Hourly Orders let you pay for work based on the actual time a freelancer spends on your project. This feature gives you greater flexibility and control, especially for evolving or long-term projects.
Overview
The Hourly Work model is suitable for:
- Projects with evolving or hard-to-define scopes.
- Long-term or ongoing projects.
- Projects requiring at least 8 hours of work.
Hourly work is priced based on the actual hours worked, which offers fair payment according to the time and effort put into your project. You can set a weekly hour limit with your freelancer as part of the custom offer, and this limit can be changed or removed anytime from the order page.
Before you begin
- Search for the service you need in the search bar and then go to the Seller details and filter freelancers by “offer Hourly rate” to compare options.
- Discuss your project details and agree on a weekly hour limit with your freelancer. The offer, sent to your inbox, will include the service description, the agreed weekly hour limit, and the freelancer's time estimation for the entire project.
- Once you accept the custom offer, you will pay a $5 order initiation fee (tax not included), and the freelancer can begin working.
Weekly work & payment process
Your freelancer will log their weekly hours, and you will receive a report for review.
How your freelancer logs hours
Your freelancer must log their weekly hours worked by Sunday (23:59 UTC). For each session of hours added, they are required to provide a detailed description or a supporting file (or both). The supporting file can be the completed work, a screenshot, or a detailed Hourly report from a tracking app.
When you are charged
You are charged every Monday, based on the hours the freelancer logged. Your payment is then securely held in escrow until you approve the report.
Suspended orders
Hourly orders can be suspended if your payment method did not go through. This can occur for various reasons, such as an expired card, insufficient funds, and payment authorization failure. To resolve this, update or replace your payment method in the Billing and Payments section of your account and pay the pending charge by clicking on the Pay Amount Due on the same page or on the Hourly order page. Your Hourly order will then resume.
How to approve the weekly report
By default, the Hourly work approval process is manual. You'll receive the previous week's report for review every Monday.
You have 7 days to review and manually approve the report after being charged (from Monday to Monday). If no action is taken within 7 days, the report will be auto-approved, and payment will be released to the freelancer. However, the order status will remain paused until you choose to activate it. Until the report is approved, freelancers cannot log new hours for the order. This manual approval is required for the strongfirst weekly report of any Hourly order.
From the second weekly report onward, you have the option to choose automatic approval. If you select this, you’ll have a 3-day period (Monday to Thursday) for opening a dispute; if it's not disputed in this window, the week will auto-complete.
Disputing a weekly report
If the work detailed in the weekly report does not meet your expectations, you can dispute it.
- If your approval process is manual, you have 7 days (Monday to Monday) to open a dispute.
- If your approval process is automatic, you have a 3-day period (72 hours) (Monday to Thursday) to open a dispute.
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- Go to the order page.
- Click on More actions at the bottom of the order page.
- Click on Open a dispute.
Once you ask for a refund, the freelancer will have up to 48 hours to accept or decline the request.
If the freelancer accepts the request or doesn't respond within 48 hours, you will get the funds immediately. Refunds are added to your Fiverr Balance, or Fiverr Pro Balance if you're a Pro client, ready for future orders.
The cancellation only affects the week, not the whole order: if you wish to receive a refund and stop the order, you need to end the order as well.
If you wish to continue working with the freelancer and request a refund only for a week, you can dispute that week without ending the order.
See more information on the refund process.
Managing your Hourly order
You have control over your Hourly order at any time from the order page:
- Change the weekly hour limit.
- Pause the order with 24 hours' notice.
- End the order with 24 hours' notice.
You can make these changes by clicking the ellipsis button at the top right corner of the order page. If you choose to pause or end the order, the freelancer will have an additional 24 hours to report any final hours worked.
In-progress order feedback
You can leave a review for your freelancer during an in-progress Hourly order if these two conditions are met:
- At least four weeks of work have been done.
- The freelancer has reported at least 10 hours of work.
Once you submit a mid-order review, the cycle will begin again. Tips and private feedback are only available when the entire Hourly order is completed.
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- All Fiverr Pro Terms of Service and Payment Terms apply.
- Disputes may only address the hours reported in a weekly report. Fiverr does not guarantee the quality of work and Fiverr's Customer Support will not accept disputes regarding the quality of services.
- The refund amount is limited to the number of hours reported by the freelancer.
- Weekly reports are auto-completed if you don't ask for a refund within 72 hours from the weekly payment or within 7 days if the Hourly order is in manual approval mode.
- Clients are strictly prohibited from using a canceled delivery. The freelancer retains all rights to the canceled order.
- Fiverr reserves the right to determine which orders are eligible, and to exclude instances of abuse, fraud, or any other inappropriate activity.
FAQs
- Fixed-price projects are ideal for well-defined services with clear deliverables. Hourly work is suitable for projects of at least 8 hours of work, long-term hiring, ongoing projects with evolving scopes, or for projects whose scope is hard to define at the beginning.
- Yes, in the Hourly model, you pay based on the actual hours worked, providing flexibility and fair billing according to the time and effort put into your project.
- the hours logged and progress made.
- Yes, when discussing your needs with the freelancer you can set a weekly hour limit as part of the custom offer. You can change or remove this limit at any time from the order page.
- Once a freelancer logs their hours and work, you’ll receive an email and a notification. You can then review and approve the report directly from the Hourly order page. After approval, the freelancer will be paid and can continue logging hours for the next week.
- You can choose between two approval methods for each Hourly contract:
- Manual approval (default): You'll have 7 days to review and manually approve each report after submission.
- Automatic approval: Reports are automatically approved within 3 days of submission. You can always dispute a report if needed, regardless of the approval method.
- By default, all Hourly contracts are set to manual approval. To switch to automatic approval, go to the Hourly order page, click on the “Actions” menu in the top-right corner, and update your report approval settings.
- Freelancers provide detailed descriptions and can add attachments of their work each week, ensuring you have visibility into their progress. The reporting always occurs before Sunday, 23:59 UTC each week, and you will be charged for the work the following Monday, before the time you need to pay for the work.
- Yes, you can pause the project if the freelancer’s services are temporarily not required. Discuss this with your freelancer to ensure a smooth pause and resume process. You can also end the project at any time from your order page. Keep in mind that the freelancer will have an additional 24 hours from the moment you pause or end the project to log hours.
- If the weekly report isn't what you expected, or if you have any issues, the dispute window depends on your order's approval mode:
- Manual approval mode: You have 7 days to dispute the report.
- Automatic approval mode: You have 72 hours to dispute the report.