Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk), the crowdworking platform that’s paid “Turkers” for small online tasks since it launched in 2005, will permanently close on September 30th 2026.
Amazon hasn’t given a detailed reason, simply saying that it regularly reviews its services and has decided to close MTurk. The platform had already stopped accepting new customers in July 2026, and task volume has been declining for years according to worker advocacy group Turkopticon.
Here’s some important details to know if you’ve been earning extra money recently through MTurk:
Check your payment settings
The most important thing to do is confirm your payment method and transfer schedule in the Worker Portal. If this isn’t set up correctly, there’s a risk your final earnings won’t be paid to you on schedule.
The timeline for final payments
- All approved HITs will be paid as normal, using your existing payout schedule. Closure doesn’t cancel money you’ve already earned.
- Bonuses can still be awarded until 30 October 2026, a full month after the platform shuts.
- Any HITs still awaiting approval when the platform closes get 30 days (until October 30th) for the requester to approve or reject. If they don’t act, the work is automatically approved and paid.
- Transaction history stays downloadable until 28 January 2027. Save a copy of your full earnings record before then if you think you’ll need them.
- Tax documents will still be issued.
If you’re outside the US
MTurk workers are typically paid into a US virtual bank account or via an Amazon.com gift card balance. If you’ve had payout issues before, it’s worth checking your settings are current well before the deadline, rather than close to it.
There isn’t a direct replacement
Unlike Amazon quietly retiring one product among many, this closure also removes the MTurk worker option from Amazon’s SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI tools. So clearly Amazon is stepping back from this kind of task-based work altogether, rather than shifting workers to another Amazon platform.
For individuals looking to replace the lost income, there isn’t a like-for-like option with MTurk’s low barrier to entry. However there are a few sites like Amazon MTurk:
- Clickworker – similar small-task structure to their platform, covering things like data categorisation and text tasks, open to workers in many countries.
- Microworkers – a comparable micro-task marketplace with a wide international worker base.
- Microsoft Rewards – not a direct equivalent, but a legitimate way to earn points (redeemable for vouchers or Microsoft credit) for online actions such as searches and quizzes.
- Prolific – mainly academic and market research studies, generally better-paid per task but requires an application and has stricter eligibility criteria compared to MTurk.
A platform that changed how work got done
MTurk was one of the earliest large-scale crowdworking platforms, letting businesses post small, repetitive online jobs (known as HITs, or Human Intelligence Tasks) that were quick for a person to do but hard for software at the time. Over two decades it grew to several hundred thousand registered workers across 190 countries, and became a key source of cheap, human-labelled data for the tech industry – including, in its early years, work that fed into some of the foundational research behind today’s AI boom.
MTurk’s decline has increasingly coincided with concerns about the reliability of the work being submitted. A 2025 study led by researchers at Bar-Ilan University tested over 1,300 MTurk participants and found that the majority gave inconsistent answers and failed basic attention checks, even those with strong approval ratings on the platform. The exception was Amazon’s “Master” worker tier — a smaller, vetted group that consistently produced reliable, high-quality results. Separate research had also pointed to a rise in fraudulent responses in recent years, some linked to workers using VPNs to get around location restrictions.
None of this has been confirmed by Amazon as a reason for the closure, but the trend has felt clear in recent years – businesses and researchers had already been moving away from MTurk’s general worker pool before the shutdown, and that decline in demand may well be a big part of the picture.
The final word
The glory years of MTurk were well behind it and it’s been steadily declining for a while. It’s a loss to the side-hustle community but not as big as it would have been many years ago, and plenty of other platforms exist for part-time workers to earn from.
If you’re an active Turker, treat September 30th 2026 as your hard deadline: verify your payment details now, chase down any outstanding bonuses or pending approvals before October 30th 2026, and download your transaction history well before it disappears in January 2027 if you think you’ll need it long-term.