UpworkMRR is an independent analytics tool that tracks estimated monthly earnings for freelancers working on Upwork. Built by an independent developer and not affiliated with Upwork in any capacity, it draws on data from Lancer.app to produce a public leaderboard, sortable by country and by skill category. At the top of the United Kingdom table sits Ryan Ramshaw, an AI automation specialist based in Leicester, with UpworkMRR estimating his current monthly figure at $31,000.
The UK table covers more than 9,400 freelancers.
UpworkMRR sorts that table by its estimated monthly earnings figure rather than by lifetime accumulated totals. The distinction changes who appears where: the leaderboard measures active current throughput, and the top spot places Ramshaw ahead of specialists with considerably longer histories on the platform and, in several cases, larger career totals overall.
The record behind that position can be checked independently. His public Upwork profile shows 68 completed jobs, more than 600 hours logged, a Top Rated Plus designation, and a 100% job success score. UpworkMRR puts his estimated lifetime earnings at $312,000 across those contracts, at an average of roughly $4,600 per project. That per-project figure reflects the category he works in: multi-step AI agent builds, n8n orchestration pipelines, API integrations across business platforms, and voice agent systems, rather than smaller, lower-value tasks.
According to the UpworkMRR profile, Ramshaw joined Upwork in 2018. The AI automation category looked substantially different then. n8n, which now functions as the orchestration layer for much of his current work, was not yet widely adopted. Claude Code, the Anthropic tool for writing AI agents in code rather than through prompt interfaces, did not exist. Voice agents as a commercial service category were similarly absent from the platform. The tools that now define the high end of automation freelancing developed largely over the same period Ramshaw has been active on Upwork. UpworkMRR also places him in the top 0.01% of Make.com specialists on the platform by earnings.
Recent work on his Upwork record includes an invoice automation platform built on n8n and Google Cloud Run for a digital transformation client, and a commission to create an end-to-end training course on n8n for a client who needed that expertise documented. The second of those is a different kind of contract: not building a system, but being paid to explain how the systems are built.
The other project Ramshaw runs is Upwork Whales, a selective mentorship for freelancers trying to build practices on the platform. The program covers four areas: profile positioning, pipeline development, sales, and delivery. It takes applications rather than open enrollment, and the site notes that not all applicants are accepted. The reasoning, as the program frames it, is that most freelancers hitting a ceiling are losing at the positioning stage, before the skills question becomes the limiting factor.
The leaderboard position and the mentorship program are directly connected. Being ranked first in a national market on the same platform you are teaching others to compete on is a particular form of credibility. Ramshaw’s Upwork profile carries the public evidence: the job count, the hourly rate, the badge tier, and the client review history built across 68 contracts. The UpworkMRR leaderboard is what a third-party tool produces when it takes that profile data and ranks it.
The ranking is a third party’s read on a body of work. The body of work, 68 contracts since 2018 with a job success rate the platform currently shows as perfect, is the thing that does not move.