What Happens to Pending HITs After the Shutdown?
Some workers may reach September 30 with completed work that has not yet been approved or rejected by a requester.
Amazon has addressed that situation directly.
Requesters will have 30 days to approve or reject submitted HITs, with that period running through October 30, 2026.
If the requester takes no action during that period, the submitted HIT will be automatically approved under MTurk’s standard approval process.
For workers, that distinction matters.
A HIT that remains pending on September 30 is not automatically lost simply because the marketplace closes.
Completed and submitted work can continue moving through the approval process during the shutdown period.
However, Amazon says HIT submission itself closes September 30. Any HITs that remain unsubmitted will automatically expire.
The important difference is whether the work was actually submitted before the platform stopped accepting submissions.
Save Your MTurk Transaction History
Another deadline arrives several months after the shutdown.
Amazon says MTurk transaction history will remain accessible until January 28, 2027.
Workers who used MTurk regularly should consider preserving their own records well before that date.
Useful information may include:
- Earnings history
- Payment records
- Transaction details
- Records related to completed work
- Information that may be useful when preparing taxes or reviewing previous income
January may seem far away when the marketplace closes in September, but account-record deadlines are easy to overlook once a platform is no longer part of a worker’s normal routine.
Downloading or saving important records earlier reduces the risk of realizing later that something you needed is no longer available.
Amazon Has Not Given a Detailed Public Reason for the Closure
Amazon’s closure FAQ explains how the shutdown will work, but it does not provide a detailed explanation for why the company decided to permanently close Mechanical Turk.
That distinction is important because the technology surrounding online task work has changed substantially.
Artificial intelligence can now perform some types of classification, analysis, transcription, and data-processing work that once required more human involvement. At the same time, other crowdsourcing and research platforms have developed their own worker marketplaces.
Those broader changes provide context for how online task work has evolved, but they should not be confused with an official explanation from Amazon.
Amazon’s public instructions are currently focused primarily on helping workers and requesters complete the transition.
The shutdown also reaches beyond the consumer-facing MTurk marketplace. Amazon says the MTurk worker option used with SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI will no longer be available after September 30.
The Bigger Lesson for Online Workers
The end of MTurk highlights one of the largest risks of platform-based income:
The platform controls the opportunity.
A worker can become highly experienced with a marketplace, build a strong approval history, understand which jobs are worthwhile, and develop an efficient routine.
But the worker still does not control whether that marketplace continues operating.
The same risk can exist with gig apps, freelance marketplaces, creator platforms, affiliate programs, and other third-party income sources.
That does not automatically make platform work a bad choice.
It means platform income is generally stronger when it is treated as one income source rather than the only one.
If you are replacing income that previously came from MTurk, Income Idea Index’s guide to 7 realistic ways to make money online covers several approaches that rely more heavily on skills, services, content, and products rather than small individual tasks.
