A bid is the price a freelancer or agency proposes for a job in an Upwork proposal, an hourly rate for hourly jobs or a total or per-milestone amount for fixed-price jobs, stated before Upwork's service fee is deducted.
When submitting a proposal, the bid form shows the amount the client will see and, beneath it, the amount the freelancer will receive after the flat 10% service fee that Upwork has charged since 2023. The client, for their part, pays a marketplace fee on top of the bid, so the two sides see different totals for the same contract. On an hourly job the bid is a rate, usually pre-filled from the profile's hourly rate and adjustable per proposal; on a fixed-price job it is a total that can be split into milestones.
The bid is a starting point, not a commitment. Terms are often adjusted in the interview, and the figures that bind are those in the offer the client sends and the freelancer accepts. Clients are shown the job's budget or hourly range when they post, and a bid far outside it is the most common reason a proposal is skipped without being read. Bidding below the profile rate to win work is common and visible to the client, who sees both.
An agency's bid is set by whoever submits the proposal and can differ from the member's own profile rate. Rate pages on this index, such as /rates, report profile rates as Upwork publishes them, which are the anchor for bids but not the bids themselves; those are never public.
How Upwork Insights uses it
This term describes Upwork's own rules or product rather than a figure the index measures; the pages that do carry live figures are the stats and rate pages.