Successful and lasting client-talent relationships in our community start with a strong foundation of trust. To help ensure a professional, secure marketplace that everyone can trust, we’re moving toward requiring all active talent to verify their identity.
Once you’ve verified your identity, we’ll put an Identity Verified badge on your profile. The badge displays as a check mark next to your name. This lets anyone who sees your profile know that we’ve taken steps to confirm that you are who you say you are.
How do I get verified?
We’ll let you know when it’s time for you to earn the "Identity Verified" badge by sending you an email and showing you a pop-up when you log into your Upwork account. We might also ask you to verify your phone number.
Important note about your privacy:
We take the protection of your personal information seriously. Access to your information is strictly governed by Upwork’s privacy policy. We do not sell any of the information you submit to us, and after 30 days, the image you submit to verify your identity is deleted. Clients can see that you have undergone the verification process from the badge only.
We’ll let you know when it’s time for you to earn the "Identity Verified" badge by sending an email and showing you a notification when you log into your Upwork account. Then, you’ll just need to complete these steps:
- Log into your Upwork account, go to Settings, then Identity Verification
- Provide a valid government-issued ID
- Complete a visual verification
The “Identity Verified” badge will appear as a checkmark next to your name.
We’ll let you know when it’s time to verify your identity. You won’t be able to do so until we request verification. We’ll send you an email and notify you when you sign in to your account if you need to verify.
We understand you may have verified your identity in the past. We ask freelancers to re-verify because periodic checks ensure that their accounts continue to reflect accurate information. Our goal is to make this process as seamless as we can and we thank you for your contribution in keeping Upwork a professional and safe community.
If you don’t verify your identity within 7 days of notification we will place a hold on your account. The hold will prevent you from withdrawing earnings, submitting proposals to new jobs, accepting direct hires, or showing up in search results. Any active proposals that have been submitted will be canceled. The hold will not affect your ability to work on existing contracts and we will be happy to remove it once you’ve verified your identity.
We know you’re busy, so we try to make it quick. For most, the process takes less than 10 minutes. In some cases, we may need more time to review the submitted information — 1 or 2 days — but rest assured we will work as fast as we can.
Upwork takes the protection of your personal information seriously. We do not sell any of the identity verification information you share with us, and we process and retain your information according to Upwork’s Privacy Policy.
Thanks for reaching out. Any resident of the European Union can request that we delete their information under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Once you request this, Upwork has 30 days to respond to your request. To learn how to make a GDPR request to Upwork, click here.
As an agency owner/business manager, you can encourage your agency members to complete this as soon as possible. However, each member needs to complete the process on their own.
To handle the volume, we’re currently only requiring earning agency members to complete the process. Agency members will be notified when it becomes a requirement for them. Until then, please continue to ensure that any agency member’s profile information matches their true identity.
To maintain trust, it’s important that the profile reflects the agency member’s true identity. Please hide that account from your agency and have that member create a new Upwork account with the correct identity information (accurate name, photo, address, etc.)
We’ll place a hold on the account of an agency member who has not verified 7 days after notification. The hold will prevent them from submitting proposals for new jobs, accepting direct hires, or showing up in search results on behalf of your agency. Also, we’ll delete any existing proposals the freelancer has submitted. Members can still work on existing contracts while on hold and will be able to verify their identity to earn the badge. Once they successfully verify, we’ll lift the related hold. We will not refund Connects for any deleted proposals.
Users can attempt to verify their identity multiple times if they fail due to technical issues. However, users that fail due to violating our Terms of Service (e.g., submitting a fake ID) may be permanently suspended.
Many agencies on Upwork use fixed-price contracts when working with clients on Upwork. In these cases, only one agency member needs to be hired (e.g., the agency owner or business manager) without requiring profiles for other team members. To ensure accurate billing, hours billed on hourly projects must be billed by the freelancer on the account.
We’re in the progress of adding notifications for agency owners and business managers to know when a member is required to complete the process. Until then, you can check each member’s profile for the Identity Verified badge, which is a blue checkmark next to a freelancer’s name.
We encourage all Upwork users to comply with applicable laws, and we require members to comply with applicable laws in our Terms of Service. However, we haven’t found any law(s) that make it illegal to provide identification information to us. If there is a specific law that you’d like to direct us to, we’re happy to look into it.
Any resident of the European Union can request that we delete their information under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Once you request this, Upwork has 30 days to respond to your request. To learn how to make a GDPR request to Upwork, click here.
We’ll notify that member when they log into our site when it’s time for them to verify their identity. We’ll also send them an email.