Low Competition, High Paying Upwork Jobs in 2026: We Checked 1.7 Million
Short answer: the best-paid work per proposal on Upwork is legal, recruiting, engineering, and customer success. These job types get 7 to 10 proposals for every hire. AI and software jobs get 23 to 28, and they do not pay more per hire.
We looked at 1.72 million Upwork jobs posted from September 2025 to August 2026. For each of 139 job types we measured two things: how many proposals are sent for every hire, and how much the client really paid after the hire. Not the posted budget. The money that was paid.
The three numbers that matter
- Only 40% of Upwork jobs hire anyone. The other 60% close with no hire.
- The average job gets 13.4 proposals for every hire.
- One proposal earns $24 on average. That is the chance the job hires, times the chance you are the one hired, times what the client pays.
That last number is how we rank job types. It puts pay and competition into one figure. A job that pays $3,000 is not a good job if 30 people fight for it and the client hires nobody two times out of three.
The quiet job types that pay well
| Job type | Proposals per hire | Jobs that hire | Paid per hire | Earned per proposal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Paralegal services | 8.2 | 36% | $1,963 | $87 |
| Customer success | 10.1 | 23% | $3,188 | $73 |
| Recruiting | 8.1 | 33% | $1,579 | $65 |
| Product management | 14.5 | 30% | $2,985 | $62 |
| Community management | 6.7 | 31% | $1,298 | $61 |
| Email, phone and chat support | 15.8 | 35% | $2,647 | $58 |
| Mechanical engineering | 8.5 | 39% | $1,110 | $51 |
| Structural engineering | 7.8 | 39% | $873 | $43 |
| Business and corporate law | 8.4 | 33% | $900 | $35 |
"Paid per hire" is the average, with the top 1% of contracts capped so a few giant ones do not bend the result. Long hourly contracts pull it up. A typical single win is smaller.
What these have in common: the client is buying trust. A licence, a degree, a person who will talk to their customers or read their contracts. Not many freelancers can show that, so not many apply.
The crowded job types
| Job type | Proposals per hire | Jobs that hire | Paid per hire | Earned per proposal |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI integration | 27.5 | 34% | $1,386 | $17 |
| Full stack development | 26.7 | 34% | $1,546 | $20 |
| Front-end development | 25.0 | 47% | $989 | $19 |
| Data entry | 23.6 | 55% | $504 | $12 |
| Mobile app development | 23.4 | 33% | $1,237 | $17 |
| Web design | 19.8 | 47% | $546 | $13 |
| Logo design | 14.6 | 41% | $450 | $13 |
| Image editing | 11.3 | 57% | $207 | $10 |
AI integration is the most crowded of all 139 job types. It pays well when you win. But a paralegal hire paid more ($1,963 against $1,386), with a third of the competition.
Here is the full map. Left means fewer proposals per hire. Up means more money per hire.
AI jobs: more pay, and the crowd takes all of it
AI is now in the title or skills of about 1 Upwork job in 9. In January 2025 it was 1 in 17.
AI jobs do pay more: $996 per hire against $780 for other jobs. But they also get more proposals (15.7 per hire against 13.1). Put together, one proposal on an AI job earns $24. One proposal on any other job earns $24. The extra pay is gone.
Two things are worth knowing if AI is your field:
- Building AI is the crowded part. AI agents, LLM apps, and AI integrations get 21 to 28 proposals per hire.
- Using AI inside an ordinary field pays more than the field without it. Social media jobs that ask for AI skills earn $36 per proposal against $25 without. Data analytics: $34 against $24. Content strategy: $39 against $28. The competition is about the same.
So "AI developer" is the crowd. "Social media manager who is good with AI tools" is not. We looked at the pay side in more detail in do AI skills pay more on Upwork.
Software got much more crowded this year
In February 2026, a software job that hired someone had 20 proposals on it. In August 2026 it had 35. Other fields went from 14 to 18 over the same months.
If your reply rate on development jobs dropped this year, this is the reason. The work did not get worse. The line got longer.
The client matters as much as the job type
The job type is half of the answer. The other half is who posted it.
- Dead jobs cost as much as real ones. Jobs that never hire get about as many proposals as jobs that do. Every proposal on a dead job is wasted, and 6 jobs in 10 are dead.
- Clients with a strong record pay more than double. Inside the same job type, clients who hire often, pay well, and have good reviews paid 2.3 times more per hire. They get more proposals too, so your chance of winning is about the same. You just earn more when you do.
- Jobs limited to one country are the quietest. They get 9 proposals per hire, not 14, and pay almost twice as much. If you are in the country the client wants, apply to these first. We covered them in US-only jobs on Upwork.
- Big spenders are worth the fight. Clients who have spent $100,000 or more on Upwork paid $1,987 per hire. The average is $799.
For how to read a client before you spend Connects, see our data on client hire rates and ratings.
What to do with this
- If you are picking a field, do not start from job volume. Start from proposals per hire. A field with 8 proposals per hire and 30 new jobs a day is better than one with 27 and 300.
- If you are in a crowded field, move one step toward trust. Not "full stack developer". "Developer for law firms" or "automation for recruiting teams". You keep your skill and borrow the quiet side of the map.
- Skip clients with a weak hiring record on crowded jobs. You pay the same Connects and the job hires far less often. Here is what Connects cost in 2026.
- Be early on crowded jobs. More than half of the proposals on an AI job arrive in the first hour. See proposal speed by category.
How we measured it
- Jobs: 1,720,074 public Upwork jobs published from 09/2025 to 08/2026, in 139 job types (Upwork's own occupation labels). We read each job again after it closed to see if it hired and how many proposals it had.
- Money: what clients really paid on 313,599 of the hired jobs, read from the client's later work history. Hourly contracts that are still running count the money paid so far.
- Proposals per hire: total proposals divided by hires, on jobs that hired. Upwork hides the count on jobs that close without a hire, so for those we used our live proposal tracker. It shows they draw about the same crowd.
- Limits: payment data exists for about a third of hired jobs, the ones whose client posted again. Ranking only those repeat clients gives the same order. The numbers do not include the cost of Connects.
Try UpHunt
UpHunt shows every new Upwork job in real time with a client score out of 10, so you can see at a glance if the client hires and pays before you spend Connects. It scores each job against your profile, tells you why, and alerts you in the first minutes. Start at uphunt.io. The dataset behind this post is on our Upwork jobs data page.