What is a good Job Success Score for an Upwork agency?

A good Job Success Score for an Upwork agency is 90% or higher, because that is the line Upwork draws for the Top Rated and Top Rated Plus badges. Among the agencies in this index that have a score at all, the median is 100% as of Oct 31, 2026, so 90% is not an exceptional result for an active agency; it is the normal one, and anything below it needs an explanation.

The score matters more for an agency than for a freelancer because clients hiring a team are hiring on trust before they meet anyone. The agency's score is its own, built from the agency's contracts, and it does not borrow from the scores of the people in it.

What the score measures

The Job Success Score is Upwork's measure of how an account's contracts have gone, expressed from 0 to 100%. Upwork publishes the result and the ingredients, not the formula. The ingredients are public feedback, private feedback that the client gives and the profile never shows, and the shape of the contracts themselves: how large they were, how long they ran, whether the client came back, and whether a contract ended quietly with no feedback at all.

Contracts are weighted by value and length, so one large client who leaves unhappy moves the score more than several small ones who leave content. Repeat clients and long relationships count in the agency's favour. Contracts that sit idle for a long time with no payment can count against it, which is why experienced agencies close finished contracts rather than leaving them open.

Upwork recalculates the score on a two-week cycle. A score is not shown until an account has enough contract history for Upwork to compute one, which is why a new agency has none for its first months.

The 24-month window

The score is computed over the past 24 months of contracts, and Upwork also looks at shorter windows inside that period. The 24-month window has two consequences. A bad contract does not disappear quickly; it stays in the calculation for two years, diluted only by the good contracts that follow it. And an agency that stops taking work keeps its score for a while, then loses it when the window empties, which is why a high score with no recent contracts is less reassuring than it looks.

Private feedback is the part most agencies underestimate. When a contract ends the client answers, privately, whether they would recommend the agency. That answer feeds the score and is never shown on the profile, so an agency can see a row of five-star public reviews and a score that refuses to climb. Asking the client to finish the contract properly, rather than letting it lapse, is the only lever the agency has there.

What the index shows

Upwork Insights reads the score from each agency's public page at observation time. Not every agency has one: the Top Rated Plus stat page states how many of the 28,921 indexed agencies carry a score and how many of those sit at 90% or above, and the median among rated agencies is 100% as of Oct 31, 2026. The badge pool is small mostly because the score pool is small; a score separates the active from the dormant before it separates the good from the bad.

In the Index Score the JSS is the quality component, worth 20 of 100 points, and an unrated agency sits at half. The agency ranking can be sorted by JSS, and every category and country page states its median, so an agency can compare its own score with the agencies it actually competes against rather than with the whole index.

What to do when it drops

A drop is not a verdict, it is a contract. Find which one ended badly, or ended with no feedback, within the last two weeks. If the client simply never closed the contract, ask them to end it and leave feedback; an open contract with nothing happening is a slow leak.

Top Rated accounts can ask Upwork to remove one piece of feedback from the calculation periodically, which is a perk worth keeping in reserve for a genuinely unfair review rather than spending on the first mediocre one. Beyond that, the arithmetic is the only remedy: more contracts that end well, with feedback left, over the following months. Large, long contracts repair the score faster than many small ones, for the same reason they damage it faster.

Say "at the time of writing" to yourself whenever you read a threshold. The 90% line, the two-week cycle and the 24-month window are Upwork's published criteria, and Upwork changes them from time to time.