Year on year (YoY) is the comparison of a figure for one period with the same period twelve months earlier, so a quarter is measured against the same quarter of the previous year rather than against the quarter just before it.
The point of the comparison is to take seasonality out. A marketplace like Upwork has quieter and busier quarters every year, and comparing the fourth quarter with the third mostly measures the calendar. Comparing it with the previous fourth quarter measures whether the business grew. That is why Upwork Inc. states most of the figures in its quarterly releases, such as gross services volume, revenue and active clients, with a year-on-year change beside them, and why analysts quote that change rather than the sequential one.
Two things are easy to misread. A year-on-year percentage is a comparison of two single quarters, so one unusual quarter a year ago can make the current one look better or worse than the trend. And a ratio such as the take rate is compared in percentage points, not in percent: a move from 17% to 18% is one point, not a 5.9% rise. When a figure is a stock rather than a flow, for example the count of active clients, the year-on-year change says how the base has moved, not how much was added in the quarter.
How Upwork Insights uses it
The Pulse page computes the year-on-year change for every quarter it holds by looking up the same quarter a year earlier in the filings, so the bars show growth with the season removed. In Q3 2026 GSV was $914.1M, down 10.1% year on year, and active clients were down 9.7%; the take rate is compared in points. Method in methodology, section 4.