Research study payment not received: what to check and who to contact

Step 1. Check your participation status

Before you write to anyone, open your account on the platform and find the study. The status shows where the money is and whether you should expect it at all.

Prolific has six statuses, and only two of them mean payment is coming. “Awaiting review” means the researcher has not checked your response yet. “Approved” means the money is already in your balance. The other statuses either involve no payment or leave it to the researcher.

Step 2. Count the window by the platform’s own rules

Each platform counts from its own starting point: approval, confirmed attendance or the day a mission closes. Only write once the window has passed. Before that, User Interviews will not even look into your request.

• business days are Monday to Friday, excluding weekends and holidays; User Interviews suggests counting two full weeks from the day you took part, plus one day
• User Interviews also has a hard limit: support cannot follow up on studies completed more than three months ago
• Clickworker pays weekly, but only once your balance reaches 10 euros for PayPal or 20 euros or dollars for Payoneer; smaller amounts carry over to the next week

Step 3. Message the researcher, then support

The order is the same everywhere: the researcher first, because they confirm your attendance and release the money, and support second. Respondent says plainly that payment and attendance status are at the researcher’s discretion, and that support acts as a go-between.

On Respondent, if 10 business days have passed since your attendance was confirmed, message the researcher in the project thread. If several attempts get no reply, contact support with the project link. Give them at least 72 business hours and do not send duplicates: every new message resets your place in the queue. Human agents work Monday to Friday, 11:30 AM to 7:30 PM US Eastern time.

If a Respondent researcher did not show up for the interview, they are still obliged to pay you. The platform suggests messaging them that you attended at the scheduled time, pointing to the cancellation policy, and asking to be marked as attended. Your status should then change to “Attended” and then “Paid” within 10 business days.

• the date and time of the session
• the exact study title or a link to the project
• the email you log in with and your PayPal email
• screenshots of emails and messages from the researcher
• proof that you were online at the scheduled time

If your response was rejected or timed out

On Prolific you can dispute a rejection once. Open the chatbot in the help centre, choose “Contact Support” and then “Dispute a rejection”. Support’s decision is final and can only be reviewed again with new evidence. If the rejection is found unfair it is removed, the study shows as “Returned” and does not affect your account. Depending on the circumstances, you may also be paid.

If a study shows “Timed-out” because there was not enough time, message the researcher using the envelope icon next to the status: the study title, any error messages and your completion code. Prolific suggests giving the researcher up to a week, then contacting support with screenshots of the conversation. To avoid this, check the maximum time allowed before you start and only take studies you can finish in one sitting.

Bonuses on top of the normal payment are settled directly with the researcher on Prolific. The exception is bonuses for video interviews, video focus groups, diary studies and later stages of longitudinal studies: for those you can go straight to support.

The money was sent but never arrived

A different situation is when the platform has already paid and your account shows nothing. Here the cause is almost always the recipient’s settings, not the platform.

A Prolific cash-out to PayPal usually arrives within 24 hours. If it does not, check that PayPal accepts both US dollars and pounds: Settings, Payment preferences, Manage currencies. Then look at pending payments in PayPal: the money may be waiting for you to accept it. You have 30 days to do so, after which it returns to your Prolific balance and you have to cash out again. After every returned payment, Prolific’s payment processor temporarily disables cash-outs until the cause is fixed.

dscout sends a “Mission payout failed” email when a payout does not go through and lists four causes: your PayPal account is locked or inactive; the email the reward was sent to is not registered with PayPal; the email exists but is not confirmed; or the reward is in a different currency from your account’s default. You fix each of these in PayPal and then ask dscout to resend the reward.

On Respondent the money does not go to PayPal but arrives as an email from Tremendous, where you pick a gift card. If there is no email two business days after the status shows “Payment Sent”, check spam, search your inbox for “Tremendous”, add [email protected] to your approved senders and ask support to send the reward again. Remember the 5% fee, with a minimum of $1: $60 becomes $57.

On User Interviews, check your dashboard: “Redeem incentive” means a gift code is waiting for you, and if the researcher pays the incentive directly, the card may have come from an unfamiliar address and landed in spam.

• Prolific lets you cash out from £6 or $6 in approved balance, once a day
• after you change your PayPal email, and for your first four cash-outs, Prolific enforces a 72-hour gap that cannot be shortened
• Clickworker requires the PayPal account to be your own, verified, and able to receive euros
• UserTesting pays only to a verified PayPal account

What never to do

Do not accept payment outside the platform. Respondent strictly prohibits taking money from a researcher outside the platform: even if someone offers to pay you directly, it breaks the rules, and the platform can no longer protect you.

Do not pay to get your own money. If someone writes on behalf of a platform and asks for a “fee to unlock your payout” or a top-up to reach the “next level”, it is a sign of fraud. The FTC describes exactly these schemes: people are shown earnings, and are only allowed to withdraw them after paying in themselves. The real platforms in this article take a fee out of the payout; they do not ask you to pay extra.