Pay
The minimum balance is a loan you did not agree to
A high threshold quietly holds a permanent slice of your earnings that you can never spend.
Guides on Pay: Pricing, from first principles to the annual review, The ceiling is hours, and it arrives sooner than people expect, What rating work actually pays
Most platforms will not send you money until your balance passes a minimum. That minimum is not a fee, and for a low-volume earner it costs more than most fees do, because it holds a slice of your earnings permanently out of reach.
The mechanism is simple and almost nobody prices it before signing up.
How the float forms
You can never withdraw the last part of your balance. Whatever sits below the threshold stays with the platform until enough new work pushes the total over the line, and after each withdrawal the remainder starts accumulating again.
On average, the amount stuck there is roughly half the threshold, continuously, for as long as you trade. It is not lost - you get it eventually, or when you close the account, assuming the account is closable and dormancy rules do not eat into it. It is simply not yours to spend, which is the part that matters when the reason you are doing this work is to have money now.
| Threshold | Monthly earnings | Withdrawals per year | Typical trapped amount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Moderate | Around it | Every second month | Half the threshold, plus a month of delay |
| High | Well below it | Two or three | Half the threshold, and long waits |
Both rows are where new earners live, and they are where the threshold stops being a rounding error and starts being the dominant term.
Why it outweighs commission early on
Commission is a percentage. A threshold is an absolute amount, so its relative weight rises as your volume falls, exactly like the fixed component of a transaction fee described in minimum viable price when fees are flat.
Compare it properly against the alternative, not against zero: a platform with a lower commission and a high threshold can be worse for a small earner than a higher-commission one that pays out on any balance. That is the same take-home comparison set out in comparing platforms on take-home, not commission, with one more line in it.
What to check before signing up
The threshold itself, and whether it differs by payout method - bank transfer thresholds are often higher than others. A high threshold is a platform's choice rather than a technical necessity: Stripe's payout documentation puts its own minimum payout at typically one base unit of the local currency, such as 1 GBP or 1 EUR.
Whether there is a payout fee, because a fee plus a threshold interact: a fixed charge makes frequent small withdrawals wasteful, so a low threshold with a high fee is not actually a low threshold.
Whether closing the account releases the remainder. This is the one worth having in writing, and it belongs in the same folder as everything in records you will wish you kept.
Managing it
Withdraw on a schedule rather than on impulse, so the trapped amount is predictable and can be treated as part of the buffer described in payout schedules and cash flow.
If you stop trading, empty the balance deliberately rather than leaving it. The most common way this money actually disappears is not a clause being enforced; it is an account nobody logged into for two years and a password that no longer works.
Thresholds are a fixed cost of participation, which is another version of the point that fixed costs decide who can afford to be cheap - what the buyer-side market pays for an unknown person is the demand-side half of the same squeeze, and what a free automated score already delivers is the floor beneath it. Where your offer is precision rather than price, the documented measurement conventions are the thing that keeps you out of that fight entirely.
Thresholds and payout methods change without announcement, so check the current figures on the platform itself rather than on a guide - Rate Cock's payouts page is the live version for judges there, and the same check is worth running annually anywhere you hold a balance.