Cover letter

Upwork's submission steps ask you to describe what you can do for the client, ask questions about the project and suggest a next step such as a call in Upwork Messages. A Get tips button offers AI suggestions once you start writing, and some jobs ask for a video interview with Uma instead of a letter.

The first lines do the selling. Before opening a proposal, clients see "the opening lines of your cover letter" together with your name, photo, talent badges, hourly rate and JSS. That preview decides whether the rest is read at all, so a greeting or a restated job title spends the only space that counts.

Generic letters show. Upwork's guidance says its algorithm compares the cover letter to the job description, and that clients can tell when a letter references nothing specific about their job. A template is fine as a starting point. A template sent unchanged is the first reason on Upwork's own list of why proposals go unviewed.

It can be edited, briefly. You can edit most parts of a proposal within six hours or until the client views it. After that the letter is fixed and only the terms can move.

Upwork publishes no length limit or ideal length for the letter in this guide.

How Upsight uses it. Upsight's writer drafts each letter from the agency's knowledge profile and the case studies matched to that job, pinned ones first and then the closest by meaning, and asks the model to cite at most two. A campaign set to approval mode holds each letter for a person to approve; otherwise it goes out on its own after a short review window. The ledger then shows its proposal view rate per campaign and per member.