What is a fair hourly price to pay an intern?

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August 28, 2024

by a searcher from Northwestern University - Kellogg School of Management in Nashville, TN, USA

What is a fair hourly price to pay an intern who is a first-year MBA candidate to help with market research?

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Reply by a searcher
from University of Pennsylvania in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Likely depends on (a) if you're doing it for the summer or off-cycle/part-time, (b) the MBA program you're focused on, and (c) what career benefit they see. Presume it's off-cycle given you're posting in August. On the higher end, summer MBA internship pay can be ~$80-100/hour - not recommending you do this, just sharing the comps.

On the lower end, off-semester internships can be "free" or based on fixed project fees for discrete projects payable on completion. I've seen this go as low as $2K/project to $40K. If there's mentorship/exposure/flexible/remote/fringe benefits like travel, most are going to be less concerned about a certain hourly rate. If you would like to go hourly, I'd estimate the amount of hours for the project in advance.
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Reply by a searcher
from Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX, USA
I recently graduated with my MBA. The summer internship I had came out to about $65/hour at a fortune 500 company. This was on the upper end of my cohort. I believe MBA typically end up anywhere between $40/hour up to $65/ hour. I did have an internship offer that was for $33.60/hour. If it's during the school year, most of the people in my cohort take around $20 - $25/hour part-time gigs helping out around the school. This summer I had a first year MBA intern for me full time. We came to an equity comp agreement, since I didn't have money to pay him over the summer, that was based on the going hourly rate of MBAs, transaction size of the business, and his involvement in the deal if we found one that I transacted on.
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