Pay
What your specialty is actually worth in AI training
In this line of work, what you get paid tracks the scarcity of your expertise far more than the hours you put in. That claim gets made a lot and almost never shown. It can be shown here, because one platform — micro1 — publishes pay on nearly every role on its own public job board, so the rate gap between a lawyer, an engineer, and a generalist is a matter of arithmetic rather than assertion.
What the board actually pays, by specialty
Computed from the 313 of 329 open roles that publish an hourly rate, mirrored from micro1's own board on September 13, 2026. Board-wide, the median listing sits at $70/hr at the midpoint of its range — half the priced roles pay more, half less — and the middle half of listings falls between $40 and $105 an hour. The lowest figure any listing publishes is $6 and the highest is $400: those are the two ends of the board, not a range to plan around. Rows are ordered richest first, by each specialty's median midpoint — the same figure the table leads with.
| Specialty | Priced listings | Median /hr | Middle half /hr | Full spread /hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Law | 41 | $120 | $110–$270 | $40–$400 |
| Sciences & Research | 27 | $115 | $80–$128 | $25–$280 |
| AI & Machine Learning | 7 | $110 | $60–$120 | $40–$200 |
| Applied Science & Engineering | 17 | $95 | $70–$100 | $40–$175 |
| Software Engineering | 32 | $79 | $70–$100 | $7–$280 |
| Business Operations | 19 | $75 | $60–$133 | $21–$280 |
| Finance | 14 | $73 | $68–$92 | $6–$280 |
| Medicine | 14 | $70 | $65–$74 | $25–$200 |
| Arts & Design | 10 | $52 | $47–$64 | $15–$300 |
| Generalist | 13 | $50 | $40–$140 | $10–$280 |
| Other roles | 65 | $48 | $27–$75 | $6–$150 |
| Language & Audio | 24 | $48 | $27–$48 | $10–$65 |
| Robotics | 19 | $14 | $12–$18 | $6–$80 |
“Median” reduces each listing to the midpoint of its own range and takes the middle one, so half a specialty's priced roles sit above it and half below. “Middle half” is the band the central 50% of those midpoints fall in: a quarter of the specialty's listings are priced below it and a quarter above, which makes it the closest thing on this page to a typical range. The full spread is the two extremes, and most listings sit nowhere near either end of it. Every figure is pay micro1's own board advertises for a role, not pay anyone has been shown to receive. How a listed range converts into real, sustained take-home is a separate question, and nobody publishes an answer to it; the micro1 review sets out what micro1 does and does not commit to between a listed rate and a paid task.
The figures above leave out 5 of the board's specialties on purpose, for having too few priced listings to generalize from: a median drawn from a couple of roles is an anecdote wearing a statistic's clothes. Excluded, with their listing counts: Sales & Marketing (4), Humanities (2), Data Analysis (2), Skilled Trades & Construction (2) and Retail & Hospitality (1). If your field is one of those, roles still exist — go read the listings themselves rather than trusting an average.
Read the spread, not the median
The medians are the part everyone quotes, and they do say something real: Law tops the board at $120/hr, the median of its 41 priced listings, against a board-wide median of $70/hr across all 313 priced roles on the board as mirrored on September 13, 2026. That is scarcity pricing, visible in published numbers.
Now look at the last column. Inside Law alone, listings run from as little as $40 to as much as $400 an hour — a $360 gap between roles wearing the same specialty label, which is wider than the $106 that separates the board's highest and lowest specialty medians.
The practical reading: role-by-role variance dwarfs the difference between specialty averages. Your specialty tells you which door to knock on. It does not tell you what you will personally earn — that comes down to the individual listing, and two roles wearing the same specialty label can be priced nothing like each other. So use the table to decide where to spend your applications, then judge each role on its own posted number.
Where the money is, specialty by specialty
Working down the table from the top, here is what the strongest-paying specialties tend to involve and what tends to make a person credible in each. The work descriptions are general — how expert evaluation work is usually structured, not a description of any one platform's tasks — and every figure beside a heading comes from the same September 13, 2026 board as the table above. Specialties further down the table are no less real; they are simply priced lower on this board.
Law
Almost all of it is judgment applied to text: reading a model's answer about a contract, a statute, or a procedural question and saying exactly where it goes wrong; writing the reference answer that other answers get scored against; turning your own review instincts into a rubric someone less senior can apply; and hunting the failure modes only a practitioner catches — a confident citation to a case that doesn't exist, advice that ignores which jurisdiction it's in, a clause summary that quietly flips who carries the risk.
What tends to count as evidence: Your practice area does more work than your seniority. Name the qualification, the jurisdictions you're admitted in, and the documents you have actually drafted or litigated. Published writing and redacted work product you own the rights to are stronger than any adjective; "legal professional" with no specifics reads as generalist.
Sciences & Research
Grading reasoning rather than prose: walking a derivation step by step, catching a unit or sign error, checking that a cited result says what the model claims it says, writing worked solutions at graduate-problem-set level, and building adversarial problems where the plausible-looking answer is the wrong one.
What tends to count as evidence: Postgraduate training in a named field, publications or preprints, and the specific methods and instruments you've used. Subfield precision is the whole game — "single-cell RNA-seq in wet-lab molecular biology" is legible; "science background" isn't.
AI & Machine Learning
Evaluating model behavior with a practitioner's eye: comparing candidate outputs against each other, writing eval sets and scoring guidelines other people can run, diagnosing where a chain of reasoning actually breaks, and probing for failure modes reproducibly instead of anecdotally.
What tends to count as evidence: Shipped work beats vocabulary. Repositories, eval or model artifacts, papers, and production systems you were responsible for — plus the part of the stack you personally owned, named rather than implied.
Applied Science & Engineering
Checking whether an answer survives contact with a physical system: load and tolerance calculations, code-compliance reasoning, spec interpretation, and the failure modes where a plausible answer is unbuildable or unsafe.
What tends to count as evidence: Professional registration where your field has it, the standards you work to, and project specifics — the structures, systems, or plants you actually engineered.
Software Engineering
Reviewing generated code for correctness rather than style — does it handle the empty input, the second call, the error path — writing reference implementations along with the tests that prove them, specifying rubrics another reviewer can apply consistently, and red-teaming code that sails through the happy path and quietly loses data on the unhappy one.
What tends to count as evidence: Language and domain specificity beats years served. Public repositories, a named stack, and real experience with the kind of code being evaluated — systems, data, mobile, infrastructure — rather than "full-stack" as a label. Expect to demonstrate it rather than assert it.
Business Operations
Judging whether an answer matches how a function actually runs: a model's plan for a procurement cycle, a policy response, a pricing or supply-chain recommendation. The scarce skill is knowing the operational constraint that makes a tidy answer useless in practice.
What tends to count as evidence: The function you ran and the systems you ran it in, named specifically — the ERP, the billing stack, the market, the regulatory environment — plus the scale you carried. "Operations leader" reads as generalist; "revenue operations in medical devices" reads as a specialty.
If you don't have a specialty (yet)
Generalist pools are the normal on-ramp, and they are not a consolation prize — they are where most people learn what this work actually involves: careful reading, consistent judgment, and writing that says precisely what is wrong with an answer. On the board as of September 13, 2026, roles tagged Generalist have a median listed rate of $50/hr across 13 priced listings, with the middle half of them in the $40–$140 band and the extremes running $10–$280.
You may be closer to a specialty than you think
Most people undersell their own credential because they compare themselves to the most senior person in the field instead of to the average applicant. A nurse is a Medicine specialist. A paralegal or contract manager is far closer to the Law pool than to the generalist one. A working translator or interpreter is a Language & Audio specialist with named language pairs, which is precisely the kind of scarce input these pools are built around. A bookkeeper who has closed real books has finance vocabulary a generalist doesn't.
The honest version of the advice: write your profile around the most specific true thing about your working life, not the most impressive one. And qualifications accumulate inside a platform over time — task types often open up as you pass their own checks — so a generalist start does not lock you out of specialist pools later. What nobody can promise you is a number. Anyone telling you what you will earn per hour before you have seen your own matches is guessing.
How to actually target the high-rate pools
Where to go next
- Browse all 329 open roles by specialty →
The listings behind every figure on this page, with the pay each one publishes.
- Run a listed rate through the pay calculator →
Turn an hourly range into a realistic weekly and annual figure, unpaid time included.
- What contractor status means at tax time →
Why a specialist hourly rate isn't a salary, and what that changes about what you owe.