Available balance

To find it, go to Manage finances, then Transactions, and read the dashboard under Available balance. Selecting a contract gives a more detailed breakdown of when funds are expected to be available or to arrive. The same figure appears on the financial overview page and behind the Withdraw now button, which Upwork places in several parts of the account.

Earnings reach the available balance only after the client has been charged and the security hold has passed, and they arrive net of Upwork's fees. Until then they are pending earnings. Money leaves the balance mainly in two ways: a withdrawal to one of your withdrawal methods, manual or on an automatic schedule, or a refund you give a client, where Upwork counts the available balance, pending transactions included, when setting how much you can return.

Three figures in Upwork's finance pages are easy to mix up:

• Work in progress: fixed-price funds a client has deposited for active milestones, not yet earned.
• Pending: earned and charged to the client, still inside the security hold.
• Available: cleared and withdrawable.

Only the last one is cash. A busy month of new contracts can therefore sit beside a small available balance for a while, simply because of the weekly hourly billing cycle and the review period on fixed-price milestones. For an agency, client payments go to the agency's account, and paying members out of it is arranged by the agency itself, outside Upwork's contract flow.