Accepting a Mercor offer does not put you on the project. Several setup steps sit between the acceptance and your first paid hour, and they split cleanly in two: the ones that are yours to finish, and the ones that belong to a third party or to the project team.
Most of the anxiety here comes from confusing them: chasing a background check that is sitting with a screening provider, or an onboarding document a project team has not written yet. Neither chase changes anything.
Everything below comes from Mercor’s own published contractor documentation, and covers the setup phase only. The pay cycle is covered in the Mercor pay week. Check which column a step sits in before you chase it.
Yours to finish
- Accept the offerOffers expire and cannot be reactivated afterwards
- Tax formW-9 if you are a US taxpayer, W-8BEN if you are not
- Payment setupStripe, or Wise where Stripe is unavailable
- Identity and background checkConsent and documents go to Certn or Zinc
- Okta accountUnlocks your contractor email and Slack
- Install InsightfulAccept the invite sent to your contractor inbox
Theirs to finish
- Background check resultAround 5 to 7 business days with Certn, longer in some countries with Zinc. Mercor cannot speed it up once it is running.
- Onboarding documentAppears under your active contract within 7 days. Until it does, the project team is still writing it.
- Tool invitationsSlack, Airtable, Notion and any client platform. Chase your point of contact if nothing arrives within 24 hours.
Nothing in this column moves faster because you email support. Finish your own column while you wait.
Your tax form decides what arrives in February
Mercor asks for a tax form at acceptance, and which one depends on your status rather than where you are sitting. US citizens and permanent residents complete a W-9. Everyone else completes a W-8BEN.
The W-9 collects your SSN or TIN. Earn more than $600 in the tax year and Mercor says a 1099-NEC is issued by February through Stripe, to the address Stripe holds for you. Below $600 no form is issued, which is not the same as no tax owed.
The W-8BEN confirms foreign status and can claim treaty benefits where one applies. No 1099 follows it: you report the income yourself under local rules, and Mercor recommends talking to a local accountant.
Two details cause avoidable trouble. Mercor says a W-9 filer living abroad must still set their Stripe country to United States: pick anything else and Stripe treats you as non-US and suppresses the 1099. And the W-8BEN has two country boxes, citizenship and permanent residence, which are not always the same answer.
One structural limit lands early: Mercor pays individuals, not companies. It says it cannot accept a W-8BEN-E or other business entity form, so routing the contract through your own company is not an option.
Payment setup gates the payout, not the work
Payments run through Stripe, with Wise used in regions where Stripe is not available, and Stripe runs its own identity check as part of that setup. Mercor treats that check as separate from both your ID verification and your background check.
It is an evening’s work, and nobody else is blocked on you, which is exactly why it gets left until a payout is due.
Identity verification and the background check are two different things
Identity verification runs through Persona: a government-issued ID plus a short selfie video, mandatory and in most cases done once. Turn off any VPN or private relay first, because Persona works out where you are from your IP address and fills the address form in to suit. A connection routed through the United States leaves you with a form that will only take a US ZIP code.
The background check is separate and much slower. It runs through one of two providers, Certn or Zinc, and covers identity, education, employment history, professional licences where they apply, and criminal and regulatory records. You get a secure link, give consent, and wait.
Mercor states that most Certn checks take 5 to 7 business days, and that Zinc’s timing varies by country. That shapes two things. Requests from Certn or Zinc are a genuine part of the process: a missed document request is the usual reason a check stalls. And once it is with the provider, Mercor says it cannot expedite it, so status questions go to the provider rather than to Mercor.
Okta creates your account, and a VPN locks you out of it
Your Okta account is generated when you start the contract acceptance process, at c-mercor.okta.com, so there is no invitation email to wait for. Sign in with the personal email attached to your Mercor account, and Okta gives you single sign-on plus a Google Workspace tile carrying your @mercor.expert contractor email.
The conditions are narrow: Chrome on a desktop or laptop, signed in, not in a private window, and no VPN or proxy. It says sign-ins through anonymising networks are blocked with a 403 error before the page loads, which reads like an outage rather than a policy. Slack runs through the same account, and a new contract can take up to 24 hours to sync before a workspace appears.
The onboarding document is theirs to write, within 7 days
The onboarding document is the thing that tells you what the project actually is. It lives in the Contracts tab of the Mercor dashboard, inside your active contract, below the contract details.
Mercor’s stated window is that you receive onboarding instructions within 7 days. If it is not there, its own explanation is that the project team is still writing it. Typical contents: project instructions and background, your point of contact and escalation contacts, and Slack, Airtable and Notion links.
It also names the person you should be talking to. Support handles general platform questions, but the point of contact owns project decisions, including your weekly hours cap, which Mercor says support cannot raise.
Tool invitations: wait 24 hours, then ask the right person
Mercor’s access checklist is short: contractor email active, Slack accepted, Airtable, Notion or Drive confirmed, and any platform or API logins received.
If an invitation has not arrived after 24 hours, Mercor’s instruction is to ask your point of contact to resend it and to check which address they used. That second half catches people: some invitations go to the contractor address, some to the personal one.
Install Insightful before day one, not during it
Hourly contracts track time through the Insightful desktop app. The invitation goes to your contractor inbox, so check the spam folder there rather than in your personal mail. The app needs Windows 10 or later, or macOS 10.11 or higher.
Mercor says hours not captured in Insightful are not payable, and that manual additions are rare and need justification. An install problem on your first morning therefore costs real money. What the app records is covered in software and time tracking.
The one deadline that cannot be undone
Most of this is forgiving. One part is not.
Offers carry an expiry window, and Mercor says the policy is strict: an expired offer cannot be reactivated. The same holds at the other end. Contracts cannot be extended, before or after the end date, and an expired contract cannot be reactivated either. In both cases the route back is to apply again.
One related risk is worth naming. Mercor says a contract can be revoked automatically before onboarding begins if background verification fails, if the project’s scope changes, or if there is a duplicate assignment, and that after onboarding starts automatic revocation no longer applies. So the gap worth closing fast is the one between accepting and starting.
Still weighing the platform up? The Mercor guide covers it as a whole. Otherwise, browse the roles open now.
This site is not affiliated with Mercor and does not recruit for it. The above is our reading of Mercor’s published documentation, and Mercor’s own pages are the authority if anything changes.