Learn

Game guide, tutorials & frequently asked questions

Back to Handbook

Market

10 lessons

Order-book trading, local versus global markets, fees, and the people and share markets.

You can read every lesson right now. Log in to take the quizzes and earn gold.

Lesson 8 of 10 0/5 correct this lesson
8

The people market

Buying and selling workers between players. · 10 min read

So far we have traded things: wood, bread, jewelry. Now for something that surprises most newcomers in the best way. You can trade people too. Workers are not only hired from your own town; they can be bought and sold between players on the People market. If you suddenly need a particular specialist and do not want to wait to train one, this is the fastest way to get the exact worker you need. And if you find yourself with spare labour sitting idle, this is how you turn those extra hands into ready cash.

It can feel a little odd at first, putting a worker up for sale like a sack of grain, but the rules are humane and sensible once you see them. Let us go through the few things that make the people market its own special hall.

What you can list, and how

  • Only free workers can be listed: ones who are idle and were not part of your town's founding population. Your founders stay with you; busy workers cannot be sold mid-job.
  • Workers trade as whole units. You cannot sell half a person, so every listing is a round number of complete workers.
  • A worker keeps their identity when sold. Their name, age and remaining lifespan all travel with them to the new owner.

That last point is a lovely detail and a practical one. When you buy a worker, you are not getting a blank slate; you are getting a specific person with a name, an age, and a certain amount of life left in them. So a young worker with many days ahead is worth more than an older one near the end of their lifespan, even at the same profession. When you browse the people market, it pays to glance at what life remains in a worker before you decide what they are worth to you.

This is the one way the people market really does differ from the goods halls, and it is worth letting it sink in. A sack of grain is a sack of grain; one unit is exactly like the next, so you only ever compare on price. A worker is not like that at all. Two workers of the very same profession, listed at the very same price, can be quite different bargains, because one might be young with a long working life ahead and the other old with only a little time left. So when you shop for people, price is only half the story; the other half is how much of their life you are actually buying. A slightly dearer worker who will serve you for far longer can easily be the better deal, and learning to weigh those two things together is the small extra skill this hall asks of you.

The housing rule, which catches everyone once

Here is the single thing most likely to trip you up, so let us be very clear. Because workers need somewhere to live, a buyer must have spare housing in their town before they can take any. People are not goods that vanish into a storage pile; they need a room. If you try to buy a worker while every house in your town is full, the purchase is simply refused, and that is the game protecting you from buying someone who would have nowhere to sleep. The fix is exactly what you would expect: make room first.

So before you go shopping for workers, take a moment to check your housing. If you have empty rooms, wonderful, buy away. If every house is full, build a new house or upgrade an existing one to open up rooms, or buy more housing capacity, and then come back for your worker. It is a small extra step, but skipping it is the most common reason a people purchase bounces, so build the habit early and you will never be caught out.

If you think about it, the housing rule is really just the game being humane on your behalf, and once you see it that way it stops feeling like a nuisance. Workers in CoinRepublik are treated as people, not as cargo, and people need a roof. The game refusing to sell you a worker with nowhere to sleep is no different from a sensible employer declining to hire someone they could not possibly accommodate. It also quietly keeps your town honest: it stops you from collecting more hands than you can actually house and put to work, which would do you no good anyway. So rather than fighting the rule, fold it into how you plan. When you know a big hire is coming, raise the housing first, and the purchase will glide through with a room standing ready.

It also helps to know when this hall is most useful to you, so you reach for it at the right moments. The people market shines when you need a specific specialist in a hurry. Say a finished workshop is sitting idle, waiting on a profession you do not yet have, and training one of your own from scratch would take time you would rather not lose. Buying a ready-made worker who already has that profession gets your building running today. On the other side, if you have idle workers you were not part of your founding crew, and you simply have no job for them, listing them turns that spare labour into cash you can put to better use. Used that way, the people market is less a curiosity and more a handy shortcut around the slower business of growing and training your own.

In every other way, the people market behaves like the halls you already know. Like everything else, people trade on your local market in your country's currency, or on the global market in gold, with the same cheapest-first offers and the same flip between the two tabs. The seller pays the usual fees, the buyer pays the asking price, and the worker comes home to a waiting room. Once you have your housing sorted, trading people is just trading, with names attached. Next, the last specialised hall, where you can own a piece of the game itself.

Housing first, always

Before you buy workers, make absolutely sure your town has spare rooms waiting. If every house is full, the purchase will be refused, plain and simple. Build or upgrade a house, or buy more housing, before you go to the people market, and your new worker will have somewhere to live the moment they arrive.

Lesson quiz — 5 questions

Each correct answer pays a random 0.0001–0.0005 gold; a wrong answer forfeits the same stake to the game fund (never more than you hold).

1.Which workers can be listed for sale?

+0.0001–0.0005 gold

2.Workers trade as...

+0.0001–0.0005 gold

3.When a worker is sold, they keep...

+0.0001–0.0005 gold

4.Before buying workers, the buyer needs...

+0.0001–0.0005 gold

5.Workers trade on...

+0.0001–0.0005 gold