How it works

Apply once. Get screened properly. Get paid every Friday.

Six stages between a first application and a first payout, four of which are paid. This page is the whole thing in detail — including the parts that go wrong.

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01

Apply

Pick a listing, reuse your profile, answer a few role-specific questions.
02

Screen

Credentials, a paid 60–90 minute assessment, a short interview.
03

Trial

3–5 paid hours of real work, scored against the live rubric.
04

Work

Get matched, log hours, get paid in the Friday, 12:00 UTC run.
The full process

Every stage, and what it filters for

6.8% of applicants make it through all six. The narrow part is the assessment, not the paperwork.

  1. 01

    Apply to a specific role

    There is no general talent-pool application. You pick a listing, and the application is scoped to it: your profile, a CV upload we parse for credentials and employment history, and between three and six role-specific questions. No cover letter, and no question about what you currently earn — rates are published on the listing and are not negotiated down from what you disclose. Ten to twenty minutes for a first application; under two for every one after that, because the profile is reused.
    Applications cannot be withdrawn once submitted, and you cannot hold two open applications for the same listing. You can apply to as many different listings as you like.
  2. 02

    Credential verification

    Licences are checked against the issuing body, degrees against the registrar or a recognised registry, and employment against public record. 61% of applicants clear this stage. A claim we cannot verify is not treated as a lie — it simply cannot be used to qualify you for a credentialed role, so an unverifiable medical licence closes clinical listings but leaves generalist ones open.
    Fabricated credentials are the one failure that ends an account outright, and it is checked again before your first clinical, legal or financial contract.
  3. 03

    Domain assessment

    A 60–90 minute open-book assessment built from the same rubric you would later apply on the project. It is scored on judgment and on written rationale, not on recall. Pass mark is 80%; 34% of people who sit it pass. You get 3 attempts total, with 30 days between them, and your highest score is the one that counts.
    Assessments run past our 30-minute ceiling on unpaid screening, so they are paid at the listing's rate whether or not you pass.
  4. 04

    Structured interview

    A recorded 25-minute interview covering how you reached your assessment answers. Its main job is integrity: confirming the person who sat the assessment is the person who applied, and probing claims that verification could not settle. It is not a culture interview and there is nothing to prepare.
  5. 05

    Paid work trial

    3–5 hours of genuine project work, paid at the listing rate, scored against the live rubric and seeded with gold items whose correct answers are already known. 71% of people who reach this stage pass. One trial per person: failing it does not bar you from a different domain, but the same one cannot be retried.
    Trial work that meets the standard ships to the lab like any other work, which is why it is paid at full rate rather than a training rate.
  6. 06

    Matched to projects

    Once admitted you see the listings your verified credentials and assessment scores make you eligible for, and work is routed to you as the labs open capacity. Median time from first application to first paid task is 17 days. You can hold several contracts at once, up to a ceiling of 80 logged hours a week across all of them.
    Idle stretches are normal. Projects start and end on the labs' schedules, and being admitted is not a guarantee of volume in any given week.
On a project

What the work actually looks like

Task types vary by domain, but the shape of a working session and the way it is reviewed do not.

Time tracking

You log time against a specific contract as you work. Logged time is expected to match submitted output — an hour with nothing attached to it will be queried, and consistently unmatched time is the most common cause of removed hours.

Quality review

Submissions are scored against the project rubric. Gold items with known answers are seeded into your queue to measure calibration, and inter-reviewer agreement is tracked per project so a drifting rubric is caught before it reaches the lab.

Feedback

Scores come back with the rubric clause they rest on. Early in a project this is frequent and specific by design; a contributor who has never been told why an item was marked down cannot correct it.

Warnings and offboarding

Quality problems escalate: written feedback, then a formal warning naming what must change, then removal from the project. Fraud, plagiarism and machine-generated submissions on human-judgment tasks skip straight to the end.
Your rights on a project
  • The rate on the listing is the rate you are paid — it does not change mid-project
  • Written reasons for any rejected work or removed hour
  • 14 days to dispute a removal, reviewed by someone new
  • Leave a project at any time, with no penalty and no notice period
  • Opt out of any safety or red-teaming project without affecting other work
  • Work for anyone else, including our competitors
Getting paid

The Friday payout run

Approved hours from the previous pay week are released every Friday, 12:00 UTC. Here is the whole mechanism, including the delays.

Pay week
Monday 00:00 UTC to Sunday 23:59 UTC
Review window
Logged hours are reviewed for 3 days after the week closes. Anything still under review rolls into the following run rather than being held indefinitely.
Payout run
Every Friday, 12:00 UTC. Approved hours from the previous pay week are released in a single batch.
First payout hold
7 days on a new account, applied once. It is a fraud control on the payment rail, not a probation period, and it does not delay any later run.
Minimum payout
$10. Balances under that carry forward and are released with the next run that clears the threshold.
Standard arrival
2–5 business days after the run, depending on your bank and country.
Instant payout
Arrives in about 30 minutes for a 1% fee (minimum $0.50). Optional, per payout, and never applied by default.
Bonuses and referrals
Paid on their own schedule — Tuesday and Friday, 12:00 UTC — because they are not tied to a pay week. A referral bonus is released once your referral logs 20 approved hours.
Currency
Everything is denominated and paid in US dollars. Where your bank converts, Cortext absorbs the processor's FX spread rather than deducting it from the payout.
Where money actually gets stuck
Three things account for almost every delayed payout: a tax form that has not been filed, so the balance is held; bank details that do not exactly match the account name, which the rail rejects on arrival; and a balance under the $10 minimum, which simply carries forward. All three are visible in your account before the run, and all three are avoidable.
Tracing a missing payment
If a payout was released but has not arrived after 2–5 business days, write to payments@cortext-ai.uk with the payout date and the last four digits of the receiving account. A trace takes 5–10 business days with the processor. Cortext does not charge for traces and does not deduct the cost of a failed transfer from your balance.
Taxes

You are a contractor, and you file your own

Cortext reports what it pays you and withholds nothing. What you owe on it is between you and your revenue authority.

US persons

Form W-9

Filed once, before your first payout. Cortext issues a 1099-NEC by 31 January for any calendar year in which you were paid more than $600. Nothing is withheld, so quarterly estimated payments are usually your responsibility.
Everyone else

Form W-8BEN

Certifies you are not a US person and claims any treaty benefit your country has. Individuals file a W-8BEN; if you contract through a company, that is a W-8BEN-E. Without one on file, payouts are held.
Locally

Your own jurisdiction

Most countries treat this as self-employment or business income, and several require registration once you cross a turnover threshold. Cortext does not register, withhold or file anywhere on your behalf.
This is not tax advice. It describes what Cortext Labs, Inc. does and what it will ask you for. It does not describe what you owe. Talk to an accountant qualified in your country before making decisions based on any of it.
Earnings

What different commitments realistically pay

Ranges assume approved hours at the listed rate. They are not projections, guarantees, or an average of top earners.

Occasional
4–8 hrs / week
$180 – $720
per week, before tax

One project, worked around a full-time job. Most common pattern in the network.

Regular
15–25 hrs / week
$700 – $2,400
per week, before tax

One or two concurrent contracts. Enough volume to hold a stable quality score.

Primary income
35–50 hrs / week
$1,800 – $6,000+
per week, before tax

Multiple contracts, usually specialist. Depends entirely on your domain having open capacity.

The honest caveat
Nobody should plan rent around this in month one. Work arrives when labs open capacity in your domain, which means quiet weeks are normal and are not a signal about your standing. Contributors who treat Cortext as their primary income generally hold several contracts across more than one domain for exactly this reason.
Questions

The fourteen things people ask before applying

Longer answers, and everything else, live in the help centre.

No. Contributors are independent contractors. You set your own hours, use your own equipment, take work from whoever else you like, and there is no notice period in either direction. Cortext does not withhold tax, does not provide benefits, and does not ask for exclusivity or non-competes.
The honest answer is that it depends far more on your credential than on your hours. Generalist evaluation sits at the bottom of the range and specialist clinical, legal and quantitative work at the top — the platform average is $68 an hour. Rates are on every listing before you apply. Treat it as variable contract income, not a salary: there will be weeks with nothing open in your domain.
Not for everything. Generalist evaluation, annotation, language and creative roles are open on demonstrated skill and the assessment score. Clinical, legal, financial and research listings require the specific credential named on the listing, verified against the issuing body.
113 countries through our primary processor, plus Brazil, Georgia, Ghana, Kosovo, Nepal, Türkiye, United Arab Emirates through a secondary rail. Sanctioned jurisdictions cannot be paid at all. Check before you invest time in an application — if we cannot pay you, we cannot contract with you.
A payment rejected by the rail is returned to your Cortext balance and retried on the next run once you correct the details. Tracing one that left our processor but never arrived takes 8–12 business days; a payment sent to wrong details takes 10–15 business days to recall. Write to payments@cortext-ai.uk with the payout date and we will open the trace.
Yes, and this is the part people are most often surprised by. Hours can be reduced where logged time does not match submitted work, where submissions fail the quality bar, or where gold items show a contributor is out of calibration. Every removal is reviewed by a person, records the rubric clause it rests on, and can be disputed. If your hours are being cut repeatedly you should not expect to stay on the project.
Reply to the removal notice within 14 days with the item IDs and your reasoning. It goes to a reviewer who was not involved in the original decision. Restored hours are paid in the next run. Outside that window the pay period is closed and cannot be reopened.
Yes, subject to the 80-hour weekly ceiling across all contracts and to any conflict rules on a specific project — some lab engagements restrict working simultaneously on a directly competing one, and that is stated on the listing.
US persons complete a W-9. Everyone else completes a W-8BEN (or W-8BEN-E for an entity). Neither can be skipped — payouts are held until the form is on file. US contributors paid more than $600 in a calendar year receive a 1099-NEC by 31 January. Cortext does not withhold tax anywhere and does not file on your behalf. This is not tax advice; talk to someone qualified in your jurisdiction.
No, and there is no phone verification either. Support is email-only, which keeps a written record on both sides and works across 130countries and every timezone without asking anyone to call during someone else's office hours. Write to support@cortext-ai.uk.
To a different domain, immediately. To the same assessment, after 30 days and within your 3-attempt limit. A failed work trial cannot be retaken for the same domain.
A computer with a current browser and a stable connection. Some agentic and computer-use projects require a desktop rather than a tablet, and a few voice roles need a headset with a decent microphone; those are stated on the listing. Cortext does not supply equipment and does not charge for anything.
Yes — that is the product. Everything you submit is delivered to the lab that commissioned it and used to train, evaluate or align their models, and you assign the rights to that work product under the contributor agreement. Your identity is not delivered with it; labs receive the work, not your name.
Credential verification and assessment scoring are usually settled within three business days. The gap that is genuinely unpredictable is between being admitted and being matched, because it depends on a lab opening capacity in your domain.
Full help centre →How referrals pay →

Start with one listing.

Applications take under twenty minutes, screening is paid past the first thirty, and the median contributor is working 17 days later.

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