A withdrawal fee is the charge Upwork or its payment partner takes when a freelancer or agency moves earned money out of their Upwork balance to a bank account, card or payment service.
Money a client pays stays in the freelancer's or agency's Upwork account until it is withdrawn, and withdrawing it is a separate step with its own cost. The fee depends on the withdrawal method: direct deposit to a local bank, an international wire, a card, or a third-party payment service each carry their own charge, some flat, some a percentage, some waived for certain countries or above certain amounts. Upwork publishes the schedule in its Help Center, and the amounts are set by Upwork and its partners and may change, so the current figures should be read there rather than remembered.
Two things are easy to confuse with it. The flat 10% service fee is taken from every payment as it arrives and has nothing to do with withdrawals. And currency conversion, when a freelancer in India or Ukraine takes US-dollar earnings into a local-currency account, is a spread applied to the exchange rate on top of any withdrawal charge; Upwork's Help Center is clear that the bank or partner sets that rate, which is why the currency an account is paid out in matters as much as the fee.
For an agency withdrawals come from the agency financial account rather than from members' individual balances, and the owner controls who can make them. An agency paying a dozen members from one withdrawal pays the fee once; a dozen independent freelancers pay it twelve times.
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.