PayPal AI Hackathon 2026: Build with PayPal and AI for $67,500 in cash

The PayPal AI Hackathon pays $67,500 in cash for working projects that use PayPal and AI together, and it is open to developers in most countries worldwide. There are 23 prizes: 20 paid in cash and led by a $12,000 first place, plus 3 Render prizes paid in $2,250 of Render credits. Entries close on Thursday 12 November 2026 at 12:00 pm Pacific Time, which is 20:00 UTC, and the dates table shows that moment in your own local time. You need a free PayPal sandbox account, any AI tool you like and a demo that actually runs.

PayPal runs this hackathon online through Devpost, a website that hosts coding competitions along with their registration, submission and judging pages. There are no tracks and no set problem statements. The single core rule is that your project must meaningfully use both PayPal and AI, so the payment side has to matter to what the project actually does.

Over 16,000 people had registered by 17 October 2026, so your entry needs to work, be clear and be well explained, not only be clever. Below you will find the deadline in UTC and in your local time, which countries can enter, every prize, the full submission checklist, how judging works and the rules that can knock an entry out.

Hackathon guide · PayPal (administered by Devpost)

PayPal AI Hackathon

Open

Time left to submitThu 12 Nov 2026, 20:00 UTC

Last moment to submit: Thu 12 Nov 2026, 20:00 UTC

Prize pool

$67,500 cash

20 cash prizes, top prize $12,000, plus 3 prizes paid in $2,250 of Render credits

Deadline (UTC)

Thu 12 Nov 2026, 20:00 UTC

Thu 12 Nov 2026, 12:00 pm Pacific Time (PST, UTC-8)

Who can enter

Adults (age of majority) in most countries

Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and OFAC-sanctioned places excluded

Format

Online, on Devpost

Solo, team or organisation; no maximum team size

Open the official pageOfficial rulesAll open hackathons

PayPal AI Hackathon: the short answer

What is PayPal AI Hackathon?

The PayPal AI Hackathon, billed as Build what’s next with PayPal and AI, is a global online competition sponsored by PayPal Inc. of San Jose, California and administered by Devpost, Inc. of New York. A hackathon is a time-boxed contest where people build a working software project and submit it for judging. This one runs for six weeks, from 1 October to 12 November 2026, and it is fully online, so you can take part from any country the rules do not exclude.

The theme is open. The official overview page says there are no prescribed problem statements and no set of tracks. The one fundamental requirement is that your project meaningfully uses both PayPal and AI. PayPal counts broadly here: the rules cover all PayPal services, for example Venmo, Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Zettle, Paidy, Hyperwallet, Simility and Swift Financial. The AI side can be any tool, model or platform you choose.

To get you started, the Resources page suggests five example areas: AI agents or automation, including agents that actually transact and agent-to-agent commerce; money movement experiences; business solutions for merchants, freelancers, creators and marketplaces; consumer experiences; and social impact ideas. These are inspiration only, not categories you must pick. Agentic commerce, a phrase you will see often in this hackathon, means AI agents that complete purchases or payments on someone’s behalf rather than only recommending them.

You can enter alone, as a team or as an organisation, with a brand new project or an existing one you significantly updated during the Submission Period. Ten companies offer optional sponsor tools (AG Grid, APIMatic, Astropods, Bryntum, Channel3, Elastic, KERNEL, Postman, Render and Zapier), and five of them, AG Grid, APIMatic, Bryntum, Channel3 and Render, put up their own sponsor prizes. Day-to-day support runs through the PayPal Discord, a group chat server where the PayPal team answers questions, and Rules section 15 gives support@devpost.com as the email for questions.

Key dates and deadlines in UTC and your local time

The Official Rules give every time in Pacific Time, and that matters because US daylight saving ends on Sunday 1 November 2026. The Submission Period opened in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT, UTC-7), but the deadline falls in Pacific Standard Time (PST, UTC-8). The table below gives each time as the rules state it, the same moment in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the reference clock that every time zone is measured from, and the time in your own time zone, which your browser works out for you.

The deadline is 12:00 pm PST on Thursday 12 November 2026, which is 20:00 UTC. That is 3:00 pm EST in New York and 8:00 pm GMT in London, still on the Thursday. In places four or more hours ahead of UTC, such as the UAE and Oman, South Asia, East Asia and Australia, the same moment already falls on Friday 13 November local time, usually in the early hours or the morning. If your local deadline shows Friday, it falls in the early hours or morning of that Friday, not at the end of the day, so plan to finish on Thursday.

The Official Rules and the Devpost schedule page disagree on the winners announcement. The rules say on or around Monday 21 December 2026 at 2:00 pm Pacific Time, which is 22:00 UTC, while the schedule page says 21 December at 9:00 am PST, which is 17:00 UTC. The rules state that they prevail over any other hackathon material, so treat 2:00 pm PT as the official time, and treat it as approximate.

All four webinars have already happened. The overview page links YouTube videos for the 6, 7 and 12 October sessions, while the 13 October session links only to a Microsoft Teams event page, so no recording of it is linked. The updates page confirms that the 6 October Start building with PayPal recording is on YouTube, and it covers the rules and prizes, the PayPal AI Toolkit and a full sandbox setup, which makes it the best one to watch first.

Prizes

The prize pool is $67,500 in US dollar cash, spread over 20 cash prizes. Three Render prizes add $2,250 in Render credits, which makes 23 prizes in all and gives the $69,750 headline figure on the overview page. First place pays $12,000. Every cash amount is in US dollars wherever you live, and winners pay their own fees for receiving the prize, such as wire and currency exchange fees.

There are three kinds of prize. Grand Prizes and Honorable Mentions are open to every eligible submission. Sponsor Prizes are only open to projects that actually use that sponsor’s tools.

A single project can win at most one Grand Prize plus one Sponsor Prize, or one Honorable Mention plus one Sponsor Prize. Using several sponsor tools makes you eligible for each of those sponsor prizes, but you can still win only one of them.

Render prizes are paid in Render credits, not cash, and Render is a cloud hosting service. That is why the cash total is $67,500 while the headline total is $69,750. The rules also attach a six-month APIMatic Business subscription to each APIMatic prize, and no value is stated for it anywhere.

Who can enter, and from which countries

You must have reached the age of majority where you live at the time you enter. The rules give no fixed age, so it depends on the law of your country or state; in most US states, for example, it is 18, so check the age that applies where you live. You can enter as an individual, as a team of eligible individuals, or as an organisation such as a company, nonprofit, LLC or partnership that already exists when you enter. The rules make no distinction between students and working professionals.

The hackathon is open to all countries and territories except standard exceptions, which is how the overview sidebar puts it. You cannot enter if you live in, or your organisation is based in, a place where US or local law prohibits taking part or receiving a prize. The rules say that includes Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran and North Korea, plus any country under comprehensive sanctions from the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), the US agency that runs trade sanctions. The official FAQ says this applies to every team member, and that being able to register on Devpost does not make you eligible.

Some people are excluded because of who they work for. PayPal, Devpost and any organisation involved in the design, production, paid promotion, running or distribution of the hackathon cannot enter, and neither can their employees, representatives, agents or immediate family and household members. Judges cannot enter, nor can any company or individual that employs a judge, along with the parent companies, subsidiaries and affiliates of all of these, and PayPal or Devpost can exclude anyone whose entry would create a real or apparent conflict of interest. If you work at one of the sponsor-tool companies, note that a company that employs a judge cannot enter, and the rules do not say clearly whether its individual employees can, so ask on the PayPal Discord before you build.

Teams and solo entries

There is no maximum team size, and the FAQ answers that question with a plain no. One person can be on several teams and can also enter alone, but every team member must be eligible, including on country of residence.

Each team or organisation appoints one Representative, who must also be eligible. The Representative submits the entry on the team’s behalf, receives any prize and decides how to split it among members. Because the rules leave the split entirely to that person, it is sensible to agree it as a team before you submit, especially as winners and all team members are responsible for their own fees for receiving the prize.

To add teammates, every person first registers for the hackathon on Devpost. One teammate clicks Enter a submission to start the project, then invites the others by email or by sharing the team invite link from the project’s team section. Each teammate opens that link while logged in to their own Devpost account and accepts. There is no accept or reject button inside the email itself, so acceptance always happens on Devpost.

You can make more than one submission, but each one must be unique and substantially different from your other entries.

How to enter PayPal AI Hackathon, step by step

The whole process happens on the Devpost hackathon site and the PayPal developer site. The overview estimates about 5 minutes to get PayPal sandbox access and about 30 minutes to read the resources, so most of your time can go into building, recording and testing.

What you must submit

Your entry is a bundle of text and links on Devpost. The rules say judges are not required to test your project and may judge it only on the text description, images and video, so every piece must explain the project on its own, even though a working build is still required.

These are the items the Official Rules and the overview’s What to Submit section ask for.

The project must install and run consistently on the platform it was built for and behave the way your video and description show. If it runs on hardware other than a smartphone, tablet or desktop computer, the sponsor may ask for physical access to that hardware.

If you are aiming for a sponsor prize, the project must use that sponsor’s tools. The extra detail on what each sponsor looks for sits on that sponsor’s page on the hackathon site rather than in the rules, so read it before you build.

How entries are judged

Judging runs from 1 December to 15 December 2026 in two stages. Stage One is a pass/fail check of whether your project reasonably fits the theme and reasonably uses the required PayPal APIs or SDKs. Projects that pass go on to Stage Two, where five criteria carry equal weight. The rules give no percentages, but equal weighting means each criterion counts for one fifth of the score.

Ties are broken by the higher score on the first criterion, Technological Implementation, then the next criterion, and so on down the list. If entries are tied on every criterion, the judges vote. The rules also say judging may use expert panels, peer review, automated AI-driven analysis or any combination of these, in one or more rounds.

Tools, APIs and what they cost

Two things are required. The first is the PayPal developer platform through the free PayPal sandbox, which you reach with an existing PayPal account or a free new one on PayPal Developer. At least one PayPal technology, API, SDK, product or developer capability must be meaningfully integrated, and any PayPal family service counts, including Venmo, Braintree, Xoom, Honey, Zettle, Paidy and Hyperwallet. The second is an AI tool, model or platform of your choice from any provider. The official pages do not say what AI usage costs, because that depends on the tool you pick, so check its free tier or pricing before you build.

PayPal links several AI building blocks from the Resources page: the PayPal AI Toolkit on GitHub, the PayPal AI documentation at docs.paypal.ai, an Agent Toolkit quickstart, an MCP server quickstart and an agent tools reference. If your idea involves an AI agent that pays or gets paid, start with these. PayPal’s API collection is also available on Postman, a tool for sending test requests to an API, which helps you explore what the API returns before you write code, and the Postman sponsor page links a free way to get started.

Sponsor tools are optional, and the sponsor pages list free access. AG Grid offers a free 45-day trial licence for AG Studio and a PayPal plus AG Grid boilerplate repository, meaning starter code you can copy. APIMatic offers a Context Plugin for PayPal that works with AI coding agents without extra credentials, plus one free month of APIMatic Basic for participants who used it. Astropods offers a free account, Bryntum a 45-day trial, Channel3 an API key with no credit card and 20,000 free API credits with promo code PAYPAL-HACKATHON-2026, Elastic a 14-day free trial you can extend yourself by 30 days or free local Elasticsearch, KERNEL $50 in credits, Render $50 in credits, and Zapier a 14-day Professional trial with no card for new accounts before moving to its Free plan. The rules say no purchase or payment is needed to enter or win.

Rules that trip people up

A strong idea can still be knocked out by a simple rule. These are the ones to check twice before you submit.

Ownership, prize payment and tax

You keep ownership. Rules section 7 says all submissions remain the intellectual property of the individuals or organisations that developed them. By entering you give PayPal a non-exclusive licence to use your entry for judging, and PayPal and Devpost may promote the submission and use the name, likeness, voice and image of everyone who contributed to it in material promoting the hackathon and its results, during the hackathon and for three years afterwards. Your code must still be in a public, open source repository, under a licence you choose.

Your entry must be your original work, solely owned by you, your team or your organisation, and must not infringe anyone’s rights. You may hire third-party technical help if you own all rights to the result, and you may build on open source code if you follow its licences and add new features and functionality on top. Any third-party SDK, API or data must be used in line with its terms, and projects that received funding, contract work or a commercial licence from PayPal or Devpost before the Submission Period ends are not allowed.

Prizes go to the individual entrant, the team’s Representative or the organisation, either mailed to the winner’s address or sent electronically to a bank account, and only after the winner affidavit and other Required Forms come back. Those forms are due 10 business days after they are sent, and prizes arrive within 60 days of the completed forms being received. Winners pay their own fees for receiving the prize, such as wire and currency exchange fees, and are responsible for taxes where they live, as well as their own country’s foreign exchange and banking rules. US residents may need a W-9 form and residents of other countries a W-8BEN, the US tax form non-US people use to confirm their foreign status, and part of the prize may be withheld under US or local tax law. Prizes cannot be transferred, PayPal may substitute a prize of equal or greater value, and the rules give no withholding rate or say whether PayPal itself is used to pay, so check with a tax adviser before you count on a net figure.

Project ideas that fit the brief

These are our own ideas, not official suggestions. Each one makes PayPal and AI both essential, which is exactly what Stage One checks, and each fits one of the example areas on the Resources page.

Tips to give your entry the best chance

• Write your one-line problem statement before any code: who it is for, what is broken and how PayPal and AI fix it. Both Potential Impact and Presentation reward a specific, credible problem for a real audience.
• Make the video carry the entry on its own. Judges may score only the description, images and video, so show a full flow, including a completed sandbox payment, well inside three minutes.
• Build the PayPal payment flow first and the AI layer second. Getting PayPal working early covers the Stage One check, and every remaining day can go into design and polish.
• Share only sandbox credentials and test keys in your README, never live PayPal keys or personal passwords, and put a spending cap on any paid AI key judges will use.
• Test your repo like a stranger. Clone it into a fresh folder, follow only your README and fix anything that needs a step you forgot to write down. On GitHub, a LICENSE file in the top folder is usually detected and shown in the About section automatically.
• Name every AI tool and model in the tools statement and say exactly what each does in your project. Specific answers make Technological Implementation easier to score.
• Pick one or two sponsor tools at most, and only where they genuinely help, since a project can win only one sponsor prize and sponsors want real use, not a mention.
• Ask questions on the PayPal Discord early, especially if PayPal sign-up fails for your country or phone number, and aim to submit a day before the deadline in your own time zone to leave room for upload problems.

Please note: we update this page from time to time, but hackathon dates, prizes and rules can change quickly, and there can be a gap between a change and our update. Check the official rules before you enter or submit. This guide helps you plan; it is not legal or tax advice, and ReconScribe is not responsible for decisions made on it.

PayPal AI Hackathon frequently asked questions

Which countries can enter the PayPal AI Hackathon?

It is open to all countries and territories except standard exceptions. Residents of Brazil, Quebec, Russia, Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea and any other country comprehensively sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) cannot enter, and neither can anyone in a place where US or local law prohibits taking part or receiving a prize. You must have reached the age of majority where you live, every member of your team must be eligible too, and being able to register on Devpost does not make you eligible.

What is the PayPal AI Hackathon deadline?

The deadline is Thursday 12 November 2026 at 12:00 pm Pacific Time (PST, UTC-8), which is 20:00 UTC. That is 3:00 pm EST and 8:00 pm GMT on the Thursday, while in places four or more hours ahead of UTC it already falls on Friday 13 November local time. Winners are announced on or around Monday 21 December 2026 at 2:00 pm PT, which is 22:00 UTC.

Is the PayPal AI Hackathon free to enter?

Yes. The rules say no purchase or payment is needed to enter or win, and the PayPal sandbox is free. The main possible cost is your AI tool, because the official pages leave that to whichever provider you choose, and several sponsors offer free trials or credits.

Do I need a PayPal business account to take part?

The official pages do not mention a business account. You need PayPal sandbox access, using an existing PayPal account or a free new one on developer.paypal.com. Sign-up options vary by country and are separate from hackathon eligibility, and if sign-up fails for your country or phone number the FAQ says to ask the PayPal team on the PayPal Discord.

Are there tracks or a fixed problem statement?

No. The overview says there are no prescribed problem statements and no set of tracks. The Resources page suggests five example areas, from AI agents that transact to social impact ideas, but they are inspiration only.

Which AI tools can I use?

Any AI tool, model or platform you like. Your submission needs a tools statement that names each AI tool, model or service and explains how you used it. PayPal’s AI Toolkit, Agent Toolkit and MCP server quickstarts are linked from the Resources page if you want a head start on payments inside an AI agent.

How many people can be on a team?

There is no maximum team size. Every member must be eligible, including on country of residence, and the team appoints one Representative who submits the entry, receives any prize and splits it among members. You can also join more than one team and still enter alone.

Can I submit a project I started before 1 October 2026?

Yes, if you significantly updated it during the Submission Period, which opened on 1 October 2026 at 9:15 am Pacific Time (16:15 UTC). Your submission must explain what changed, and PayPal and Devpost decide at their sole discretion what counts as significant.

How long should the demo video be?

The rules say it should be less than three minutes, and judges are not required to watch beyond three minutes. It must be uploaded to YouTube as a public video and linked on the submission form. It must not include third-party trademarks or copyrighted music used without permission, and it must be in English or come with an English translation.

Can one project win more than one prize?

Yes, up to two. A project can win one Grand Prize plus one Sponsor Prize, or one Honorable Mention plus one Sponsor Prize. Using several sponsor tools makes you eligible for each of those sponsor prizes, but you can still win only one of them.

Who owns the code I submit?

You do. The rules say submissions remain the intellectual property of the people or organisations that built them, and PayPal gets a non-exclusive licence to use the entry for judging. Your repository must still be public and open source, and PayPal and Devpost may use your project and contributors’ names and images in promotion for three years after the hackathon.

How are prizes paid, and is tax deducted?

Cash prizes are stated in US dollars and are mailed to the winner’s address or sent electronically to a bank account within 60 days of the completed winner forms being received. US residents may need a W-9 form and residents of other countries a W-8BEN, part of the prize may be withheld under US or local tax law, and winners pay their own wire and currency exchange fees. The rules give no withholding rate, so check with a tax adviser about your own situation.

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Sources

• PayPal AI Hackathon overview (Devpost)
• Official Rules
• Official FAQ
• Official schedule page
• Official Resources page
• Official updates page
• AG Grid sponsor page
• APIMatic sponsor page
• Channel3 sponsor page
• KERNEL sponsor page
• Render sponsor page
• PayPal Developer (sandbox sign-up)