The team component is the part of the agency Index Score, worth 10 of 100 points, that carries the team size bracket the agency declares on its public Upwork profile; freelancers have no team component.
Upwork lets an agency state its size as a bracket rather than a count, and the public page shows that bracket. The index maps it to a fixed fraction of the 10 points: a declared size of 1 earns 1.5, 2 to 10 earns 3.5, 11 to 50 earns 6.5, 51 to 200 earns 8.5, and every bracket from 201 upward earns the full 10. An agency that declares no size sits at 2.5 points, a little above the solo bracket and well below a declared small team, so leaving the field blank is neither rewarded nor heavily penalised.
The bracket is self-declared and unverified by the index. Upwork also shows a roster of members on some agency pages, and the index records that count separately, but the component uses the declared bracket because it is the figure the agency chose to publish and the one every page carries. The team size entry explains what the brackets mean on Upwork.
Ten points is a small weight on purpose. Size is already rewarded through lifetime earnings in the scale component, and a large declared team with little work behind it should not outrank a small team with a long record. The component exists so that two agencies with similar earnings and badges sort with the one that can staff a larger engagement first.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The team points are the last bar of the Index Score breakdown on every agency page, and the Insights page shows the mix of declared sizes across the 28,921 agencies indexed as of Oct 31, 2026. Freelancer scores move the weight to scale and quality instead; both tables are in methodology, section 3.