a general annotator will earn on the same platform.
Pay outside the US and Europe
Press reports from lower-cost countries describe pay far below anything above.
- TIME reported in January 2023 that Kenyan workers at the outsourcing firm Sama, labelling toxic content for OpenAI, took home between about $1.32 and $2 an hour depending on seniority and performance. OpenAI paid Sama $12.50 an hour for the work. Sama ended the contract in February 2022.
- The Washington Post reported in August 2023 that at least 10,000 people in the Philippines worked on Scale AI's Remotasks platform. Of the 36 workers it interviewed, all but two said payments had been delayed, reduced or cancelled. Scale told the paper it pays "rates at a living wage".
- Rest of World reported in 2024 that Remotasks shut down in Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan and stopped sign-ups in Thailand, Vietnam and Poland. Access in Kenya ended on 8 March 2024.
- A 2026 WageIndicator survey of 57 members of Kenya's Data Labelers Association found average monthly earnings from their main platform or outsourcing employer of Ksh 21,850 for women and Ksh 26,107 for men. The sample is small and not random.
Today the $6–10 roles on this board are open worldwide, which in practice means they appeal most to people where that rate goes further. The pay by country guide covers how location changes the offers you see.
Where the work is going
In 2025 two of the largest buyers of annotation cut general work, and one of them said it would grow its specialist team instead.
In September 2025 TechCrunch reported that xAI laid off about 500 people from its 1,500-person data annotation team. xAI said it no longer needed "most generalist AI tutor positions" and would grow its specialist team, covering areas such as STEM, finance, medicine and safety, tenfold. In July 2025 Scale AI cut 200 employees and 500 contractors after Meta's investment, with its interim chief executive writing that the company had "ramped up our GenAI capacity too quickly".
The annotation roles on this board split the same way. Five of the eighteen pay $10 an hour or less, five pay $12.68 for a specific language, and six pay $50 or more to people with a specialism.
How annotators move up the pay range
The listings point to three routes.
A professional field pays most. The nursing role above pays about six to ten times the entry-level annotator rate, and the radiology role pays twenty times or more, for work that is still labelling at heart. If you have a professional background, apply through it rather than as a generalist; specialist vs generalist pay covers the gap.
A language helps too. Native command of a script that few annotators have, such as Korean or the Indic scripts, is a qualification on its own; see AI training jobs for bilingual speakers.
The third route is review. Mercor's Indic PDF projects say experienced annotators move into the reviewer seat, and micro1's entry-level ads ask annotators to document the reasoning behind each label, which is what review work consists of.
Sources
- Listings on Labeling Jobs, counted from the open roles on 3 October 2026
- CVAT documentation, annotation tools (docs.cvat.ai)
- Salary.com, "Annotator" salary in the United States, figures dated 1 October 2026
- Levels.fyi, Amazon Data Annotator, read 3 October 2026
- DataAnnotation FAQ (dataannotation.tech/faq), read 3 October 2026
- Mercor homepage and Alignerr homepage, read 3 October 2026; TechCrunch, 27 October 2025, on Mercor's funding round
- TIME, Billy Perrigo, 18 January 2023, on Sama and OpenAI
- The Washington Post, Rebecca Tan and Regine Cabato, August 2023, on Remotasks in the Philippines
- Rest of World, 2024, on Remotasks leaving Kenya, Nigeria and Pakistan
- WageIndicator Foundation, 2026, survey of data labelers in Kenya
- TechCrunch, 13 September 2025, on xAI's annotation layoffs; TechRepublic, July 2025, on Scale AI's layoffs
Pay figures on this board are what each platform states on its listing. We are not affiliated with any employer named here and we do not process applications.
Questions
- How much does a data annotator make?
- It depends mostly on whether the job needs expertise. On Labeling Jobs on 3 October 2026, entry-level annotator roles at micro1 paid $6–10 an hour, language-specific document annotation at Mercor paid $12.68 in India, and specialist roles paid $50–90 for video annotation, $55–65 for registered nurses and $200–400 for radiologists. Salary.com puts the average US salary for the title Annotator at $56,244 a year, about $27 an hour.
- Do you need a degree to be a data annotator?
- Not for entry-level work. micro1's Data Annotator listings ask for attention to detail and good English, with no degree or AI background. Higher-paid annotation roles usually ask for a professional qualification instead, such as a nursing licence or board certification in radiology.
- Is data annotation a full-time job?
- Usually not. Every annotation role on Labeling Jobs on 3 October 2026 was a contractor role, and most publish no fixed weekly hours. Some companies, Amazon among them, hire salaried data annotators; Levels.fyi shows total compensation of $47,200 to $65,700 a year for that title at Amazon in the US.
- What does a data annotator do day to day?
- Labelling data to a written guideline: drawing boxes or masks on images, tagging events in video, transcribing audio or documents, or rating AI answers. The listings also ask annotators to check other people's labels, flag ambiguous or faulty samples, and write down why each label was chosen so it can be audited.
Platforms covered here
Put this into practice
Every listing shows its pay and who it is open to.