A rehire is a new Upwork contract that a client opens with a freelancer or agency they have worked with before, started from the previous contract or the freelancer's profile without a public job post or a proposal.
Once a contract has ended, Upwork keeps the pair connected. The client can rehire from the closed contract's page or from the freelancer's profile, send an offer directly, and the freelancer accepts it without spending Connects. The new contract can be hourly or fixed price, on new terms, and is a separate record with its own feedback and its own line in the work history. An agency can be rehired in the same way, and the owner can assign a different member to the new contract.
Rehires are the quiet engine of a good profile. Upwork's published description of the Job Success Score says that long-term relationships and repeat clients count in a profile's favour, and a client who comes back is also the one most likely to leave strong private feedback. Over time rehires reduce the share of income that depends on winning cold proposals, which is what separates established agencies from new ones.
A rehire is not the same as leaving a contract open. A contract that is kept open for occasional work accumulates idle time and no fresh feedback; closing it and rehiring when the next piece of work arrives gives a clean outcome each time and a growing list of completed jobs. Rehiring also keeps the relationship on the platform, which Upwork requires for a period after first contact under its non-circumvention rules.
How Upwork Insights uses it
This term describes Upwork's own rules or product rather than a figure the index measures; the pages that do carry live figures are the stats and rate pages.