Ever wondered how many freelancers are in the world? What they do or from which countries are they from? We did, and created this cool set of visualization in Tableau. And since we are not greedy and always try to give the most to our clients, we decided to share it with them and with our readers (you) via this blog post.

Note: The data from these visualizations is based on publicly available data from World Bank and freelancing sites. When analyzing it please keep in mind that the data includes only digital freelancers who work via online marketplaces. Offline or independent freelancers are not included in this analysis.

P.S. For a better experience it is recommended to view the visualization in full screen.

In the first map below, we can see the total number of registered and active freelancers classified by country, along the percentage of active freelancers from the total of registered freelancers.

As you can see, United States has the highest number of freelancers – 558K, of which 13.90% or 77K have been active in the past 3 months. It is followed by India with 145K freelancers (of which 14% were active in the past 3 months) and Philippines with 162K freelancers.

In terms of how popular is internet freelancing per 1000 people, we can see that Freelancing as a career is the most spread in Serbia where there are 3.52 freelancers per 1000 people living there.

Serbia is followed by Macedonia with 3.41 freelancers per 1000 people, Jamaica with 2.43 people and Armenia with 2.18 people out of 1000 being freelancers.

United States ranks 5th with 1.72 freelancers per 1000 people while Montenegro and “Bosnia and Herzegovina” rank 6th and 7th with 1.58 and 1.55 freelancers per 1000 people.

From this map we can also see that digital freelancing is most spread in the Balkan peninsula (Europe), Eastern Europe and among English speaking countries like USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, UK and Ireland.

Apart from these countries, freelancing is also widely spread (compared to country’s population) in Portugal, Iceland, Philippines, Armenia and Georgia (country).

Countries like India, Russia, Pakistan and Bangladesh although have a high number of freelancers, when compared against their population, the number of freelancers per 1000 people is relatively low so we may consider that freelancing is not that popular there.

In terms of most popular categories among freelancers, we can see that “Web, Mobile and Software development”, “Design & creative”, “Writing” and “Admin Support” are the most popular categories in which freelancers choose to specialize and work.

Analyzing the specific subcategories below, we can see that United States has the most freelancers in almost all subcategories with some exceptions like “Web & Mobile Design”, “Other – Software Development”, “Desktop Software Development” “Ecommerce Development”, “Product Management” and “Q&A Testing” where India has more freelancers.

In some categories like “Customer Services” and “Technical Support” United States is on par with Philippines.