Hidden earnings is the state of an Upwork agency or freelancer profile whose owner has chosen to keep the lifetime total earned private, so the public page shows jobs and hours but no earnings figure.
Upwork gives every account an earnings visibility setting. When it is private, the public page still shows the number of jobs, billed hours, the Job Success Score and the badges, but the total earned is gone. Upwork Insights reads only what the public page shows, so the figure is hidden here too; nothing is inferred from hours multiplied by a rate, and nothing comes from a signed-in session.
The index treats agencies and freelancers differently. An agency that hides its earnings but has completed jobs is still listed and marked "Hidden", because its jobs are a real track record; it is ranked after every agency that shows earnings, and hidden agencies are ordered among themselves by jobs. In the Index Score its scale component is computed from billed hours instead of earnings, with 200,000 hours earning full marks, which scores it as the least it could be. A freelancer who keeps earnings private is not ranked and not shown at all, because the freelancer list is defined by a public earnings figure of $10,000 or more.
Hidden is not the same as zero. An agency showing $0 earned is left out of the index altogether; an agency showing nothing but with jobs done is in it. And a hidden figure cannot be averaged: hidden agencies are excluded from median earnings, lifetime pace and earnings per job.
How Upwork Insights uses it
Hidden agencies appear at the end of the agency ranking with "Hidden" in the earnings column and are counted in the 28,921 total as of Oct 31, 2026, but not in $3.13B, the index's sum of public earnings. The rule is in methodology, section 1.