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Research
How much research participants want to be paid
By Ian Floyd and The Decision Lab|9 min read|Updated Oct 24, 2023
Good research is almost always incentivized. And people want money for taking part in research. But how much should you offer?
Deciding on the right incentive amount is a delicate problem: pay too little, and you won't get enough participants. Pay too much, and you blow up your budget. We did some research to find out the right amount to offer to keep both your participants and your budget happy.
We’re not the first to try to figure this out. Other companies have created incentive calculators based on historical data. They’re valuable and insightful. But their work is retrospective in nature. It’s an analysis of the status quo — how thousands of researchers have paid participants for various types of research in the past.
We took a different approach. In partnership with , we used conjoint analyses on over 3,000 data points to measure what participants actually want. You can read the full methodology at the end.
To arrive at a more nuanced answer, we also approached a number of sub-questions, such as:
By taking this approach, we’ve been able to measure how the individual variables interact and impact how much you should offer.
With this guide and our research incentive calculator, we’ll help you get the most bang for your buck — while still doing right by the people at the heart of your study.
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How to approach research incentives, at a glance
We’ve got a super-short answer, a shorter answer, and the long answer.
Super-short answer: Answer a few questions about your study and will suggest how much to offer.
Short answer:
And it also matters how you send the incentive.
In a separate survey of Tremendous clients, we found that 49% incentivized research using Amazon.com gift cards prior to switching to Tremendous. Yet, in our research with The Decision Lab, we discovered that most participants don’t want to be boxed into a single retailer … even if that retailer is Amazon.
Here are some highlights from our research:
If you are an occasional researcher, this might be enough for you to go on. If figuring out how and how much to pay subjects is a meaningful part of your work, you might want to keep reading.
Step 1: Figure out how long your study takes
Time is the most important variable to prospective participants. So the first step to finding the optimal incentive is to figure out how much time you’re asking of participants.
For the sake of simplicity, we’ll share some heuristics. On the whole:
Keep in mind, though, that these numbers are viewed in isolation. Once you start factoring in the study type, participant demographics, and other variables, these amounts change.
One thing that may surprise you is that the longer your experiment runs, the cheaper each additional minute becomes. For example:
These findings have important implications for how researchers should approach their experimental designs.
While some researchers may worry about how increasing study length will impact participant motivation, it may in fact be relatively inexpensive to include additional questions while still adequately compensating respondents.
⚠️ Baseline isn't always best
Step 2: Choose between quantitative versus qualitative research
By using the discrete choice methodology, we present participants with two options and ask them to choose which is better. This allows us to analyze their preference of different variables, and assign a dollar value to their preference.
Sample discrete choice set
Table 1
Research project A
Research project B
Understanding consumer breakfast cereal preferences
Investigating household budgeting and debt management behaviors
30 minute online interview
60 minute online interview
Receive a $46 cash transfer (via Paypal, Venmo, or bank transfers) as compensation
Receive a $96 mailed check as compensation
Receive half of your compensation upon signing up, and half after completing the task.
Receive your full compensation after completing the task.
There are no rows in this table
With this information, we know whether people prefer taking a survey vs. participating in an interview.
Turns out, people prefer studies that do not require talking to an actual person — namely, our participants showed a preference for online surveys over online interviews.
Step 3: Does your study get personal?
Researchers also need to think about the sensitivity of the subject matter at hand.
In our study, we probed how different topics affected participant motivation levels. We asked our participants to choose between two research projects: one about their breakfast cereal preferences, and one about household budgeting and debt management.
For interviews and surveys that take longer than 30 minutes, we found that participants would need to be compensated $3.40 more if the experiment deals in sensitive or personal subject matter (e.g., household debt) as opposed to surface-level content (e.g., cereal preferences).
Asking someone to talk about a topic like household debt for an hour will require about $9 extra in compensation compared to asking someone about a more casual subject for the same period.
Middle-income earners (people earning between $50k and $100k) showed the strongest sensitivity to research topic: they would need to be compensated on average $8.37 more than someone with a <$50k income to take a long survey about a sensitive subject.
The causality of this finding is unclear — is debt a particularly touchy subject for middle-income earners? Or is cereal a particularly exciting one?
A note on methods
Step 4: Determine your target population
Who you target for your research matters, but some characteristics matter more than others.
Income mostly don’t matter
Intuitively, we might expect participants’ income to affect their perception of . You might think that high earners would assign greater value to their own time, and you’d be right.
In our sample, respondents at the highest end of the wealth spectrum did have noticeably higher expectations for research compensation. Specifically, those earning $200,000 or more needed to be paid 46% more than low-income earners (under $50,000) for the incentive to have the same appeal.
However, for the most part, all the people we surveyed valued their time equally, regardless of whether they were working or how much they were earning.
On the other hand, there's one group willing to be paid less: students. A lot of university research relies on students for their studies. And, indeed they are the most cost-effective group.
Addressing B2b versus B2C
We anticipate you’ll ask: how should I toggle incentives up or down if I’m targeting a B2B versus a B2C population?
Whether someone is a consumer or business person is contextual. The same person could be one or both depending on the setting. And with our methodology, we weren’t able to test that.
We understand that this isn’t the most satisfying answer. If you want to provide feedback on how we should improve our research, email us at research@tremendous.com
Step 5: Pick an incentive that appeals to research participants
We tested a variety of different incentive types to see which are the most appealing to research participants.
The table below explains what each incentive type is. It also shows the short-hand we’ll use for the remainder of this guide.
Incentive types & shorthand
Table 2
The incentives we tested
Short-hand
Cash transfer (via Paypal, Venmo, or bank transfer)
Cash transfer
Digital Visa prepaid card
Visa prepaid card
Digital gift card of your choice (choose from 1,000+ options)
Gift card or choice of gift card (This is a gift card to a single retailer that the recipient chooses from Tremendous' options.)
Digital Amazon gift card
Amazon.com Gift Card (These are the most commonly selected gift cards from the Tremendous catalog of options. This is considered a proxy for gift cards to any single retailer.)
There are no rows in this table
How incentives are delivered to participants can impact motivation levels. Overall, cash transfers are always preferred, especially if you’re hoping to engage a lower-income audience.
Specifically, cash offers at least $9.50 of additional value over any other incentive type we studied. This holds true for all study lengths.
☝️ So why not just offer cash transfers?
While participants prefer options like bank transfers, PayPal and Venmo, they’re either a pain or expensive to offer.
Sending money to many people directly from a bank or PayPal account is tedious, fraught with errors, and risks tripping fraud alerts.
Doing it through a platform like Tremendous is smoother, but typically comes with a fee. And in both cases, international transfer options are limited.
Many researchers find that the happy medium is to offer a payout redeemable for a wide assortment of prepaid and gift cards — which, if you use Tremendous, is simple, free, and covers over 200 countries.
We also found some interactions between participant characteristics and the incentives they preferred. Namely:
If you are hoping to speak to unemployed people, avoid retailer-specific gift cards, even to large retailers like Amazon. A gift card would need to be loaded with around $37 more than a cash transfer to be valued equally (or $26 more than a Visa prepaid card).
Step 6: Ignore what doesn’t matter
It’s just as valuable to know what you don’t need to care about. Below is one such consideration, which didn’t yield any significant findings in our analyses.
Payment timing doesn’t matter
It matters how much you pay your participants, and how you pay them — but when you pay them doesn’t seem to make a difference for incentivization.
We tested a number of payment schemes:
No significant differences emerged between these options.
⚠️ A note on methods
Step 7: Piece together research incentives your participant will love
We’ve run through all the variables and how they interact (or don’t). When building an incentive strategy for your research, keep these rules in mind:
1. Study length has the greatest influence on how participants perceive research incentives.
2. Participants require more compensation for research modalities that involve human interaction.
3. Studies revolving around sensitive subject matter are also more expensive if they’re on the longer side.
4. Cash transfers are always preferred, offering at least $9.50 additional value over any other incentive type we studied.
5. Payment scheme (whether participants were compensated before the study, after, or a blend of the two) did not affect motivation.
6. Participant employment status and income level also did not show any significant effects in our analyses, with two exceptions:
Step 8: Use our research incentive calculator
We’ve explained how it all works. Now that you understand the inputs, let us help you produce the outputs.
We built based on these insights. Input the characteristics of your study, and let it recommend the optimal research incentive.
Send research incentives using Tremendous
Ready to send your next batch of research incentives? If you don’t already, use Tremendous – it’s fast, free, global, and it integrates with your favorite research platforms.
. You can also strategize on how best to set up your program by .
Thousands of brands trust Tremendous to send research incentives.
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