Upwork and Fiverr With a US LLC: Only One Publishes Rules

"Businesses or individuals in the following regions and countries are not permitted to register for accounts or utilize our platform:"

Upwork, Who's eligible to join and use Upwork?.

Businesses or individuals. Upwork closed the incorporation route in its own first four words. A US LLC is a business, and businesses are named.

The list: Iran; North Korea; Crimea, region of Ukraine; Cuba; individual nationals of Cuba; Luhansk People's Republic (LPR); Donetsk People's Republic (DPR); and "any other country or region restricted by law (this changes occasionally)."

Separately:

"Upwork suspended operations in Russia and Belarus as of May 1, 2022."

Same source.

Upwork says why:

"U.S. law restricts Upwork from conducting business with individuals or entities located or traveling in restricted areas."

Same source.

Upwork also screens against the Specially Designated Nationals list.

Set that against Mercury, which will not open an account for a founder living in Croatia or Latvia. Nothing in US law prevents a bank from serving a Latvian resident. That is one company's risk appetite, and another company reaches a different answer, which is why a Mercury rejection is worth appealing to Relay.

An Upwork exclusion is not like that. It is a legal prohibition, every compliant US platform reaches the same answer, and there is no provider to switch to. Listing the two kinds of exclusion in a single table, as most country guides do, tells you nothing about which one you can route around.

"Individual nationals of Cuba" is the single citizenship-based restriction found across all twelve providers we track.

Every other gate is about where a company is formed, where its bank account is, or where a person lives. All three can change. Citizenship generally cannot, so a Cuban national is outside Upwork regardless of residence, entity or documentation.

Relay comes closest with a test on citizenship or residency across 31 countries, but that is risk policy. Upwork's is the sanctions case.

We could not retrieve any published country eligibility policy for Fiverr.

That is the finding, and we are not going to improve on it by assembling a list from forum posts. Fiverr is a US company subject to the same sanctions law as Upwork, so the sanctioned-jurisdiction outcome is predictable in substance. What is not published is anything beyond that: no country list, no statement about business versus individual accounts, no entity policy.

If you have registered a Fiverr account under a US LLC from outside the US, or been refused, tell us the country and the month. Fiverr is one of the emptier cells in our index and reader reports would move it.

It does not cure a restricted-country presence. Upwork's rule names businesses explicitly.

It does not change your nationality. The Cuban-nationals clause follows the person.

It may still be worth having, for the ordinary reasons: invoicing US clients as a US entity, banking, payment processing and the tax position. Those are separate from platform eligibility and none of them is what this page is about.

Can I use Upwork with a US LLC from a restricted country? No. Upwork's rule covers "businesses or individuals" in the listed regions, so the entity does not help. This is a legal restriction rather than a policy one, so no competing platform will reach a different answer.

Is Upwork's list the same kind of thing as Mercury's? No, and the difference matters. Upwork's is sanctions-driven and applies to every compliant US platform. Mercury's is institutional risk policy, which is why Relay permits five countries Mercury refuses.

I'm a Cuban national living in Spain. Can I use Upwork? Upwork's list names individual nationals of Cuba, which follows citizenship rather than residence. This is the only citizenship-based gate we found across twelve providers.

What about Russia and Belarus? Upwork suspended operations there as of May 1, 2022, and states it separately from the restricted-regions list.

Does Fiverr have the same rules? Fiverr publishes nothing we could retrieve. As a US company it is subject to the same sanctions law, so sanctioned jurisdictions are predictable, but anything beyond that is undocumented and we are not going to invent it.