Experience level

The choice is the client's, made in the posting flow next to scope and budget, and Upwork offers three options: Entry-level, Intermediate and Expert. Freelancers can filter job searches by experience level and keep that filter in a saved search. It is a statement of expectation, not a rule Upwork enforces: any freelancer can propose on a job at any level.

What it really signals is price. Upwork publishes no rate bands per level, and the choice is the client's own judgement about their project. In practice it says as much about what the client expects to pay as about who they expect to hire. An Expert post with a small budget is a contradiction worth reading carefully, and an Entry-level post tends to draw the most price-sensitive competition in its category.

Matching the bidder to it. For an agency, the level is a staffing question. The member whose badges, JSS and history fit the stated level is the right person to bid, even if another member is free, and the bid amount should sit where the level implies rather than where the agency's average sits.

How Upsight uses it. A campaign's targeting can include or exclude each experience level, mapped to Upwork's own values, and the targeting preview counts how many recent matching jobs fall into each level before the campaign is saved, so an agency sees what it gives up by excluding one. The chosen member for each job comes from the campaign's best fit staffing, not from the level alone.