Top Rated freelancers and agencies on Upwork can get paid sooner on hourly contracts.
With faster payouts, the typical 10-day wait for payment is cut in half for hourly contracts. Your client will still have five days to review your hours, but you will not have a five-day security hold after your client releases payment.
Cleared payments are released on Fridays by 11:59 p.m., UTC.
Cleared payments are released on Fridays by 11:59 p.m., UTC. If your client pays later than 12:00 a.m. UTC, the payment will not be released early (even if the payment was successful and you qualify for faster payouts). If you live in another timezone, please calculate the time difference to determine when your payment will be available. We will email you after your payment is applied and ready to be withdrawn.
If you issued a partial refund for your client, the rest of their payment to you will not be released according to the faster payouts schedule. A payment impacted by a refund will be subject to the 10-day wait on payments.
As long as your client’s billing method can be charged successfully and they don’t dispute your hours, we will apply their payment to your Upwork account five days earlier than before if you are Top Rated. You can then withdraw the money anytime you prefer by choosing Get Paid Now.
If you have an automatic payment schedule set up and want your earnings sooner, you also can use Get Paid Now.
The five-day security hold still applies for fixed-price contracts.
There is inherent risk in payment processing, driven by the potential of fraud, disputes and chargebacks. We also want to give clients time to review their freelancer’s billed hours and project progress before a payment is released.
If you qualify for faster payouts and you receive your funds five days earlier, your reports will still show the standard, 10-day payout date on a Wednesday. This is because we won’t know which payments will be released early until we review accounts every Friday morning (if your client disputes your hours or their payment fails, we can’t release your payment until the issue is resolved). As long as there’s no issues, your payment will be posted to your Upwork account on the Friday before the Wednesday date that is listed. For example, if your payment date is listed as Wednesday, July 15, and you qualify, you will receive it earlier on Friday, July 10.