About
Credit
State of the Upwork continues work originally published by Aaron Melton at Ascend Automation Agency (May 2025 – April 2026). Methodology, taxonomy, and report structure follow Aaron's framework with permission. AI-keyword tracking, AI-generated narrative, and the public CSV/JSON API are additions.
Methodology
- Daily scrape of every automation-related Upwork job posting via the
jupri/upworkApify actor. - Keyword matching is substring-based on job title + description (case-insensitive). A job mentioning Zapier AND n8n counts in both buckets.
- Average rate is dragged by outliers; we publish median and 25th/75th percentile rates alongside it. Aaron's reports never showed median.
- Rate buckets: Ultra-Premium $150-500, Premium $100-150, Expert $75-100, Experienced $50-75, Mid-Tier $40-50, Entry $25-40.
- AI keyword categories (new in SOTU): Claude/Anthropic, OpenAI/GPT, AI Agents, RAG, Vector DBs, LangChain, Voice AI, AI Builders (Lindy/Bardeen/etc), MCP, Embeddings.
- Pre-May-2026 historical trend lines are sourced from Aaron's published markdown tables; SOTU's own data starts May 2026.
Public data
- JSON API — current month, CORS open
- CSV download — anonymized, aggregated
- Add
?month=YYYY-MMto either endpoint for any archive month.
Limitations
- Jobs may mention multiple platforms (overlap exists).
- Generic automation jobs without platform mentions are excluded from platform counts but still appear in totals.
- Rates are posted maximums, not actual contracted rates.
- Sample is limited to Upwork — not the broader freelance market.
- Substring matching can catch incidental mentions (e.g. "excel" inside "excellent"). We accept the noise to maintain continuity with Aaron's taxonomy.