Lifetime pace is an agency's or freelancer's total earned on Upwork divided by the number of years since the member-since date on the public profile, giving an average rate of earning over the whole life of the account.
The index computes it from two public fields: the lifetime total earned and the member-since date. Years are counted to the day of the observation, as a fraction, so an account four and a half years old divides by 4.5. It is labelled an estimate wherever it appears, and it is left blank in three cases: the account is under six months old, so dividing by a fraction of a year would inflate it; the earnings are hidden; or Upwork shows a member-since date before 2000, which happens for a few very old accounts and is treated as unknown.
Lifetime pace is a floor on historical throughput, not a current figure. An agency that earned most of its total in its first years and has since slowed shows the same pace as one that is still accelerating. That is exactly why the index also measures the run-rate: the two together say whether the recent window is running above or below the long-run average.
The common misreading is to treat it as annual revenue. It averages across years when the agency may have been tiny, and it counts only money that went through Upwork; work billed off the platform never appears on the page.
How Upwork Insights uses it
Lifetime pace is shown on every agency page in the Insights block, marked as an estimate, and it is the yardstick the momentum component measures the run-rate against: a run-rate equal to lifetime pace earns half of the momentum points, double the pace earns all of them. The valuation tool starts from it when no run-rate exists yet. Method in methodology, section 2.