The Index Score is a 0 to 100 sorting aid computed by Upwork Insights for every agency and freelancer in the index, built from five visible parts: scale, quality, trust, momentum and, for agencies, team.
The score exists so that a young, well-reviewed, fast-growing agency can be seen next to a large old one. The default ranking is by lifetime earnings, which nobody can argue with, but earnings alone bury everyone who started recently. For an agency the weights are scale 40, quality 20, trust 15, momentum 15 and team 10. Each part is a fraction between zero and one multiplied by its weight, rounded to a tenth, and the five parts are added. A freelancer has no team part; the weight moves to scale (45) and quality (25), with trust and momentum unchanged at 15 each.
Every input is something Upwork publishes on the public page: lifetime earnings or billed hours, the Job Success Score, the badges, the declared team size, the last contract date, plus the one figure the index measures itself, the run-rate. Nothing is weighted by opinion or by a hidden signal, and the breakdown is drawn on every agency page.
It is a sorting aid, not a verdict. A score of 60 does not mean an agency is better than one at 55 for your job; it means it sits higher on five public dimensions chosen in advance. Two agencies with the same lifetime earnings can differ by twenty points on badges and momentum alone, and an agency with hidden earnings is scored on hours, never on a guess.
How Upwork Insights uses it
Every one of the 28,921 agencies indexed as of Oct 31, 2026 carries a score and a rank by score, shown on its page as "#n overall" beside the Index Score tile; the agency ranking can be sorted by it, and the weights are set out in methodology, section 3.