What this tool actually does

The three headline numbers

Net cash kept

Gross pay minus travel cost minus dependent-care cost (if you've told it you have dependents needing coverage — see below). The number that actually lands in your account, not the number on the flyer.

Cash velocity

Net cash divided by days until you're actually paid, normalized to a 30-day rate. This is the number that tells a $30k-in-6-months study from a $15k-in-1-month study — the smaller, faster study usually wins if bridge cash is the goal, and payout timing is rarely published anywhere except a phone call, which is why it's flagged “unconfirmed” until someone reports it back.

Downtime rate

Net cash divided by total days of life committed — confinement nights plus a discounted follow-up-visit tail. Two studies can pay the same but cost wildly different amounts of your actual time.

Two gates, kept separate on purpose

Eligibility is a hard filter — BMI range, age, sex, smoker status, special populations (e.g. a study requiring BMI 27+). If you don't qualify, the study shows up in a separate “doesn't apply” list with the reason, never mixed into your ranked results. Feasibility is different: can you actually arrange the stay, logistically? That's driven by your own home base (any US city, real drive-vs-fly distance, not a fixed list) and whether you've configured any dependent-care coverage of your own. Neither gate is guessed on your behalf.

Dependent care, on your terms

A single visitor with no dependents pays nothing extra in this model — the cost is exactly $0, unconditionally, unless you turn on “I have dependents needing care while I'm away” yourself. If you do, you set your own estimated backup-care rate and which cities you personally have free coverage in — nothing is assumed or defaulted to “free” on your behalf.

Data: automated, refreshed daily, community-checked

Study listings are pulled directly from each network's own site on a daily schedule — see Resources for exactly which networks and how. Anyone can submit a correction (no account needed) if something's wrong or out of date — those corrections build confidence automatically as independent people agree, and show as openly disputed rather than silently overwritten when they don't. Nothing here is fabricated: an unpublished field (BMI range, payout timing) stays flagged as unconfirmed rather than guessed.

No accounts, nothing tracked server-side

Your Profile (BMI, home base, weights, dependent-care settings) and status pipeline live entirely in your own browser's local storage — there's no sign-in, no server-side record of who you are or what you looked at. Want to share a specific ranking with someone? A “share this view” link encodes your inputs directly in the URL.