Upwork talent badges are the marks Upwork places on freelancer and agency profiles to signal standing on the marketplace, namely Rising Talent, Top Rated, Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted, each granted against criteria Upwork publishes.
The four badges form a rough ladder. Rising Talent goes to promising new profiles with no score yet. Top Rated requires, among other things, a Job Success Score of 90% or higher, $1,000 earned and 90 days of history, re-checked every two weeks. Top Rated Plus adds a recent-earnings requirement including a large contract. Expert-Vetted is different in kind: a human decision by Upwork's talent team, by invitation only, for individual freelancers in selected categories.
The first three are automatic. Upwork's systems grant and remove them at each review, so a badge can appear or vanish without anyone at Upwork looking at the profile. For an agency the badge belongs to the agency account and reflects the agency's own contracts; members' individual badges do not transfer to it, and the agency's badge does not transfer to them.
Badges are signals, not guarantees. They say that an account's recent record met Upwork's thresholds at the last review, nothing more, and a profile with no badge may be new, inactive or simply between reviews. Clients can filter search results by badge, which is the main practical effect.
How Upwork Insights uses it
Upwork Insights reads Top Rated, Top Rated Plus and Expert-Vetted from each agency's public page at observation time; Rising Talent is not recorded. As of Oct 31, 2026, 1,489 of the 28,921 agencies in the index hold Top Rated Plus and 1,346 hold Top Rated, 9.8% between them; the Top Rated Plus stat page breaks that down by category. In the Index Score described in the methodology, badges are the trust component, worth 15 of 100 points.