I make over $2,500 a month from focus groups. Here's how I decide which ones are worth my time and how to find the highest-paying ones. (2024)

I had no idea what it was, but I clicked on the link and filled out the survey.

These days I make between $2,000 and $3,000 each month participating in focus groups. Over the past six months, I've made an average of $2,845 a month. I then created my own business, teaching others how to make money from focus groups.

I wondered why I would be paid to share my opinion

About two days after I filled out that initial survey in 2020, I got a call from a recruiter. She confirmed my answers and told me a little more about what the research study was. It was going to be about social media, and I would be paid $175 for spending 90 minutes on a Zoom call.

It was me, four other participants, and a moderator. The conversation just flew by, and it honestly felt like just a normal chat geared toward social media.

Two weeks later, I got a check in the mail for $175 and I was like, "Okay, so this was legit!" While it didn't necessarily sound like a scam, I wondered how and why I would get paid to do something as fun as sharing my opinion on a specific topic.

I quit my retail job in search of more flexibility

At the time, I was working as a store manager. I had a decent job with benefits and stability, but the work had started to take a toll on my mental health, and I wanted more flexibility and freedom.

I went on a leave of absence and started to search online for ways to make money through side hustles. I got back into doing focus groups and started applying to new studies. I came across a course on YouTube that was very good at teaching me the fundamentals of participating in research studies.

While I also tried other side hustles like e-commerce, DoorDash, and Shipt, they didn't feel as worth it. I noticed that I was consistently bringing in $2,000 to $3,000 a month from focus groups alone, so I eventually transitioned to concentrate solely on doing focus groups.

I made over $2,500 working only 33 hours in a month

In January, I participated in 28 focus groups for a total of 1,195 minutes or around 20 hours. I tend to spend about 35 minutes per day, Monday through Friday, just applying to focus groups. In those 35 minutes, I can usually apply to 10 to 15 focus groups.

In January, I spent 2,000 minutes, or about 33 hours, applying for focus groups and participating in them. Despite working far less than full-time hours, I made $2,568 from these focus groups, or about $77 per hour.

Last month, in March, I participated in 18 focus groups for a total of $2,770 or an average of $154 per focus group.

With focus groups, you can get paid in a variety of ways. I've gotten paid through virtual Visa gift cards, direct deposits, in-person checks, cash, PayPal, checks in the mail, Zelle, and Amazon gift cards.

I keep track of it all in a spreadsheet that I created, and that really helps me visualize how much I'm making every single month and make my budget.

How focus groups work

Focus groups are consumer studies by big brands (like Apple, Google, Burger King, Chase, and Facebook) who want to figure out if their ad, service, or product will resonate with the consumer market — and they'll pay big money for your opinion.

They organize one-on-one or group interviews that vary in length. Some might take a full day, while others are 90 minutes. Some of the shortest ones are just 10 or 20 minutes.

It really varies, but the average pay rate is 90 minutes for $150. The benchmark I set to decide whether a focus group is worth participating in is generally at least $50 for 30 minutes to an hour.

There are also specialized research studies that pay even more, which look for people working in specific fields, such as doctors, nurses, and dentists. One of my friends in Texas is a dentist, and he found a focus group that paid $260 for an hour of his time.

Qualifying for a focus group is a numbers game. The more applications you fill out, the more you'll book. It's almost like applying to jobs; it's probably not as competitive as job applications, but the same idea applies — you need to apply to a lot to get into a few.

Some of the applications are really easy to complete and only take a minute or two, while others take five or, at most, 10 minutes to fill out. They ask demographic questions tailored to a specific focus group, as well as which products and services you use.

The actual focus group is a very moderated conversation. Whether you're in a group or a one-on-one call, a moderator asks you questions and makes sure that everyone feels comfortable. They guide the conversations in the way that their client (the big company) wants the conversations to go.

In my experience, the first 30 minutes are questions that help them understand who you are and what you like to do. Then, they start to guide the conversation over to the main topic. Sometimes, they show you ads or ad concepts and ask you a lot of questions about them. It's standard to sign an NDA because you'll be seeing ads for products or services that haven't been released yet.

One of the coolest focus groups I've done was a four-part study on food. While I can't say specifics, the first three parts were questions about food, and the fourth and final part involved a trip to Chicago that was entirely paid for by the company.

I'm a huge foodie, and I love Chicago; it's one of my favorite cities, especially in terms of food. The focus group in Chicago was a four-hour in-person group with other study participants. It was a lot of fun and one of the best experiences.

If you're consistent, you could make several hundred dollars a month

When I first started, I was spending a lot of time searching for good focus groups. There are a lot of websites that offer low-paying surveys, so those are very common to find, but actual focus groups that pay more are much harder to find. It took a lot of searching throughout a long period of time to find these studies.

The best free ways to find focus groups are by searching "focus groups near me" or "taste tests near me" on Google, Craigslist, and social media. It's important to beware of potential scams, though. Avoid applying to surveys found on those sites if they don't share the incentive amount or if the amount is oddly high, like $750 for an hour.

My biggest tips for people who want to get started on focus groups

1. Apply to 10-15 surveys per day and stay consistent! It's a numbers game, and so the more surveys you fill out, the more you're going to book.

2. Don't get discouraged if you fill out a bunch of applications and don't hear back. You will not book every single group. Each focus group has a specific criteria and quota to fill, and it can take weeks to get a response. Just keep at it; they're going to come.

3. Stay organized. Once you start getting booked, keep track of the dates of the studies in a spreadsheet so you don't miss them, and note when the payment is meant to come in. I actually caught a few instances where companies forgot to pay me for studies I had completed several months prior. They were reputable companies with a huge volume of focus groups, so things probably slipped through the cracks. Each time, I reached out to the company, and they promptly paid me what I was owed.

If you stay consistent and put in an hour a day just to apply and participate in focus groups, you could walk away with a few hundred dollars at the end of the month. I know people who do this part-time while working full-time jobs, and they're making $1,000 to $2,000 consistently, month after month.

If you have an interesting side hustle and would like to share your story, email Jane Zhang at janezhang@businessinsider.com.