The Global Freelancer Landscape

March 25, 2021

With over 1.5 billion freelancers worldwide, representing around 35% of the global workforce and an estimated market size of $1.5 trillion in the US alone, the global freelancing industry is HUGE, and it’s getting bigger and bigger each year.

While the growth in freelancing has been expanding at a rapid pace for several years already, in the past year alone, whether out of redundancy or voluntarily choosing to, we’ve seen a new wave of workers transition to the more flexible form of work with 75% of freelancers claiming they wouldn’t trade their current work set up for any other type of work. Indeed, the trend is here and very, very clear: Freelancing is here to stay.

Reflecting this growth is the number of freelancing platforms available for a wide range of skill sets. Whether you’re a digital marketer, virtual assistant, graphic designer, translator, IT expert, engineer, teacher, academic, or even a surgeon, there’s likely to be a freelancing platform out there with potential clients for you to work with. And new freelancing marketplaces are cropping up all the time too.

Below is a quick overview of today’s freelancer landscape to showcase some of the most popular platforms, a large majority of which are integrated with Payoneer to help you get paid securely and efficiently from your clients wherever you, or they, are in the world.

METHODOLOGY: platforms included (as of March, 2021) were defined as those which offer the opportunity for freelancers to offer their digitally-based skills and services to those seeking such services.

If you are an online freelancing marketplace and would like to be included in the next edition of our freelance platform landscape overview, please send an email to freelancemap@payoneer.com, we’d be happy to hear from you.

If you’re a freelancer looking to get paid quickly and efficiently by international marketplaces and global clients, check out why Payoneer is truly the best solution