A freelancer is a person who sells their own work to clients on Upwork under their own profile, as an independent contractor rather than an employee, either alone or as a member of an agency.
Upwork has two sides, clients who post jobs and freelancers who do them, and it calls the second side "talent". A freelancer account belongs to one named person, verified by Upwork, with one profile, one Job Success Score and one earnings record. The freelancer finds work by submitting proposals to job posts, which cost Connects, or by accepting invitations, and is paid through Upwork on hourly or fixed-price contracts in US dollars, less the freelancer service fee, a flat 10% since 2023. Legally the freelancer is an independent contractor to each client; Upwork is the marketplace and the payment intermediary, not the employer.
A freelancer may also belong to an agency, and here the terms get tangled. Work done under the agency's contracts counts towards the agency's earnings and score, not the freelancer's own; a member who is exclusive to the agency has no independent profile in the marketplace, while a non-exclusive member keeps one. So a freelancer's profile figures and the figures of the agency they work in are different records, and a client comparing a freelancer with an agency is comparing a person's own contracts with a team's.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The freelancer ranking lists 11,749 freelancers whose public profiles show $10,000 or more in lifetime earnings, read from Upwork's public hire pages and profiles; the median advertised rate among them is $30/hr. Profiles that keep earnings private are not ranked. The methodology explains what is read and how the freelancer Index Score differs from the agency one.