Tara, a young, lonely woman, drops out of college unbeknownst to her mother and becomes a surrogate for Gabriel and Elliott, a well-established gay couple. Suddenly, Tara finds herself carrying not only their future child, but a terrible secret as well. Compensation is a dialogue about the complex systems that coerce women into outsourcing their bodies for income, the ethical implications of men purchasing access to those bodies, and the profound yearning for family that drives these people to entangle themselves in these systems in the first place.