Survey Junkie Review: Is It Legit and Worth It?

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.

How much can you realistically earn?

We tested Survey Junkie for almost 5 hours.

Here’s what we earned:

• Hourly rate: $1.09*
• Average time to redeem rewards ($5): 4½ hours*
• Time to get paid: Up to 5 days
• Poll completion rate: 44%

*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:

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.

Factors that will affect your earnings

Your earnings on the site may vary significantly depending on the surveys you qualify for. Your eligibility will depend on your:

• Demographic: Companies are often looking for the opinions of a certain demographic (i.e., millennials, women, etc.) If you’re not part of a group that companies are particularly interested in, you won’t qualify for as many surveys. Unfortunately, there’s no way to tell which demographics are in demand, so we can’t be sure whether our tester’s experience was representative.
• Timing: Survey Junkie says that weekdays are the best time to take surveys, which rotate in at the start of each week. (That said, our tester used Survey Junkie on several different days, including both weekends and weekdays, but she never ran out of surveys to take.)

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.

Other pros and cons to consider

Alternatives to Survey Junkie

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:

• Branded Surveys
• Forthright
• InboxDollars
• InstaGC
• LifePoints
• MyPoints
• Opinion Outpost
• Prime Opinion
• Swagbucks
• Toluna Influencers
• ySense
• Zap Surveys

On Survey Junkie, you earn rewards in the form of points, which accumulate on your account balance.

How much are points worth on Survey Junkie?

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.

How much do you need to earn to get paid?

You’ll need at least 500 points ($5 in rewards) to make a withdrawal on Survey Junkie.

How long does it take to get paid?

How long it takes to get paid on Survey Junkie depends on the redemption method you choose:

• Bank transfer: Survey Junkie says these redemptions may take up to 5 business days.
• Gift card: Survey Junkie doesn’t specify how long gift cards will take to reach you. We didn’t test this, but on other, similar sites, this redemption method is usually quite fast, with gift cards taking no more than a day or two to arrive.
• Visa: If you redeem your rewards as a prepaid Visa card, you should receive it in your email instantly.
• PayPal: Survey Junkie gives conflicting information about how long this takes. In the screenshot below, they claim that PayPal payments take 1–3 days. However, one of Survey Junkie’s help pages says that they take just a few hours to 1 day. We got paid instantly when we redeemed our rewards via PayPal, so there’s a good chance your money will reach you very fast if you opt for this method.

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.

Is there a limit on how much you can earn?

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:

• Sign up
• Take surveys
• Install the browser extension
• Install the desktop app
• Join focus groups (after you’ve used the site for a while)

Sign up

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.

Our experience

We charged through the Survey Junkie signup process in less than 5 minutes and earned 85 points in total (equivalent to $0.85).

Take surveys

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.

Profile Surveys on Survey Junkie

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:

• Technology Profile
• Shopping Profile
• Health Profile
• Household Profile
• Interests Profile
• Travel Profile

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.

Other surveys on Survey Junkie

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.

Our experience

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:

• We qualified for four and got rewards for completing them.
• Four surveys disqualified us but gave us 2–3 points (equivalent to 2–3 cents) for trying.
• One survey disqualified us and gave us absolutely nothing.

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:

• The three-question Profile Survey that gave us no points. This was a waste of time, although not a horrible one (as it took less than a minute).
• A survey that filled up with other respondents and booted us after wasting 5 minutes of our time (although it did at least give us 2 points, equivalent to 2 cents).

Install the browser extension

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.

Opting in to Surf to Earn

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.

Our experience

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).

Install the desktop app

Survey Junkie will give you 100 points (equivalent to $1) for installing its desktop app on your computer.

Our experience

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.

Join focus groups

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:

• Gift cards
• Bank transfers
• Virtual prepaid Visa cards
• PayPal

Gift cards

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:

• Apple
• Amazon
• Groupon
• Sephora
• Starbucks
• Target
• Walmart

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

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.

Virtual prepaid Visa cards

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

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.