Are you conducting user interviews or research studies? Our User Research Incentive Calculator helps you determine fair and competitive participant compensation based on study type, duration, participant hourly rate, urgency, and audience difficulty.

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How Does the Incentive Calculator Work?

Our formula calculates the incentive amount using:

• Study Type: Moderated 1:1 interviews, AI-moderated sessions, or surveys.
• Hourly Rate for Participants: Adjust this to match your target audience’s compensation expectations.
• Number of Participants: Estimate total incentive costs based on your sample size.
• Time to Complete Study: Longer studies generally require higher compensation.
• Audience Difficulty: Hard-to-find participants may need increased incentives.
• Urgency: Faster turnaround times often increase recruitment costs.

Why Use an Incentive Calculator?

• Fair Compensation: Ensure participants are paid appropriately for their time.
• Budget Planning: Quickly estimate total costs before launching your study.
• Optimize Participation: Attract the right respondents by offering competitive incentives.

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Incentives are just one piece of running great user interviews—explore our 17 Essential UX Research Tools Organized by Phase to see what else belongs in your research stack. And when you're ready to run interviews at scale without the coordination overhead, Usercall's AI-moderated interview platform handles recruitment, moderation, and synthesis so your team can focus on the insights.

Getting the incentive right is only one part of recruiting well—see our research participant recruitment guide for the full strategy behind finding and screening the right people. Usercall lets you manage incentives, scheduling, and interviews in one place, so fair pay doesn't mean more admin work.

Related: strategies for recruiting the right participants · recruiting participants without skewing your results · what paid study participants actually expect to earn