How to pay clinical trial participants
Late payments cost you participants. Set the amounts with the ethics committee, tie each payment to a completed visit and pay in local currency.
Interactive tour on demo data. Click through at your own pace, no email asked.
All guides and toursInside the demo
A 30-minute call on your protocol, your sites and the modules you need.
- Separate stipends for time from reimbursements for costs.
- Get the amounts and the schedule approved by the ethics committee.
- Pay per completed visit, so a participant who leaves keeps what they earned.
- Keep a record of each payment: visit, amount, currency, date and approver.
Participant payments cover two things: a stipend for the time and burden of a visit, and reimbursement of costs such as travel, parking or meals. You set them up with the ethics committee, tie each payment to a completed visit, and pay fast. Participants who wait weeks for their money miss the next visit.
How to set up payments in 6 steps
- Define what you pay. List stipends per visit type and reimbursable costs, with caps and the receipts you need.
- Get ethics approval. Describe the amounts and the schedule in the consent form. The committee checks that payments do not pressure people to join.
- Pay per visit. Spread payments across the study. A participant who withdraws keeps what they earned for completed visits.
- Trigger payments from the visit record. Release the payment when the visit is marked complete, so no one files a request.
- Pay in local currency. For multi-country studies, pay through local channels and follow each country's tax and reporting rules.
- Keep the audit record. Store the visit, amount, currency, date and approver for each payment, and protect bank details with role-based access.
Mistakes to avoid
- Paying everything at the end. Ethics committees see it as pressure to stay, and participants wait months.
- Cash and vouchers at the site. Coordinators lose time and the record gets patchy.
- Bank details in a spreadsheet. That breaks the GDPR and your audit trail.
Payments in Datacapt
In Datacapt, a coordinator marks a visit complete in Calendar and Scheduling, and Datacapt creates a payment order in the currency set for the study. The clinical team confirms each order, and finance validates the batch, then exports it for your bank as a SEPA file for EU payments, a CSV or through the API. Your finance team reviews orders from every study on one dashboard, and your auditor sees the visit, amount, currency, payment date and every change on each record.
Keep reading
Is paying trial participants allowed?
Yes, in most countries, with amounts the ethics committee approves. Some countries limit payments to patients in therapeutic trials to the reimbursement of costs.
What is the difference between a stipend and a reimbursement?
A stipend pays for time and burden. A reimbursement repays costs the participant spent, such as travel, on receipts or at a fixed rate.
Are participant payments taxable?
It depends on the country and the amount. In the United States, sponsors may need to report payments above a threshold to the IRS. Check the rules in each country before the first payment.