Closing your Reward Hours account is a straightforward process. This guide explains how to request deletion, what happens to your unused rewards, and how privacy laws apply to the answers you have already shared.
Many people wonder if they need to delete their account just to stop getting emails. If you feel overwhelmed by survey invitations, you do not have to close your account completely. You can change your email preferences in your profile settings.
This setting lets you pause messages or reduce how often you hear from us. Unsubscribing keeps your account open, saves your reward balance, and lets you log in whenever you want.
Deleting your account is a permanent step. When you choose to delete, you are telling us you no longer want to be a member of Reward Hours. We will close your profile, stop all communications, and begin the process of erasing your personal details. You will not be able to log in, and your account cannot be restored later.
If you are sure you want to leave, we make the process simple. You do not need to call a support line or write a complicated letter. You can handle everything directly from your computer or phone.
Follow these general steps to close your profile:
Once you complete these steps, the system logs you out automatically. Your profile is immediately deactivated, meaning you will stop receiving new survey invitations right away.
A major thing to check before you delete your account is your reward balance.
Claim your rewards first. When an account is closed, any remaining points or unredeemed rewards are permanently erased. We cannot recover them or transfer them to another account after the deletion is processed.
Take a moment to see if you have enough points to claim a reward. If you do, request your payout before you hit the delete button. Wait until you have actually received your gift card, physical product, or digital payment. Some rewards take a few days to process, and you need an active account to receive them successfully.
If your balance is not quite high enough for a reward, you might decide to take one or two final surveys to reach that goal. If you prefer to just leave immediately, you will simply leave those remaining points behind. The choice is completely up to you.
When you take part in market research, your answers help companies make decisions about new products, packaging, and services. By the time you decide to leave Reward Hours, your past opinions have likely already been shared with our clients. However, these answers are handled in a specific way that protects your privacy.
Market research relies on aggregated data. This means your answers are mixed together with the answers of hundreds or thousands of other people. If you said you prefer blue shoes over red shoes, that information becomes part of a large statistical summary. Our clients see that a certain percentage of people like blue shoes, but they do not see your name attached to that preference.
You can read more about how this works in our guide on How anonymous are surveys, really?. Because your answers are anonymized, they cannot be deleted from past research reports.
Anonymized data is information that has been stripped of all personal identifiers, such as your name, email address, or phone number. Since this data can no longer be linked back to you, it is not considered personal data under privacy laws. The statistical results remain intact, but your identity is completely removed.
While we erase your profile and contact information, we are legally required to keep a few specific records for a little longer. This practice is standard across all legitimate market research companies. We only keep what is absolutely necessary, and we store it securely.
The primary reason for keeping limited records is fraud prevention. Unfortunately, some individuals try to create multiple accounts to take the same survey several times. To stop this, we keep a hashed version of your email address or a basic identifier.
A hashed email is a string of random characters generated from your email address. It allows our system to recognize if someone tries to sign up again with the same details, without actually storing the readable email.
We also keep certain records to comply with tax laws and financial regulations. If we have sent you rewards, we must maintain a record of those transactions for our accounting department. These financial records are kept strictly for audits and legal compliance.
We recommend checking with a qualified tax adviser or official government sources if you have questions about your personal tax reporting. Our internal records are never used for marketing, and they are deleted automatically once the legal retention period expires.
Reward Hours sometimes works with specialized research partners to offer you different types of studies. For example, you might have joined an online focus group, completed a product test at home, or recorded a video interview. These partners often use their own platforms to conduct the research.
When you delete your Reward Hours account, we stop sharing your information with any new partners. If you recently participated in a partner study, they may hold your data temporarily to complete their research project. However, they are bound by strict agreements to delete your personal information once the project is finished.
If you gave your contact details directly to a third party during a study, such as signing up for a specific testing app, you may need to ask them directly to delete your data. We always recommend reading the privacy notices provided at the start of any specialized study. Those notices explain exactly who holds your data and how to contact them.
Data deletion is not always an instant event across all computer systems. When you close your account, your profile is deactivated immediately, and you will not receive any more emails from us. However, erasing your data from our backup servers and secondary databases takes a little more time.
Under laws like the General Data Protection Regulation in Europe, you have specific rights regarding your data. You can learn more about these in our article on Your GDPR rights as a survey panel member. Similarly, residents of California have rights under local laws, which we detail in our guide on Your California privacy rights as a survey panel member (CCPA and CPRA).
These laws typically give companies up to 30 days to complete a data deletion request. We work hard to process deletions much faster than the legal requirement. Most of your information is purged from our active systems within a few days. Our automated maintenance routines then sweep through our secure backups to remove any remaining traces.
If you ever miss sharing your opinions, you will not be able to reactivate your old profile. Instead, you are always welcome to create a free account and start fresh.
No, account deletion is permanent. Once you confirm the deletion, your profile and reward balance are erased completely. You would need to start over with a new account if you want to return.
You can change your communication preferences in your profile settings. This allows you to pause survey invitations or reduce how often we email you. Your account stays open and your reward balance remains safe.
Your past answers remain in our research reports, but they are fully anonymized. We remove your name and contact details so the data cannot be linked back to you. Our clients only see combined statistical summaries.
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