How much prize money should you offer, Data Science

There is no rule of thumb worth trusting here. The right number depends entirely on what kind of hackathon you are running. So we show you what comparable events actually award.

The 873 priced Data Science hackathons we track have a median prize pool of $1,260, about $9 per participant.

Where these numbers come from

5,371 of the hackathons we track have a known prize pool, normalised to USD. That's the sample, not a survey, not a handful of famous events, and not an LLM's impression of what hackathons pay.
Because we hold the prize pool and the participant count on the same events, we can give you prize-per-participant. Almost nobody publishes that, and it's the number that actually scales with your event.
Prize pools are noisy: mistyped zeros, credits counted as cash, lifetime totals passed off as one event. We run sanity rules over them and report medians, so one bad row can't move your answer.
Thin cohorts don't get a percentile at all. We widen until the number means something, and tell you which cohort we ended up using rather than quoting a median off a handful of events.

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What we measure

Percentiles are computed over events with a known USD prize pool.
A cohort has to be big enough to stand behind before we'll quote a percentile from it. When yours isn't, we widen it and tell you which cohort the answer came from.
We report medians, not averages. A handful of million-dollar prize pools would otherwise drag the number somewhere useless.

Questions

Why is the median so different between categories?

Because the events are different. Blockchain hackathons pay an order of magnitude more than student hackathons. That difference is the most useful thing on this page.

Does a bigger prize pool get more participants?

They correlate in our data, on self-reported attendance figures. That is not the same as causation, and we label it as what it is.

By category

AI & Machine Learning Blockchain & Web3 Web Development Social Impact Fintech Data Science Health & Biotech Climate & Sustainability