Freelance marketplaces are online platforms where clients post work and independent professionals and agencies offer to do it, with the platform handling matching, contracts, payment and reputation in return for fees on what passes through.
Upwork is one of the largest, and because Upwork Inc. is listed it is one of the few whose size is public, which is why its filings are often read as a proxy for the market as a whole. The model is common to all of them: a two-sided marketplace with a job post or catalogue on one side and profiles on the other, a bidding or ordering step between, escrow or payment protection to make strangers safe to deal with, and a review or score system that accumulates into the reputation that keeps talent on the platform. Where marketplaces differ is in who initiates, the client posting a job or the freelancer listing a service, in how much vetting the platform does before showing a profile, and in what they charge whom.
Upwork's particular shape is a job-post-led marketplace with a flat 10% freelancer service fee since 2023, a client fee, paid proposals through Connects, badges that stand in for vetting, and an agency layer that lets a business sell a team through one profile, which is the layer this index exists to read. Upwork does not publish how much of its volume goes through agencies, or how many freelancers and agencies are active; only the client side is reported.
A marketplace is not a staffing firm. The client contracts with the freelancer or agency directly, the platform is an intermediary, and the quality of the work is the contractor's responsibility, not the platform's.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The index reads the supply side of one marketplace: 28,921 agencies across 149 countries and 11,749 freelancers as of Oct 31, 2026, ranked at /agencies and /freelancers. The demand side comes from the filings on the Pulse page.