Earnings visibility is the profile setting that lets a freelancer or agency choose whether the lifetime amount earned on Upwork is shown on the public profile or kept private.
By default Upwork prints the total earned near the top of a profile, next to the jobs completed and hours billed. The setting in the profile's privacy options turns the figure off, and the profile then shows the contract record without the money. On some surfaces, such as the public hire pages, Upwork prints a band rather than an exact figure, so a profile may show "$10K+ earned" in one place and a precise total in another. The choice is the account holder's and can be changed at any time; agencies make it for the agency account separately from the choices of their members.
Hiding earnings changes nothing in the account's standing. The Job Success Score, the badges and the feedback are all still public, and Upwork's own matching still knows the figures. What changes is what a client can read: many clients use lifetime earnings as a quick proxy for experience, so a hidden figure is often taken as a weak signal, when in fact it may belong to a profile with a long record. The reverse mistake is to read a hidden figure as zero; a profile with no earnings at all shows a zero, not a blank.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The index reads what the public page shows. An agency that hides its earnings but has completed jobs is listed among the 28,921 agencies, marked as hidden earnings and ranked after every agency that shows a figure, with billed hours standing in for earnings in the scale part of the Index Score. Freelancers are handled more strictly: only profiles with $10,000 or more in public earnings enter the freelancer ranking, so a profile that keeps earnings private is not ranked and not shown, which is explained in the methodology.