Hourly contract

Upwork bills hourly work by the week. Clients are "automatically invoiced and billed for hours you log each week", whether the time was tracked with the Upwork Time Tracker or added by hand as manual time, and in most cases the freelancer is paid 10 days after the weekly billing period ends each Sunday. The client sees the hours in the freelancer's work diary and can review them before the money moves.

Three things decide what an hourly contract actually pays:

• The rate. Agreed in the offer. The client is billed the rate shown, and the freelancer's service fee comes out of it.
• The weekly limit. Set by the client in the contract terms. Hours over it are not billed: see weekly limit.
• How the time was logged. Only tracked time that meets Upwork's criteria is covered by Hourly Protection; manual time and bonuses are not.

Extra work outside the logged hours is paid as a bonus. The hourly model suits open-ended work where scope moves. The price of that flexibility is that neither side knows the final bill when the contract starts, which is the opposite trade from a fixed-price contract.

How Upsight uses it. A campaign can target hourly, fixed-price or unspecified postings, and its hourly rate window applies only to hourly posts. Upsight's P&L counts an hourly contract won from a proposal at its rate times a number of hours the reader sets, and marks that revenue as estimated, because Upwork publishes no figure for what an hourly contract will bill in total.