Fixed-price contract

Upwork's payment path has four steps. The client must fund each milestone or the whole project before work starts, and the money shows under Work in progress. The freelancer submits the work. The client then has 14 days to approve it or request changes, and if they do neither the funds are released anyway. Once approved or auto-released, the payment moves to Pending for "a five-day security hold" before it can be withdrawn.

Two rules matter when things go wrong. If a client asks for a refund of a deposit instead of releasing it, the freelancer can approve the refund or dispute it, but only within seven days of the request. And on an agency contract the payment goes to the agency, not to the member who did the work; Upwork tells agency freelancers to arrange their payout with the agency.

A fixed-price contract can be one milestone or many. Its protection depends on the money being in escrow before work starts, and on the work being submitted through the contract rather than sent by message: see Fixed-Price Protection. There is no weekly limit and no time tracking requirement, which is why the scope of each milestone has to be agreed before the work, not argued about after it.

How Upsight uses it. Campaigns can target fixed-price postings and set a budget window that applies only to them. In Upsight's P&L a fixed-price contract won from a proposal is counted at the contract's amount, the one revenue line Upsight can measure rather than estimate.