Drawing on aggregate self-reported data from contractors who applied through joblet.ai, here's the state of AI training contracting at the start of 2026 — what's growing, what's shrinking, and where rates are heading.
Headline numbers
- Total active contractors (estimated): 850,000+ globally across major platforms (vs ~600k start of 2025).
- Median mid-tier coding rate: $57/hr (up from $54 in 2025).
- Median senior coding rate: $82/hr (up from $76 in 2025).
- Specialty rate growth: Medical RLHF +18%, agent eval +25%, long-context +30% YoY.
Fastest-growing role categories
- Agent task evaluation: Demand grew ~3x in 2025. Rates climbed correspondingly.
- Long-context reasoning: Newer category. Steady demand growth as 1M+ token contexts become standard.
- Domain RLHF (medical, legal): Steady growth. Frontier labs continue investing heavily.
- Constitutional / safety RLHF: Growing as more models ship safety-focused training.
- Multilingual frontier evaluation: Steady demand for less-supported languages.
Slowing categories
- Generic English RLHF: Pool is saturated. Rates flat or slightly down.
- Basic image annotation: Increasing automation. Rates flat to declining.
- Generic multiple-choice evaluation: Smaller share of overall AI training spend.
Where the income growth isSpecialty rates grew 18–30% YoY. Generalist rates grew 5–8%.
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Platform market share (estimated)
- Outlier (post-Scale merger): ~38% of total contractor volume.
- Mercor: ~22% (growing fast).
- Surge AI: ~15%.
- Toloka: ~10% (mostly multilingual).
- Other (Invisible, DataAnnotation, Remotasks, Turing, etc.): ~15% combined.
Mercor is the fastest-growing platform in 2026. Outlier remains dominant in volume.
Geographic distribution
- India: ~28% of contractor base. Largest single market.
- US: ~22%.
- Philippines: ~10%.
- Brazil + Latin America: ~8%.
- UK + EU: ~12%.
- Africa: ~5% (growing fast).
- Other: ~15%.
What changed in 2025
- Scale → Outlier consolidation completed; payment infrastructure unified.
- Mercor's senior tier requirements tightened (180-day minimum became firm).
- Anthropic launched explicit contractor red team program via specialty consultancies.
- Direct frontier-lab programs grew (Apollo Research, METR, Lakera all expanded contractor pools).
- Multilingual specialty rates rose meaningfully for Tamil, Hausa, Vietnamese, Amharic.
What to expect in 2026
- Agent evaluation will continue to grow. Every frontier lab is shipping agents; eval pool is undersupplied.
- Specialty premiums likely to widen further. Domain experts continue commanding meaningful premiums.
- Generalist rates likely flat. Saturated pool keeps mainstream rates stable.
- Direct frontier-lab work expanding. Outside the major platforms, direct labs and specialty consultancies will absorb more of the contractor pool.
Bottom line
AI training contracting is a stable and growing market. Specialty work is where rates are rising fastest; generalist rates are flat. Most contractors who started in 2024 and reached senior tier earned more in 2025 than they would have in 2024 — but generalists who stayed at entry tier saw flat-to-declining real income.
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