How much does Upwork take from freelancers
The Short Answer Upwork charges freelancers a service fee of up to 10% on their earnings, taken directly off every payment before it reaches a Maker's account. On a $1,000 project, that's $100 gone before the work is even invoiced, and the fee applies at the same rate whether it's a freelancer's first project with a client or their fiftieth. Fiverr runs a flat 20% seller fee on every transaction, with no reduction for repeat business either. Platforms with no freelancer-side service fee let Makers keep the full rate they quote, on every project, for as long as the relationship lasts.
A freelancer who quotes $100 an hour on Upwork doesn't take home $100 an hour. Upwork takes its cut first, and the number that lands in a Maker's account is smaller than the number they agreed to with the client.
The fee that doesn't move
Upwork's service fee runs up to 10% of a freelancer's earnings on a project, deducted automatically from every payment. Fiverr's model runs even higher: a flat 20% seller fee on every transaction, regardless of gig size or client history.
Neither fee is a one-time cost. Both apply every time money changes hands, on every payment for as long as a Maker keeps working through either platform.
What counts against the fee
The fee applies to the full payment amount, not just profit above expenses. A freelancer who spends $200 on subcontracted work to deliver a $1,000 project still pays Upwork's cut on the full $1,000, not the $800 they earned after covering that cost. The platform's fee calculation doesn't account for what the work cost a freelancer to deliver.
Why the fee never steps down
There's no loyalty discount built into either platform's structure*. A client a Maker has worked with for two years, across dozens of projects, generates the same percentage cut on invoice fifty as it did on invoice one.
The relationship got easier to manage and more predictable to deliver against over that time. The fee stayed exactly where it started.
What the fee costs across a real income
The math looks small on a single invoice and large across a working year. A freelancer earning $60,000 annually through Upwork at the 10% service fee rate pays $6,000 back to the platform before taxes, software, or anything else comes out. That's real income, gone before it was ever fully theirs.
Run the same math at project scale. A $100 project nets $90 after Upwork's fee, a $1,000 project nets $900, and a $10,000 project nets $9,000.
That last figure represents months of work for many independent professionals, and $1,000 of it goes to Upwork for processing a relationship the freelancer built and maintained on their own.
A freelancer earning $60,000 a year through Upwork sends $6,000 of it back to the platform, every year, for as long as they keep working there.
Fiverr's flat 20% fee compounds faster. A $1,000 project on Fiverr nets a seller $800, twice the loss of the same project run through Upwork's 10% structure. Sellers who price competitively to stay visible in Fiverr's marketplace are absorbing that gap directly out of their own rate.
What the fee looks like across a full career
A single year of lost fees is easy to shrug off. Ten years of the same freelancer earning $60,000 annually through Upwork means $60,000 handed back to the platform over a decade, the equivalent of an entire additional year of income that never reached the person who did the work.
That number only grows if a Maker's rate grows with experience. A freelancer whose income climbs from $60,000 to $100,000 over a decade as they build a reputation isn't rewarded with a lower fee for that growth. Upwork's 10% cut scales up right alongside the freelancer's own success, taking a bigger dollar amount out of every raise a Maker earns for themselves.
What splitting work across both platforms costs
Many Makers don't rely on a single platform. A designer might run recurring client work through Upwork while picking up smaller gigs through Fiverr to fill gaps between projects. Splitting income this way doesn't split the fee burden in a favorable direction, since the freelancer still loses up to 10% on every Upwork payment and a flat 20% on every Fiverr order.
A Maker earning $40,000 through Upwork and $20,000 through Fiverr in a year pays roughly $4,000 to Upwork and $4,000 to Fiverr, for a combined $8,000 lost across both platforms on $60,000 in total billings. Spreading work across two platforms spreads the fee burden right along with it.
Where Upwork and Fiverr's model breaks down
When Upwork launched, the fee made a kind of sense. The platform found the client, ran the payment infrastructure, and gave a freelancer with no network a way to get discovered. That introduction had real value, and charging for it wasn't unreasonable.
The introduction that never happens again
The problem is what happens after the introduction. Upwork's fee doesn't shrink once the freelancer has built the relationship, learned the client's preferences, and become the person that client calls first for every new project.
The platform introduced them once, on the first project. Every invoice after that gets charged as if the introduction is happening again.
Fiverr has the same structural gap. A buyer who orders from the same seller for the tenth time isn't discovering that seller through Fiverr's search or recommendation engine anymore.
They're going straight to a name they already trust, placing an order the same way they'd text a contractor they'd hired before. Fiverr's 20% cut doesn't reflect that shift at all.
Where Toptal fits, and who it leaves out
Toptal takes a different approach: it doesn't charge freelancers a percentage fee at all, and negotiates rates directly between the freelancer and client. The tradeoff is an acceptance rate reported around 3%, built around a screening process most working freelancers never pass. A fee-free model that's only available to a small slice of applicants doesn't solve the problem for the freelancers facing it right now.
Toptal's freelancer-side model proves a marketplace can run without a percentage cut. Most platforms keep the fee because most freelancers have no real alternative to accept it.
What a flat cut looks like without a share to hand over
Lyriem is a zero-fee freelance marketplace where Makers keep 100% of their earnings and Initiators hire verified talent through escrow-backed contracts. There's no service fee taken out of a Maker's payment, on the first project with a client or the fiftieth.
That changes what the numbers above look like in practice. The same $1,000 project that nets $900 on Upwork or $800 on Fiverr nets the full $1,000 on Lyriem. The same $60,000 in annual freelance income that loses $6,000 to Upwork's fee structure stays $60,000, in full, in a Maker's account.
What changes when you keep the full rate
Keeping 100% of a quoted rate changes the math on pricing itself. A Maker who wants to net $90 an hour on Upwork has to quote $100 an hour to absorb the fee. On a platform with no freelancer-side service fee, that same Maker quotes $90 an hour and takes home $90 an hour, which means the rate a client sees is closer to what the work costs without a platform's margin built in.
Why the rate a client sees starts to matter more
A lower quoted rate for the same take-home pay changes how a Maker competes for work in the first place. Two freelancers with identical skills and identical target take-home pay show up at different price points to a client comparing proposals, purely based on which platform's fee structure they're pricing against. The freelancer with no service fee to absorb can quote a more competitive number without cutting into what they keep.
That gap compounds across every proposal a Maker sends. A slightly lower quoted rate, repeated across dozens of bids over a year, can be the difference between winning and losing work on price alone, before either freelancer's actual skill or portfolio enters the conversation.
Milestone-based escrow adds a second layer on top of the full payout. Funds get committed to a project before work starts and release against agreed milestones, so a Maker isn't extending free credit to a client while also paying a service fee on whatever eventually comes through.
What happens to the fee when a project goes wrong
A refunded or disputed project doesn't necessarily return the fee along with the payment. Depending on how a dispute resolves, a Maker can end up having paid Upwork's service fee on a project that later gets partially or fully refunded to the client, losing both the disputed income and the platform's cut on top of it.
That risk sits entirely on the freelancer's side of the transaction. The platform collects its percentage the moment a payment processes, well before either party knows whether the project will finish cleanly or end up in a dispute.
FAQs
Does Upwork charge freelancers a different fee for long-term clients?
No*, and that's the part most freelancers don't realize until they add it up. Upwork's service fee runs at the same rate on a brand new client relationship and one that's been active for years, so a freelancer working with the same client for their fiftieth invoice pays the identical percentage they paid on the first.
There's no mechanism in Upwork's fee structure that reduces the cut based on relationship length, project volume, or how the client originally found the freelancer. A Maker who brought a client to Upwork themselves, rather than being discovered through the platform, still pays the full service fee on every payment from that client.
Is Fiverr's fee structure different from Upwork's?
Yes, and it runs higher. Fiverr charges sellers a flat 20% fee on every transaction, compared to Upwork's service fee of up to 10%. On a $1,000 project, that's the difference between a seller taking home $800 on Fiverr versus $900 on Upwork.
Neither platform reduces the fee for repeat buyers or long-standing seller relationships. A Fiverr seller with years of five-star reviews and a steady base of returning clients pays the same 20% on every order as a seller who joined last week.
How does Lyriem avoid charging freelancers a service fee?
Lyriem doesn't take a cut of a Maker's earnings because the business runs on a different model entirely: anonymized, aggregated workforce data sold to enterprises, not a percentage of every project. Makers keep 100% of what they earn, and standard payouts don't carry a fee.
Initiators pay a payment processing fee of 3.3% plus $4 per project payment, which covers the actual cost of moving money through Stripe rather than functioning as platform margin. That fee sits entirely on the Initiator side of the transaction, and it never touches what a Maker takes home.
For a Maker deciding where to list their work, the difference shows up on every single payment rather than as a one-time comparison. A $1,000 project run through Lyriem instead of Upwork means $100 that stays with the person who did the work, on that project and on every one after it.
* As of the time of publication