Monitoring of cotton fields to collect information to improve decisions for protecting cotton fiber and seeds is the most important economic dimension of cotton sampling. For new insect sampling procedures and materials to be adopted by farmers and consultants, cotton specialists should try to understand the choices of cotton farmers, IPM consultants, and researchers of other crops. The overall cost of useful cotton monitoring information has fallen rapidly in the past fifteen years because of increased trapping efficiency (primarily due to phermones), decreased cost of evaluating information (because of refined thresholds, manuals, and computers), increased field and farm size, and improved training of many farmers, scouts and consultants. Studies across various cotton regions and other field crops show that the following factors are associated with more frequent use of private, hired pest management consultants: higher expected pest levels, where crop values per acre are higher, where cotton farmer pest monitoring skills are lower, where monitoring fees are lower, where farm and field size is larger, where farmer time is used more for other crops, and where fewer public IPM services are provided. There is evidence from a few cotton studies that field scouting either increases cotton yields per acre, and/or lowers pesticide use and variability in cotton yields. There are diminishing returns to cotton monitoring similar to other resources, but with improvements in monitoring procedures such as sequential sampling, and monitoring of multiple pest-crop-beneficial conditions there is likely to be continued increases in cotton monitoring.