Help & Support

What incentive do you recommend for research studies?

written by
Eve
Last updated:
June 23, 2021

An incentive is a monetary sum offered to participants as a "thank you" for contributing their time to your study. Incentives can directly impact your recruit and participant engagement.

Offering a reasonable incentive will help with the following:

  • Increase in the responses to your screener survey.
  • Lower no-show rates during your study.
  • Encourage high quality participation during your study.

We've seen incentives have a positive—and negative—impact on projects. As a result, we may decline projects that have an incentive lower than our recommendation. We do not allow non-monetary incentives on Recruit projects.

Check out our Ultimate Guide to User Research Incentives and our data backed Incentive Calculator for more information.

Incentive Recommendations

You'll notice that our incentive recommendations increase as you reach different audiences. They are designed to complement different professional tiers, ensuring that payment is worthwhile, or incentivizing enough, for candidates. If you are running a multi-day study or have multiple phases, calculate the total time commitment to help gauge the best recommendation.

Please note that while these are general recommendations, very niche or otherwise harder to recruit studies may benefit from a higher than recommended incentive to attract participants.

Incentives based on moderated vs. unmoderated

High Earners include professionals such as  doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc.
Note: Highly specialized professions (e.g. Oncologists, Surgeons, etc.) may require even higher incentives than those listed above.
Mid-Level Earners include managers, developers, small business owners, etc.
Low Wage Earners
include retail workers, gig economy workers, etc.

Incentives based on session length

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