1,131 of the 25,139 agencies in the index hold Upwork's Top Rated Plus badge, which is 4.5%, as of Oct 30, 2026; another 1,066 are Top Rated.
Top Rated Plus is the highest of Upwork's standard badges. It is awarded automatically to agencies and freelancers that meet the Top Rated criteria, a Job Success Score of 90% or higher with a complete profile, enough history and no recent account holds, and that also show substantial recent earnings, including work on a large contract, in the past twelve months. Counting both tiers, 2,197 agencies, or 8.7% of the index, carry a Top Rated badge of some kind.
Badges concentrate by category. Among the 52 directory categories with at least 200 indexed agencies, the share holding Top Rated or better runs from 17.8% in Artificial Intelligence down to 3.9% in Copywriting. The table lists the categories where the badge is most common; every category page states its own share.
The badge pool is small because the Job Success Score it depends on needs rated history. Only 8,896 agencies (35%) have a score at all; of those, 8,090 sit at 90% or above and 7,282 at 100%. A badge, in other words, mostly separates the active from the inactive, and the ranking filtered to Top Rated Plus is a good shortlist of agencies that are winning work right now.
Expert-Vetted, Upwork's invitation-only tier, is shown on no agency pages in the index; Upwork attaches it mainly to individual freelancers. Badges are read from each public page at observation time and count for 15 of the 100 points in the Index Score, as described in the methodology.