Mercor’s stated default is that time properly recorded in Insightful gets paid. Hours can be withheld, but only for three named reasons, and the quality of what you produced is not one of them.
Fix that last point in your head before anything else. Mercor’s policy says low-quality output does not invalidate time you have already logged, and that those hours remain payable. Weak work has a consequence, but the consequence is about whether you stay on the project, not whether that week is paid.
What counts as paid time
Three things qualify under Mercor’s policy: project tasks inside the agreed scope, webinars Mercor runs as part of your engagement, and approved meetings or coordination you need in order to deliver. Time spent in a required project call is working time, not overhead you absorb.
The tracker is the record. Insightful, formerly Workpuls, runs on your machine and takes periodic screenshots, a few per hour, to confirm the time matches the work. Mercor’s reasoning is that this protects the contractor as much as the client: a screenshot record is the evidence that you were on task. What the trackers across platforms actually capture is covered in the software you will be asked to install.
Hours can be withheld for three reasons, and only three
Mercor lists them as a closed set:
- policy violations, including breaches of its LLM usage policy
- spam or bad-faith activity, such as submitting garbage data with no real effort
- logging time while you are not actively working on project tasks
Everything outside that list is paid. Missing an acceptance criterion, needing a second round of revisions, delivering something the reviewer sends back: none of those move an hour out of the payable column.
No withholding decision is automatic. A log can be flagged automatically, but Mercor states that a human reviewer looks at the screenshots, the activity log and the surrounding context before anything is taken off.
Mercor’s own pages disagree on that point, so check which one you are reading. Its time tracking policy says a human decides every removal. Its project support page says hours “may be automatically deducted or removed before payout”, and lists what a weekly review looks for: no activity in screenshots, a timer left running while idle, time logged outside the project scope, duplicate tracking across two contracts, and prohibited use of automation. Treat the second list as the things that draw attention, and the policy page as the commitment about who decides.
The sequence from flag to payout
Four steps sit between a suspicious log and your money. The thing to look for below is the order: a person examines the log, and you are told before the payout runs rather than after it.
- Automatic A log is flagged Idle stretches or activity that does not look like project work
- A person Someone reviews it Screenshots, activity and context. Mercor says this decision is never automatic.
- Before payday You get an email It names how many hours were removed and why
- Wednesday The rest is paid Legitimate hours go out on the normal schedule
You have until the end of the next pay period to reply to that email and dispute it. One reply per period, and the answer is final.
The removal applies to the disputed hours only. Everything else in that period is paid on the usual schedule, and the schedule itself is not disturbed by the review. How the Mercor pay week works covers the cutoff and the payout timing.
A worked example
Say you are on a 25-hour weekly cap and you log 19 hours across a week.
On Wednesday you start a long document review, get pulled into a family thing, and leave the timer running for roughly three hours while nothing happens on the machine. You notice on Thursday, but manual correction is not available to you, so the three hours stay in the log.
The following Monday that stretch is flagged for idle activity. A reviewer opens the screenshots, sees an unchanged screen across the whole block, and confirms three hours as time logged while not working on project tasks.
Before the payout goes out you get an email stating three hours removed and the reason. The other 16 hours are paid on the normal schedule. You are not paid nothing, you are not held back a week, and the rest of the period is untouched.
If you think the reviewer got it wrong, say because the screen really was static while you were reading a long specification, you reply to that email with what you were doing and any evidence you have. You get one reply, and the answer you receive is final.
One reply, inside the next pay period
The dispute window is narrow and precise. Mercor asks for the dispute during the pay period immediately after the one being disputed, which in practice means within the following week. The route is a reply to the removal email itself, not a fresh support ticket, with context and any supporting evidence attached.
Mercor then reviews the message alongside your account history and project activity, and sends a final decision by email. Duplicate requests for the same period are ignored, so there is no value in sending a second one. If you are going to dispute, put everything into the first reply.
Manual time entry is not allowed
You cannot type hours into Insightful after the fact. Mercor treats manual additions and adjustments as not permitted, with rare exceptions reviewed case by case and requiring documented justification, and no guarantee of approval.
The practical consequence is that a forgotten timer is a real risk of unpaid work. If you miss a block, the only route is your project point of contact, as soon as you notice, with a clear account of what you were doing. Support cannot fix it for you.
Why the weekly cap exists
Mercor caps weekly hours on purpose, and it gives two reasons: to keep feedback frequent enough that you stay aligned with what the project expects, and to avoid burnout at a sustainable delivery pace. The cap is not a budget problem being dressed up.
It is cumulative, not daily. A 40-hour cap does not mean eight hours a day, and most projects allow flexible scheduling. Hours worked past your approved cap without advance approval are not paid, so the cap is a hard number rather than a target.
Only your project point of contact can change it. Mercor’s support team cannot raise a cap.
Running two projects
Mercor allows more than one hourly contract at a time, as long as each project lead knows your availability. Each contract sets its own maximum hours a week, and you cannot raise your hours unless your project lead says so.
Being on a second project is not automatic: it depends on the project and its approval. Mercor’s contract page, re-read on 13 Oct 2026, states no combined weekly cap.
What Mercor does not publish
Mercor does not say how long a review takes from flag to email, and it does not publish how long it takes to answer a dispute beyond stating that the decision comes by email and is final. It also does not state the threshold at which idle time becomes a flag. Do not assume a number for any of these.
One further note from the policy page: if hours have to be manually subtracted from a given week, Mercor suggests you should not expect to continue on that project. Removal and offboarding are separate processes, but they are correlated, and how Mercor contracts end sets out what that looks like.
Red Pen Jobs is an independent directory and is not affiliated with Mercor. Everything above is our reading of Mercor’s published talent documentation, which Mercor can change at any time.