When you use Upwork as your home for work, security is essential. That means keeping you safe with dedicated trust and safety checks to help protect every user from fraud, theft, intimidation, and spam. We understand that an international community of professionals, agencies, and clients relies on us to help deliver quality opportunities and talent matches with full peace of mind.
Keeping working relationships on the Upwork platform is an essential part of maintaining transparency, helping ensure accurate information, and providing you with payment protection and dispute assistance. It also helps protect your personal financial account information and prevents situations where a client might try to get around our systems that protect you.
Why can’t I get paid directly?
The short answer is that it makes Upwork less safe.
More specifically, when relationships are moved outside of Upwork — something called circumvention — it undermines user experiences, limits the protections we can offer, hurts our ability to attract quality clients and talent to create new opportunities and matches, and weakens the marketplace as a whole. Because of this, circumvention is a serious violation of our Terms of Service unless you pay the Conversion Fee.
We enforce a zero-tolerance Circumvention Policy to ensure that Upwork is a safe place for both talent and clients to thrive, while preventing breaches of trust that put you and the community at large at risk.
Circumvention damages user experience both on and off the platform. Users outside of Upwork risk being exposed to fraud, abuse, and harassment without any recourse because their relationship is not covered by Upwork’s protections. On the platform, users lose the trust that is provided through the transparency provided by on-platform relationships. Any relationship taken outside of Upwork will not result in client or freelancer reviews, which provide valuable information to all platform users. It also impacts Upwork’s algorithms, disrupting accuracy and efficiency for everyone.
Note: We do have a contract conversion process, which enables you to move your relationship off-platform without violating our Terms of Service.
What is Circumvention, exactly?
Circumvention is when a client and freelancer meet on Upwork, but then conduct their relationship outside of Upwork by sending payment through another means without paying the Conversion Fee. Circumvention is a serious violation of the Terms of Service and is laid out in Section 7 of the User Agreement.
We understand that there may be times when a significant, longer-term business relationship develops between you and your client and working together directly makes sense for both parties. And since we allow you to bring your own clients to Upwork, it follows that we have ways for you to bring them off Upwork, as well. That is why we recognize two exceptions, when moving a relationship outside of Upwork does not count as circumvention:
- The Upwork Conversion Fee has been paid for the relationship.
- A relationship that started outside the platform, comes onto Upwork, and is then taken outside the platform. This includes Bring Your Own.
Violating the Non-Circumvention clause of the Terms of Service will result in loss of the ability to use Upwork (account suspension). Also, violators can be charged the associated Conversion Fee for that relationship.
Frequently Asked Questions
When your relationship is taken outside of Upwork, we will no longer be able to offer any support, including customer service, payment protection, dispute resolution services, etc. You will be responsible for resolving any issues that arise with payments, quality of work, deadlines, etc., without our assistance.
The Conversion Fee is 13.5% of estimated earnings over a 12-month period in each specific client-freelancer relationship. We apply a discount to the Conversion Fee based on the total amount of Marketplace fees (paid to Upwork by the client), and we consider the length of the relationship between the specific client and talent who are converting their contract. We’ll display the total amount of the fee when you begin the contract conversion process.
The client initiates the contract conversion process in their Upwork account. To pay the Conversion Fee and take your relationship outside Upwork, your client will need to:
- Go to Jobs > All Contracts
- Choose a specific contract under All contracts and select the (…) menu
- Select the Request Contract Conversion button to start the conversion process
- Follow the steps outlined and send the conversion request. The other party will be notified and must accept the request. We’ll then process the payment and notify you when the conversion process is complete.
Contact support if you need more help.
