Ending a contract is the step on Upwork by which either the client or the freelancer closes a contract, settling any remaining escrow, opening the feedback both sides leave, and fixing the outcome that feeds the Job Success Score.
Either party can end an Upwork contract at any time from the contract page, and the other is notified. On a fixed-price contract the closing party decides what happens to any funded milestone still in escrow: release it, request a refund, or leave it for the other side to confirm. On an hourly contract the final week's hours are invoiced on the next weekly billing cycle as usual.
Closure opens the feedback window. Each side leaves public feedback, a star rating and a comment shown on the profile, and private feedback, which the other side never sees. Upwork publishes both sets only once both have been submitted or the window has expired, so neither can react to the other. The private answer, in particular whether the client would work with the freelancer again, is what moves the Job Success Score, so how a contract ends matters more than that it ended.
Because of that, when to close is a real decision. A contract that has gone quiet is better closed while the relationship is good than left to go stale; Upwork's published guidance is that long-idle contracts can count against the score. A client who closes without feedback leaves a contract that counts for little either way. If the same client wants more work later, a rehire opens a fresh contract rather than reopening the old one.
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.