Five weeks. That is how long a working `boto3` MTurk client has left, because Amazon is closing Mechanical Turk permanently on 30 September 2026 and HIT submission stops the same day. Everything after that is wind-down: requesters get until 30 October to approve, reject or bonus the work that is already in, refunds land within thirty days, and your transaction history stays readable until 28 January 2027. The headlines went a step further and buried SageMaker Ground Truth alongside it. Amazon own FAQ says something narrower, and the difference decides whether your labelling stack survives September or not.
The short answer
Amazon confirmed the closure on 25 August. New signups had already stopped on 30 July, when MTurk went onto the AWS maintenance list alongside SageMaker Ground Truth and Augmented AI. Ground Truth is not closing on 30 September: what disappears there is the MTurk worker type. Private and vendor workforces keep working.
What Amazon actually said
The notice is short and it sits on the front page of mturk.com, which is a strange place to end 21 years of anything.
We regularly evaluate our programs, tools, and services and make adjustments based on those assessments. Following an assessment, we’ve made the decision to close Amazon Mechanical Turk, effective September 30, 2026.
That is the whole reasoning. No usage figures, no migration path, no successor named. Amazon launched the thing in 2005 and Jeff Bezos used to call it artificial artificial intelligence, which was a good joke back when the joke still needed explaining.
The closure was not a surprise if you were watching the plumbing. On 30 July 2026 AWS stopped accepting new MTurk customers and moved the service into maintenance, the same footing it applied that day to SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. Maintenance in AWS language means security and availability work continue and features do not. From there the runway is usually measured in quarters. This one was five weeks.
The four dates that actually govern your pipeline
Read those in order, because two of them will cost you money if you get them wrong.
30 September. Service closes. HIT submission closes with it, and every unsubmitted HIT expires automatically. Any batch you queue in the last week either completes or evaporates, so stop publishing new work with enough headroom for your slowest task type to actually clear.
30 October. Last day to approve or reject work completed before the close, and the last day to pay a bonus. Here is the part that costs money: if you take no action, Amazon auto approves. So an unreviewed batch is a paid batch. If your quality control was ever the reject button rather than qualifications, you have thirty days to run it manually or you are buying whatever came in.
Refunds of prepaid requester balances land within thirty days, and Amazon tells you to verify payment details in the Requester Portal first. Final AWS charges show up in the normal upcoming billing cycles.
28 January 2027. Transaction history stays readable until then, and this is the date that did not make a single headline we saw. If you are running a study and your assignment level records are your audit trail, export them. A portal being decommissioned is not an archive.
Ground Truth is not dying on 30 September
Plenty of the coverage ran with a version of “Amazon shuts down SageMaker Ground Truth too”. We read the FAQ twice, and it does not say that.
This closure also applies to SageMaker Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI. The Amazon Mechanical Turk Worker type will no longer be available when creating labeling jobs or human review workflows as of September 30, 2026.
The second sentence is the whole meaning of the first. What goes away inside Ground Truth and A2I is the MTurk worker type as a workforce option. Ground Truth supports three workforces: the MTurk crowd, a vendor from the AWS Marketplace, and a private workforce of your own employees or contractors. One of the three is being removed. The AWS developer guide, separately, still says Ground Truth is closed to new customers with existing customers continuing “as normal” and no new features planned.
So the practical read splits by how you were using it. If your labelling jobs ran against a private or vendor workforce, 30 September is a non-event for you, and the thing to worry about is the slower problem of building on a service in maintenance mode. If they ran against the MTurk workforce, your job configuration breaks on 30 September and you need a different workforce selected before then.
Honestly, I think the confusion here is partly Amazon own fault. Announcing the death of one service and the partial amputation of two others in a single FAQ line invites exactly this.
If you actually depend on this
The blunt version: MTurk is not replaceable by one thing, because it was never one thing.
Academic survey work is the cleanest migration, since Prolific was built for that population and pays per hour rather than per task. Production data labelling is a different market now, and Scale AI and Mercor were pulling requesters away from MTurk long before this notice. What you will not find is the same shape of deal, which was an open API, a large undifferentiated crowd, and cents per task with no account manager. That model is what actually ended here, and the reason is not mysterious: for a lot of the classification and transcription work that filled MTurk, a model is now cheaper and steadier than a HIT.
There is a documented irony in the record. A 2023 EPFL study of MTurk workers on text summarisation tasks estimated that between a third and a half of them were passing the work to an LLM. The crowd started routing around itself years before the platform closed.
If you want the wider pattern, the human data layer of AI is consolidating into fewer hands fast: see what the reported Nvidia deal for Hugging Face changes, and Twitch switching genAI training on by default for where the raw material goes instead.
One practical note before you migrate. Export your worker qualification data now, not in September. Qualifications were the only part of MTurk that took real time to build, and they are the part with no export path anywhere else.
Sources
Amazon published the closure notice and the wind-down FAQ on mturk.com, which is the primary source for every date in this piece. The maintenance status and the three workforce options for labelling jobs come from the AWS SageMaker Ground Truth developer guide. The announcement was first reported on 25 August 2026 by CNBC and covered the following day by Quartz.
Frequently asked questions
When exactly does Amazon Mechanical Turk shut down?
30 September 2026. Amazon own notice on mturk.com says the service closes permanently that day, and the FAQ adds that HIT submission closes on the same date with all remaining unsubmitted HITs expiring automatically. New customer registrations already stopped on 30 July 2026, when AWS moved MTurk onto its services-in-maintenance footing.
What happens to work that is still pending approval on 30 September?
You keep the standard thirty day window. Amazon says requesters can approve or reject any HIT completed until 30 October 2026, and anything left untouched is auto approved, which means unreviewed work gets paid. Bonuses can also still be awarded up to 30 October. Workers are paid on their existing disbursement schedule.
Do I get my prepaid requester balance back?
Yes, and the FAQ commits to a full balance refund within thirty days of closure. Amazon asks you to check the payment details in the Requester Portal first, since a stale card or bank record is what delays it. Final AWS billing arrives in the upcoming billing cycles rather than as one closing invoice.
Is SageMaker Ground Truth shutting down on 30 September too?
No, and several write-ups got this wrong. The FAQ says the closure also applies to Ground Truth and Amazon Augmented AI in one specific sense: the Mechanical Turk worker type stops being selectable when you create a labelling job or a human review workflow. Ground Truth itself is closed to new customers as of 30 July 2026 and gets no new features, but existing customers keep running it, and the private and vendor workforce options are untouched.
How long can I still export my MTurk data?
Transaction history stays available until 28 January 2027, per the closure FAQ. That is the only date in the whole wind-down that sits after the calendar year turns, and it is the one that did not make any headline we read. If you need assignment level records for a paper or an audit, pull them well before then rather than trusting a portal that is being decommissioned.
