What AI training data sells for in 2026: medians from 973 published prices

AIData.Broker — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 02:09:00 +0000

There is no price list for AI training data. Labs and data vendors negotiate privately, and the numbers that do surface are scattered across job postings, marketplace listings, court filings and press reports. AIData.Broker keeps a public board of them: 973 published prices from 673 sources, each kept with its source and the source's own words, and normalised to a comparable unit.

Here is what the medians say.

The medians

Kind of data	What the figure is	Median
Company records	Offered to the company that holds them (chat, tickets, CRM, documents), per company	$316K per company
Speech	Asking prices of off-the-shelf datasets, per hour of audio	$118 per hour of audio
Speech	Paid to the people who record it, per hour of work	$24 per hour of work
Video	Sales of existing footage that happened, per hour	$42 per hour of video
Video	Offered to creators for their own footage, per hour	$95 per hour of video
Video	Footage made to order, per hour	$32 per hour of video
Images	Sales of existing images that happened, per image	$0.098 per image
Text	Licences of text and archives that happened, per contract year	$16M per contract year
Text	Sales that happened, per book or title	$3,000 per book or title

Each median links to its own page, which lists every price behind it and where that price was published.

What stands out

Company records are the new market. Slack messages, support tickets, CRM notes and internal documents became a priced asset in 2025 and 2026. 23 of the 36 buyers on the board take a company's records, and several publish estimators that value a company's data by its headcount and its age.

Who sells an hour of video changes its price. Existing footage that was sold went for $42 per hour of video, creators selling their own footage are offered $95 per hour of video, and footage made to order costs buyers $32 per hour of video.

The people who make data are priced too. Voice recording for AI pays a median of $24 per hour of work, and people paid by the hour for AI training work earn a median of $77 per hour of work.

The data

The tables behind these numbers (prices, market rates, 95 disclosed licensing deals, 36 buyers' terms, 68 lawsuits and rulings) are open under CC BY 4.0, as CSV and JSON, with a permanent copy and a DOI on Zenodo: the open datasets.

The full guide, with every price by kind of data and the sources behind each: AI training data prices in 2026.

Compiled by AIData.Broker's research desk, which uses AI to collect and check sources; every figure links to the publication that stated it.

DEV Community: AIData.Broker

What AI training data sells for in 2026: medians from 973 published prices

The medians

What stands out

The data