September 12, 2024
Editorial Guidelines
Experts in this article:
Sophia is a software QA Tester and web developer with experience testing multiple survey and task apps. She has two years of...
Jessica is a writer for SideHustles.com. Her side hustles include freelance academic writing and editing, which she's done for...
Survey Junkie is a market research platform that you can join to take surveys for money. You’ll get rewarded for your work with PayPal credit, gift cards, or cash.
Survey Junkie says that you can use its rewards to round out your income and pay for your everyday expenses, such as gas, meals, gifts, and more. But can you really earn a substantial amount on the site, or are there better options for people who want an easy side hustle?
We sent our tester to find out.
Survey Junkie gives you the opportunity to earn money without leaving your home or doing much of anything besides staying by your computer or phone. If you’re in a situation (health-related or otherwise) where you need extra cash but that’s all you can manage to do right now, using Survey Junkie might be worth it.
That said, you should keep your expectations modest. As you’ll see, while you can use Survey Junkie to earn real money, you won’t earn very much money. What’s more, there are several other apps (Survey Junkie’s competitors) that pay more. We’ve linked to our reviews of these apps below.
Ultimately, it’s up to you whether there’s a place for Survey Junkie in your life. It doesn’t offer the best value for your time, but if you use it diligently, you can still earn enough to buy a few extra groceries per month—or at least cover the gas to drive to the store.
We tested Survey Junkie for almost 5 hours.
Here’s what we earned:
*Our calculations of the hourly rate and average time to redeem rewards include signup bonuses. Pending rewards aren’t included.
Survey Junkie makes various claims about how much you can earn by taking their surveys. We investigated these to see whether we agreed:
| What Survey Junkie says | What we found |
|---|---|
| On average, it takes approximately 15 minutes to complete a survey. | We qualified for four surveys (not counting questions to complete our profile); on average, each took 48 minutes. |
| Members qualify for an average of 1 in 4 surveys (a 25% qualification rate). | We qualified for 4 out of 9 surveys we applied for (a 44% qualification rate). |
| You can earn up to $40 per month by taking three surveys per day. | You might be able to earn $40 per month by spending about an hour a day on the site (although completing three surveys in an hour might be hard). |
It’s worth noting that our tester’s earnings were boosted significantly by a signup and setup process that offered bonuses for doing minimal work. Without the signup points, her effective hourly wage would have been lower.
Your earnings on the site may vary significantly depending on the surveys you qualify for. Your eligibility will depend on your:
Luck will also play a role in how much you’re able to earn. Certain surveys are worth more points than others and take less time to complete. If you’re consistently eligible for short, high-value surveys, you’ll earn more.
Survey Junkie isn’t the only game in town. If you’re interested in learning about other platforms that will pay you to take surveys and complete other small tasks, check out our reviews of:
On Survey Junkie, you earn rewards in the form of points, which accumulate on your account balance.
The Survey Junkie rewards system is refreshingly simple. One point is equivalent to 1 cent. In other words, you can redeem 100 points for $1.
You’ll need at least 500 points ($5 in rewards) to make a withdrawal on Survey Junkie.
How long it takes to get paid on Survey Junkie depends on the redemption method you choose:
Your timeline to cash out may also be affected by other minor factors. For instance if you redeem on a weekend or holiday, it might take longer. However, the process should never take more than 5 days.
There’s no hard cap on how much you can earn on Survey Junkie. Your potential earnings are limited only by the number of surveys you’re able to qualify for.
Survey Junkie doesn’t offer much variety in terms of the tasks you can complete. Here are the ways you can earn rewards on the platform:
When you sign up for Survey Junkie, you’ll have to go through several steps to access their selection of surveys. You’ll also earn rewards along the way.
First, you’ll have to provide your email and answer questions about your location (your country and ZIP Code), date of birth, and gender. You’ll also have to choose a password. This part of the process takes less than a minute and yields 25 points (equivalent to $0.25).
Next, you’ll have to answer a set of questions to complete your “General Profile” and get access to other surveys. These include questions about your education, job, family, grocery shopping habits, and more. This step takes a couple of minutes and will give you 50 points (equivalent to $0.50).
After this, you’ll be prompted to take a quick tour of Survey Junkie’s site. This process takes just a few seconds and gives you 5 points (equivalent to $0.05).
Finally, there’s a quick tutorial that shows you how to take surveys. Again, this takes just a few seconds and gives you 5 more points (5 cents).
As you can see from the screenshot below, Survey Junkie will prompt you to install their browser extension and desktop app when you sign up. This isn’t obligatory, and you can choose whether you want to install these features later or just skip this part.
We charged through the Survey Junkie signup process in less than 5 minutes and earned 85 points in total (equivalent to $0.85).
The main way to earn rewards on Survey Junkie, as you’d expect, is by taking surveys. There are two different types of surveys available on the platform: Profile Surveys and normal surveys.
When you get started on Survey Junkie, you can answer six quick Profile Surveys to complete your “profiles” on the site (i.e., provide Survey Junkie with more information about you so they can target other surveys that match your demographics and interests). Each survey will yield 10 points (10 cents).
You can fill out your:
Once you’ve done these Profile Surveys, they’ll be marked as completed, and you won’t be able to take them again.
However, you may sometimes randomly be offered short Profile Surveys on other topics. Some of these uncategorized surveys offer the chance to win a few points very quickly by answering just a few questions. Others, however, offer no rewards at all.
The screenshot below shows a selection of the other types of surveys you may see on Survey Junkie.
On this platform, surveys will frequently reject you if the companies that commissioned them don’t want you as a responder. This isn’t unique to Survey Junkie; we’ve tested many of its competitors, and virtually all of them will sometimes disqualify you from taking surveys, too.
The good news is that Survey Junkie will sometimes reward you with two or three points (2–3 cents) for your failed attempts to take surveys.
We took six Profile Surveys on Survey Junkie after we finished the signup process. Doing this took less than 20 minutes and earned us 60 points (equivalent to $0.60).
After this, we attempted nine other surveys. Of these:
Finally, we tried out a couple of Profile Surveys on the mobile app. The first one we took was very short (there were only three questions), but we didn’t get any points for it. The second one was also fairly short, with only nine questions; it gave us 9 points.
Best survey experience: $1.42–$5.40 per hour
The best survey we took on Survey Junkie was the aforementioned Profile Survey, which took us just over a minute to complete and gave us 9 points—equivalent to an hourly rate of about $5.40. Of the normal surveys we took, the best was one that took us 21 minutes and paid 50 points (worth $0.50), equivalent to an hourly rate of about $1.42.
Worst survey experience: $0–$0.20 per hour
The worst surveys we took on Survey Junkie were:
Survey Junkie will give you 100 points (equivalent to $1) if you install the site’s browser extension on your computer. You can use this extension to view surveys and check your rewards progress (along with other details about your Survey Junkie account).
To get your 100-point reward, you have to keep the extension active for at least 30 days.
The other way to get rewards via the Survey Junkie browser extension is by using it to join Survey Junkie’s “Surf to Earn” community. If you keep your Survey Junkie browser extension active, you should be able to harvest points automatically as you browse online.
Survey Junkie says that you can also participate in Surf to Earn by opting in via the Survey Junkie app, although we didn’t test this.
We installed the Survey Junkie browser extension and kept it active for 30 days. This gave us 100 points.
Our tester also got several 10-point bonuses just for surfing the internet while the extension was active. These showed up on her Survey Junkie account as “Surf to Earn” bonuses
The screenshot below shows that Survey Junkie also promised us a monthly 50-point bonus as a Surf to Earn benefit.
We aren’t sure whether this is the maximum cap for the “Surf to Earn” bonuses we mentioned above or if it’s an additional monthly bonus we’re due to receive later (in which case we haven’t received the 50 points at the time of writing).
Survey Junkie will give you 100 points (equivalent to $1) for installing its desktop app on your computer.
We installed the Survey Junkie app on our computer and the 100 points showed up in our account. However, the reward was still pending when we finished testing, so we didn’t include it when calculating the hourly rate.
Survey Junkie has focus groups and product testing studies, which anecdotal online reports claim pay more than its regular surveys. These focus group studies likely involve free product trials, live user groups, and one-on-one phone calls. However, you won’t be eligible to participate in them immediately after you join the site.
We contacted Survey Junkie’s customer service team to find out more about these focus groups. They told us that they would email us to let us know if we became eligible to participate. However, they did not specify exactly which requirements we would have to meet or give us any more information beyond that; they just recommended that we continue taking surveys to increase our chances of being contacted.
There are several ways to claim your rewards on Survey Junkie:
If you want to redeem your rewards in the form of a gift card, Survey Junkie has a small selection to choose from. We saw the following retailers:
Survey sites sometimes change their gift card selections, so you might see a different set on Survey Junkie when you use the site.
Note that the gift card redemption option is only available if you live in the US.
Bank transfers are also only available for US-based users of Survey Junkie. To redeem via this method, you need to provide a unique US bank account and routing number.
One point to note is that, when survey sites offer bank transfers, they sometimes charge fees (especially for smaller transactions). We didn’t see any disclaimers about fees on Survey Junkie, but we didn’t test this redemption option ourselves, so we can’t be 100% sure that bank transfers from Survey Junkie are free.
As we’ve already mentioned, Survey Junkie says that you should allow up to 5 business days to receive your rewards if you’re using this method.
If you want a very quick and flexible way to redeem your Survey Junkie rewards, you can get a virtual prepaid Visa gift card. As we’ve already mentioned, it should arrive instantly. Once you get your card, you can use it to shop online or add it to your digital wallet to use in stores that accept contactless payments.
PayPal is another flexible way to redeem your Survey Junkie points. Once you cash out, you can use your credits to shop online (or in person, if you add your PayPal to your digital wallet).
Survey Junkie says that you may have to log in to your PayPal account or confirm your PayPal email to use this option. This was the case when our tester redeemed her points; she had to log in to her PayPal to complete the transaction.
As we’ve already mentioned, Survey Junkie gives conflicting information about how long PayPal withdrawals take. On one of their help pages, they say that your payment should take just a few hours (and that you should get in touch if you’re still waiting after 24 hours); on another page of the site, they say that PayPal payments may take up to three days.
We got our PayPal payment immediately, so you should hopefully also receive your money very quickly if you choose this method to redeem.
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