Numerai Weekly Payouts: When Does NMR Actually Land?

Numerai weekly payouts settle 30 days after a round closes, at 20:00 UTC, almost always on Wednesday or Thursday. The cash-flow timing every staker should know.

A Numerai stake takes a full month to turn into a payout. Across 1,064 resolved tournament-8 rounds, 74% of all NMR earned has landed on a Wednesday or Thursday at exactly 20:00 UTC, and the median round resolves 30 days after it closes. On the 2026-04-28 snapshot used here, the rounds list showed 23 unresolved rounds holding 16.7M NMR awaiting settlement.

This post is about the timing of those payouts, not the size. For magnitude see Round Economics and Is Staking Profitable?. Every number below comes from rounds.round_resolve_time and rounds.total_earned for tournament 8.

The Wednesday-Thursday Window

Resolved payouts cluster sharply on two weekdays.

Bar chart of NMR earned by day of week the round resolved, with weekly rounds dominating Wednesday at 566K NMR and Thursday at 1.03M NMR while daily rounds spread evenly across Tuesday through Saturday at roughly 210K NMR each
Bar chart of NMR earned by day of week the round resolved, with weekly rounds dominating Wednesday at 566K NMR and Thursday at 1.03M NMR while daily rounds spread evenly across Tuesday through Saturday at roughly 210K NMR each

Weekly rounds (the original Numerai cadence, opened on Saturday) resolve on Wednesday for 35% of the cohort and Thursday for 64%. Thursday alone has paid out 1.03M NMR earned across all resolved weekly rounds — the single biggest payout day in the tournament's history. Daily rounds spread their payouts more evenly, with about 210K NMR earned on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday each. No round has ever resolved on a Sunday or Monday.

Every resolve hour also matches: 100% of the 1,064 resolves landed at 20:00 UTC. That is 4 PM US Eastern or 8 PM in London. New NMR appearing outside that hour is more likely to be a withdrawal, transfer, or accounting update than a normal round resolve.

Monthly Cash Flow Has a Floor and a Ceiling

Aggregating to months smooths the day-of-week noise.

Bar chart of monthly NMR earned and burned from May 2024 to May 2026 with a net-flow line, showing earned bars between 13K and 34K NMR per month and net flow ranging from -5K to 28K NMR
Bar chart of monthly NMR earned and burned from May 2024 to May 2026 with a net-flow line, showing earned bars between 13K and 34K NMR per month and net flow ranging from -5K to 28K NMR

Across the last 13 months the resolved tournament earned 271K NMR and burned 136K NMR, leaving 135K NMR net distributed to stakers — about 10K NMR per month on average. The earnings floor sits near 17K NMR (June and September 2025 both came in at 17.2K) and the ceiling near 34K NMR (April 2025). January 2026 was the only net-negative month in the window, paying 13K NMR earned against 17.9K NMR burned.

Earnings cluster by season but only loosely. March and April have led the past two years; June, July, and October have lagged. The pattern is not strong enough to time a stake by, but it does show that monthly flows oscillate within a 2x band rather than spiking dramatically.

The 30-Day Settlement Lag

Every round, regardless of type, takes about a calendar month to settle.

Histogram of days from round close to round resolve, with weekly rounds clustering at 25 days for older rounds and 30 days for recent ones, while daily rounds split between 30 and 32 days
Histogram of days from round close to round resolve, with weekly rounds clustering at 25 days for older rounds and 30 days for recent ones, while daily rounds split between 30 and 32 days

Most weekly rounds settle exactly 30 days after their close (178 of 349 rounds), with an older cohort of 123 rounds at 25 days from before the schedule was lengthened. Daily rounds settle at either 30 days (359 rounds) or 32 days (356 rounds); the longer tail comes from weekend gaps in the scoring window. Median lag is 30.1 days for weekly rounds and 30.3 days for daily rounds.

The reason is structural. Numerai scores submissions against roughly 20 business days of forward stock returns, so the earliest a round can finalize is one calendar month after its submission window closes. A new stake generally enters a settlement window about a month after the relevant round closes.

The Pipeline You Are Waiting On

At any moment the protocol is sitting on roughly a month's worth of unresolved rounds.

Bar chart of stake at risk per round in the active Numerai pipeline by scheduled resolve date over the next 30 days, with daily rounds at 700K-750K NMR each plus a few weekly rounds, and a cumulative line rising from 700K NMR on April 28 to 16.7M NMR by May 28
Bar chart of stake at risk per round in the active Numerai pipeline by scheduled resolve date over the next 30 days, with daily rounds at 700K-750K NMR each plus a few weekly rounds, and a cumulative line rising from 700K NMR on April 28 to 16.7M NMR by May 28

There are 23 unresolved tournament-8 rounds queued up in the 2026-04-28 snapshot: 18 daily rounds and 5 weekly rounds, every one already opened or submitted, with settlement pending on the forward-return scoring window. Each daily round holds 700-750K NMR at risk, and the weekly rounds carry the same. Cumulative stake awaiting settlement reaches 16.7M NMR by May 28, the scheduled resolve date of the newest round in the snapshot.

In the 2026-04-28 snapshot, the leaderboard reflected payouts from rounds submitted four to five weeks earlier. Submissions from that week would not move the leaderboard's settled-payout columns until late May, and individual stakers could expect about five rounds to resolve every week -- one weekly plus four dailies -- landing roughly 5,200 NMR per week on the tournament as a whole.

Planning Around the Cycle

The cycle is predictable enough to plan around. Every Wednesday and Thursday at 20:00 UTC the protocol releases the largest weekly payouts; daily payouts spread across Tuesday through Saturday at the same hour. The lag between submission and settlement is locked at about 33 days from open to resolve, with 30 of those days spent waiting after submissions close.

For cash-flow purposes a fresh stake is fully exposed for roughly one calendar month before any portion of it returns. If a position is sized to depend on weekly payout liquidity, count five rounds resolving per week and budget around the unresolved NMR pipeline sitting in the protocol's hands. For comparison across tournaments, see Cross-Tournament Comparison; for the broader rhythm, Numerai Round Cadence covers the open and close side of the clock.