Upwork’s 2025 Transparency Report: Our Ongoing Work to Protect Yours

Work on Upwork starts with people choosing to collaborate, often for the first time. Businesses trust someone they’ve never met to lend their expertise and get to real outcomes, and professionals trust that the work is legitimate, paid, and worth their time. These are all key underpinnings of Upwork’s purpose to create opportunities in every era of work. Our role is to help both sides equitably move forward in these opportunities with confidence and trust, even as we operate across countries, cultures, and complex regulatory environments at global scale.

This week, Upwork Inc. published our 2025 Transparency Report, which explains how we work behind the scenes to keep these working relationships credible, protect the integrity of the Upwork Marketplace, and help opportunity flow to the right people.

We’re proud to report and highlight:

• Record-low fraud exposure. Continued investment in always-on defenses drove sharp reductions in malicious activity, with job offers from bad actor clients down more than 90% year-over-year and work proposals from bad actor talent down more than 80%.
• Stronger trust signals earlier in the customer journey. By expanding identity verification earlier for talent, we increased the number of identity-verified professionals on the marketplace by more than 20%, helping establish clearer expectations and smoother starts for new working relationships.
• Clearer paths forward when issues arise. We launched the Account Health Hub to give talent and clients a centralized view of their account standing, enforcement history, and clear steps to resolve issues. We also continued to invest in faster response times, bringing the median review time for user reports down to just 22 minutes.
  
• Smarter moderation at scale. We improved how policy issues are detected across job posts, messages, and other marketplace activity by using automation to identify patterns and signals at scale, paired with trained human reviewers who assess context, intent, and edge cases. This layered approach allows us to act quickly without sacrificing accuracy.
  
• Faster security protections. New sign-in safeguards and real-time security alerts helped users respond more quickly to potential account risks, protecting both livelihoods and business continuity.

Looking ahead, we’re focused on clearer reputation signals, better in-product guidance about our policies, more intuitive reporting, and continued investment in fraud prevention. Each of these priorities is designed to reduce uncertainty and disruption so our customers can move forward with confidence and focus on building what’s next.

Read the full 2025 Transparency Report, which goes deeper into the policies, data, and systems behind this important work, here.