Payment Schedules

hCaptcha Payouts run quarterly on a 60 day trailing basis. To illustrate what this means, please see the table below.

Traffic Between Reconciliation Date Payout Date
Jan 15th 2022 - Apr 15th 2022 Jul 5th-15th 2022 Jul 5-15th 2022
Oct 15th 2021 - Jan 15th 2022 Apr 5th-15th 2022 Apr 5-15th 2022
Jul 15th 2021 - Oct 15th 2021 Jan 5th-15th 2022 Jan 5-21st 2022††††
Apr 15th 2021 - Jul 15th 2021 Sep 14th-24th 2021††† Sep 15th-25th 2021†††
Jan 15th 2021 - Apr 15th 2021 No later than Jun 25th 2021†† Jun 19-25th 2021††
Oct 15th 2020 - Jan 15th 2021 No later than Mar 14th 2021 Mar 15th 2021
Jul 15th 2020 - Oct 15th 2020 Jan 5th-11th 2021* Jan 5-11th 2021†
Apr 15th 2020 - Jul 15th 2020 Sep 16th - 22nd 2020***** Sep 16-24th 2020*****
Jan 15th 2020 - Apr 15th 2020 No later than Jun 16th 2020* Jun 15-19th 2020****
Oct 15th 2019 - Jan 15th 2020 No later than Mar 23rd 2020*** Mar 20-23th 2020***
Jul 15th 2019 - Oct 15th 2019 No later than Dec 14th 2019* Dec 17th 2019**
Apr 15th 2019 - Jul 15th 2019 No later than Jul 15th 2019 Sep 15th 2019
Jan 15th 2019 - Apr 15th 2019 No later than Jun 15th 2019 Jun 15th 2019

†††† As Jan 15th falls on a weekend and Monday is a national holiday, this payout cycle will end on Jan 21st instead.

††† From September 2021, reconciliations and payouts now run over an approximately 10 day period rather than a single day, in order to simplify operational constraints related to growth in the service.

†† Some June 2021 reconciliations and payouts will run in the following week due to delays in verification of final calculations during the reconciliation window.

† December 2020 payouts have been rescheduled from the 15th to avoid overlap with end-of-year reconciliations and staff vacations: they will be completed by the second week of January. Due to slower-than-usual transfers into PayPal, payouts will run over several days rather than being completed on a single day.†

* Please Note: we are currently working on a major backend transition to near-real-time reconciliation. Periodic reconciliations will run less frequently than usual through Q1 2021. This does not affect payout schedules or dates.

** When the 15th falls on a weekend, the Payout Date is instead the 17th.

*** COVID-19 ADVISORY: Due to reduced staff capacity related to COVID-19, reconciliation has been rescheduled to allow additional time to complete our standard verification. Payouts are expected to start on Friday and complete on the following Monday.

**** Due to maintenance by PayPal of their REST APIs during the payout window, not all payouts were completed on Jun 15th. Any payouts scheduled for Jun 15th (Pacific time) but not executed due to PayPal API errors were re-run by Jun 19th (Pacific time).

***** Reconciliations are expected to complete over several days due to system maintenance.

***** September 2020 payouts will run in batches as reconciliation completes, with some running several days later than originally scheduled due to reconciliation delays.
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Payouts typically run throughout the day on the Payout Date, and are in general completed by midnight Pacific time. If an account has been flagged for review, it may take up to five additional business days to release a payment.
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As a reminder, only accurate human traffic is eligible for payouts. You can see more details on this in our FAQ, linked below. Available balance must also meet a minimum threshold in order to be eligible for payout, currently 10 HMT.

Real-time estimates do not reflect final accuracy or humanity, and thus your final earnings may vary substantially up or down from numbers shown in the Dashboard prior to your first reconciliation.

After each reconciliation, your per-sitekey estimates will be updated and the accuracy of future predictions should increase, unless your site has a material change in user behavior.

What does Reconciliation mean?

Reconciliation is the process whereby traffic is analyzed after the fact to verify its humanity and accuracy, once all data from all reporting sites is in. You can read more details in our FAQ as well as our blog posts, e.g. How hCaptcha Calculates Rewards.

Are you planning to speed this process up?

Yes, we are currently working on a variety of improvements to our backend systems that we expect will eventually allow us to offer both faster reconciliation, more rapid estimation accuracy, and faster payouts. We are currently working to speed up reconciliation first.