What's a Good Reply Rate on Upwork? Benchmarks From 16,000 Agency Proposals

Vlad Timinski· July 4, 2026· 6 min read

Every agency owner I talk to asks some version of the same question: "We send proposals and hear nothing back. Is that normal?"

Until now, the honest answer was "nobody knows." Upwork doesn't publish reply-rate data, and every guru quotes a different made-up number.

I'm in a different position. As General Manager of GigRadar, the auto-bidding platform agencies use to win work on Upwork, I see proposal outcomes at a scale no individual freelancer ever could. For this post I pulled just over 16,000 proposals sent in Upwork's Sales & Marketing category over a recent two-month window and measured what actually got a client reply.

Here is what the data says.

First, what counts as a "reply"

A reply means the client responded to your proposal in the message room: a question, an interview invite, anything that opens a conversation. It is the single most honest metric in Upwork lead generation. Hires can close off-platform and take months, but replies tell you within days whether your targeting and pitch are working.

The honest benchmark

Across categories, the numbers are lower than most people expect:

So if you're sending 100 proposals a month and getting 3 conversations, you're not broken, you're average. The point of everything below is that average is a choice.

The internal targets I hold my own client accounts to: 10% or better is the goal, 7 to 10% is workable but has room, below 7% means something specific is broken (targeting, cover letter, or profile) and needs a fix, not more volume.

The one filter worth 36x

The strongest single lever in the entire dataset is embarrassingly simple: whether the client's payment method is verified.

That is a 36x difference. Unverified clients are mostly browsers, duplicates, and people who never hire. And since roughly 95% of Sales & Marketing jobs come from verified clients, filtering out the rest costs you almost nothing in volume.

If you take one thing from this post: stop bidding on unverified jobs today.

Client spend barely matters (for replies)

Most freelancers assume a client who has spent $100k on Upwork is more likely to answer. The data disagrees:

Flat. Brand-new clients reply at nearly the same rate as whales. High spend predicts bigger contracts, not more replies. So a "minimum client spend" filter protects your average deal size but does nothing for your response rate, and it quietly excludes new clients who often move fastest.

Reply rate by skill

Within Sales & Marketing, the skill attached to the job changes the game:

The pattern: jobs asking for an outcome (sales, conversion, strategy) reply far more than jobs asking for a tool (Klaviyo, WordPress). Tool-tagged jobs drown in identical-looking applicants. If your service can be positioned against outcome skills instead of tool skills, your baseline reply rate moves before you change a single word of your pitch.

What to do if you're under 7%

Three levers, in the order I check them on every account audit: targeting (are you bidding on verified, ideal-fit jobs, or everything with a matching keyword?), cover letter (does it read like a peer who has done this before, or a template?), and profile (does it rank for what your buyers search?).

I run this exact diagnostic for agencies as part of Space Sales. If you want your own numbers pulled apart, book a free strategy call and bring your reply rate. I'll tell you which lever is broken.

Vlad Timinski

Founder of Space Sales and General Manager at GigRadar, the Upwork auto-bidding platform. I write about what proposal data says actually wins work on Upwork.