Upwork study finds AI freelance budgets 52% higher, with a 1.5% hourly gap

AI-related freelance listings on Upwork advertised fixed-price budgets about 52% higher than other listings in the same line of work and posting month, according to a study OpenAI and Upwork released on November 10. The difference in posted hourly prices was far smaller. The midpoint of the hourly range on AI-related listings was about 1.5% higher after the same adjustment.

There was a bigger difference in time spent. Among hourly contracts that led to a hire and logged work, AI-related contracts recorded about 41% more hours in the first 90 days. For freelancers and clients, the study separates the price attached to an entire assignment from the price of an hour and the hours logged after hiring. The advertised budget measures what a client proposed for a project. It does not measure a freelancer's take-home pay.

Project budgets and hourly rates tell different stories

Clients on Upwork can post a fixed price for an assignment or give a range of hourly rates. The researchers split the listings by contract type and used the middle of the range as the advertised hourly rate. Their comparison used marketplace data through April 2026. The analysis used positive values and removed the top 1% of the relevant advertised price distribution.

Before accounting for the line of work and posting month, the fixed-price gap was about 70% and the hourly rate gap was about 9%. Both narrowed when the researchers compared listings within the same subcategory and month. They applied the same adjustment to the recorded hours, using only the subset of hourly contracts with a hire and logged time. The authors interpreted the results as evidence that AI-related jobs differed more in project size than in what clients offered to pay per hour.

Some clients bundled video generation with editing

The researchers also examined what clients asked for together, using Upwork listings through 2025. In one example cited in the research, clients combined AI-generated footage, editing and motion graphics in the same brief. Other listings paired chatbot development with integration into an application. An AI-related listing contained an average of 3.35 distinct tasks, compared with 3.19 for other listings. Requests covering three or four tasks were more common in the AI-related group.

To measure how familiar those combinations were, the researchers looked back at listings from before the generative AI era. They counted a pair as historically uncommon if it had appeared together in fewer than 200 earlier listings. They calculated the fraction of uncommon pairs within each listing with at least two tasks, then gave each listing equal weight. The average was 8.4% in AI-related listings and 2.4% in other listings. The team used listing titles, descriptions and requested skills, among other details, to identify AI-related work.

Writing in ChatGPT, production work on Upwork

A separate comparison looked at what people asked ChatGPT to do and what clients sought on Upwork. It used 36,896 personal or work-related conversations drawn from consumer accounts between January 2025 and June 2026. Content writing accounted for 14.5% of the sampled conversations and about 1.3% of Upwork listings in the first half of 2026. Video and animation and web development took up larger shares of the Upwork listings than of the ChatGPT sample.

Content writing's share of Upwork listings fell by about 0.57 percentage points compared with the same six months a year earlier. That measures a change in the mix of listings. The conversation and marketplace datasets were separate, so the analysis could not track whether a particular client shifted an assignment from a freelancer to ChatGPT.

Upwork reports platform spending separately

Upwork's November 2 earnings release measured transactions across its business. Gross services volume for July through September was $914.1 million, down 10.1% from the same quarter a year earlier. At the end of September it reported 717,000 active clients, down from 794,000. The company defines gross services volume to include spending on talent services and transactions for other services such as payment processing and memberships.

In its quarterly filing, Upwork attributed the decline to difficulties attracting and retaining clients. It cited the changing effect of AI on some freelance categories, changes in how customers find Upwork through search engines and economic uncertainty. The joint study's price comparison covered listings through April. The company-wide figures cover transactions in the later July-to-September quarter.