Stephan Miller
Never Run Out of Freelance Work - An Exhaustive List of Writing Job Lists

Never Run Out of Freelance Work - An Exhaustive List of Writing Job Lists

Updated July 2026. I wrote this in 2023 and then did the thing I said I wouldn’t do: I let it rot. Almost three years later I went through every link on this page and checked it. About one in seven was dead. I pruned those, noted the companies that quietly got acquired, added a section on paid writer programs that publish their rates, and added a short section at the bottom on what actually got me work in the three years since — because it wasn’t what I expected when I wrote this.

Well, so much for the claims I made in my last blog post. After I wrote that, my freelance writing work picked up and I haven’t published a post since then. Last week alone I wrote about 12,000 words. The truth is that there is always freelance writing work online if you look for it and because it is, it can be hard to turn it down to do your own thing.

So I decided to write this post about how to find that writing work.

Writing for Agencies Versus Writing Directly for Clients

Most of what I write is for agencies. Yes, the pay can be a lot less than writing directly for a business, but most of the time, they give me the idea and possibly the outline for the article they want me to write and about 75% of the year, they keep me busy enough I don’t have to go looking for new work. With agencies, I really just write. I don’t pitch, don’t go back and forth with ideas, and really don’t do much in the way of editing.

But I do leave a lot on the table for this convenience. I learned it firsthand when a company I wrote for through an agency tracked me down to write directly for them. They wanted me to write the same type of blog articles and would pay me $800 a piece for articles in the 1000-1500 word range. The agency paid me $120.

That gap has not narrowed in the years since. The best per-word rate I have ever been paid came from a company that hired me directly with no middleman, and it was roughly four times what my steadiest agency pays. Convenience is expensive.

With the work flowing with agencies, I know how much I can make each month and know the schedule I have to have to keep up with the work. I know most of the articles I can write at the rate of about 500 words per hour and schedule my time accordingly. Not much thinking involved. I turned it into a system.

But agency work can also be feast or famine. Months will go by where I am consistently getting paid to write 1000 words a day and even have to turn down some work because there just is not enough time. And then, out of nowhere, the flow stops.

Which just happened this week. In the last month, I wrote around 40 articles freelancing. Yesterday, I finished the last one up and there was nothing in my queue. Which makes me anxious every time it happens and I start going through my bookmarks and searching Google to find new places to write for.

This time I decided to consolidate them in a blog post for easy reference.

Where to Find Freelance Writing Jobs Online

I decided to make this a list of other lists rather than linking directly to places you can write for because I am lazy and don’t want to come back and have to edit it every few weeks. I will let other sites curate and I will just curate their curations.

That instinct turned out to be right, by the way. The curated lists that are actively maintained are still here and still good. The individual company pages are the ones that rotted.

Writing Jobs and Pitch Request Newsletters Delivered to Your Inbox

I love these. I subscribe to too many newsletters and most get deleted before I open them. Some entice me to open them before I delete them. But these I read every time. If something catches my eye, I apply, even if agency work is keeping me busy. I do plan on cutting down on agency work, but while it is flowing, I don’t think about it. These remind me.

This section held up better than any other on the page — every one of these was still live in 2026.

This is the section I wish I’d had in 2023, and it’s the biggest omission in the original post.

A lot of developer tool companies run open writer programs: you apply, they assign you a topic or accept your pitch, and they pay a published rate per article. Unlike most job boards, the rate is stated up front, which means you can filter before you spend any effort. That single fact makes this the most efficient list on this page.

  • Community Writer Programs: A GitHub repo listing roughly 40 active paid programs, each with its pay rate and topic focus, split into active and paused. It gets audited about monthly, which as far as I can tell makes it the most reliably current list of its kind anywhere. Rates when I last looked ranged from $100 to $1,500 per article.
  • Who Pays Technical Writers: Crowdsourced rates for technical publications. Fewer application routes than the repo above, but better for finding out what a place actually pays before you talk to them.
  • Who Pays Writers: The non-technical equivalent.

If you write about software, start with these three rather than the general job boards. The programs paying $500 to $1,500 per article are on this list, and there are only a handful of them, so screening takes about twenty minutes.

Freelance Writing Platforms and Agencies

These are job boards and other membership sites that allow you to create a profile, portfolio, etc. Some are general job marketplaces. Some are agencies. I have signed up for a few of these, but there are a lot, so I haven’t reviewed all of them yet. I get most of my work either by hunting it down or through people who contact me on LinkedIn.

This is where the link rot was concentrated. I removed Contena, Freelance Writing Jobs (freelancewritinggigs.com), CravInkMinds, and Bou.co, all of which are simply gone. Three others changed hands and now redirect somewhere else, which I’ve noted inline — worth knowing before you fill out an application for a company that no longer exists under that name.

  • ProBlogger: A job board for bloggers, featuring freelance, contract, and part-time writing opportunities.
  • Content Writers: A content writing service that connects businesses with professional writers. I wrote for them for years. As of 2026 they are winding down, so treat this as historical.
  • Scripted: A platform for freelance writers to find work creating content for businesses and agencies.
  • nDash: A content creation platform that connects freelance writers with brands and agencies.
  • ClearVoice: A content marketing platform that connects freelance writers with clients.
  • The Urban Writers: A ghostwriting service for eBooks, articles, and other content.
  • Reedsy: A platform for freelance professionals in publishing, including writers, editors, and designers.
  • Steady Content: A content creation service that hires freelance writers to produce blog content.
  • All Freelance Writing: A resource for freelance writers, featuring job listings, writing tips, and advice.
  • Compose.ly: A content writing service that connects businesses with freelance writers.
  • MediaBistro: A job board and career resource for media professionals.
  • ContentFly: Now redirects to draft.co. The writer program moved with it.
  • Panda Copy: A content writing service that takes on freelance writers.
  • FlexJobs: A job board featuring remote, part-time, and freelance jobs, including writing. Subscription based.
  • ServiceScape: Connects freelance professionals, including writers, with clients.
  • Guru: A freelance marketplace.
  • Upwork: The big one. Expect to compete on price.
  • VirtualVocations: A job board featuring remote jobs, including writing positions.
  • TextBroker: A content writing service that hires freelance writers.
  • iWriter: Now redirects to FreeUp. Different company, different model.
  • Audience Ops: A content marketing service that hires freelance writers.
  • Twine: Connects freelance professionals, including writers, with clients.
  • Best Writing: A job board for writing-related positions.
  • BEwriters
  • Word Candy
  • The Writer Finder: The site is still up but the write-for-us page is gone, so start from the homepage.
  • Verblio
  • WriterBay
  • Constant Content
  • Writer Access
  • Express Writers: Now points at their services rather than a writer application.
  • qwoted
  • superpath
  • Fiverr

Online Lists and Directories of Writing Jobs

While some of these might fit into the list above, most of these are just basic lists of writing opportunities that get updated on a regular basis without all the bells and whistles.

I removed the “80 Websites that Pay Writers” entry here — it lived on freelancewritinggigs.com, which is gone along with the rest of that site.

Social Media Writing Job Lists

These aren’t actually lists, but filtered or hashtag searches of social networks or profiles that may turn up some writing opportunities.

Be warned that this section has aged the worst. Twitter is X now, most of these searches require you to be logged in, and several of the accounts post far less than they did in 2023. I’ve left them because a couple are still worth a look, but I would not build a routine around them.

What Actually Worked, Three Years Later

Here is the part I couldn’t have written in 2023, and it is the reason I bothered updating this instead of just fixing the links.

I used these lists the way you’re probably about to. Over roughly a year I applied to about 25 places from this page and its equivalents. Write-for-us pages, guest author programs, application forms. I did not get a single reply. Not one acceptance, not one rejection. Silence.

That is not an argument against the lists. I found LogRocket through Who Pays Technical Writers and wrote for them for three years. The lists work. But it took me an embarrassingly long time to understand why they work when they work, and it is not the way I was using them.

A posted opening is an auction. Whatever the page says, you are one of a few thousand people submitting a form to a marketing person who checks that inbox when they remember to. Your sample being good is not enough, because nobody is reading it.

The things that actually produced paid work in those three years:

Emailing a specific human about a specific thing. Not “I’m available for freelance writing,” but “your engineering blog hasn’t posted since March and you shipped a major feature last month.” That’s a conversation with one person, not a lottery with five thousand.

Going back to clients who had gone quiet. This one genuinely surprised me. When I finally sat down and checked my old client folders, I found that my highest-paying client of all time was one I had mentally written off years earlier — and when I looked into why they stopped sending work, it was because the two people I dealt with had both left the company the month after my last article. Nobody rejected me. My contact walked out the door and the relationship went with them. That has now happened to me at three separate companies. If your income keeps falling off a cliff for no visible reason, go check whether your editor still works there.

Filtering by rate before spending any effort. Every application I sent went out with no rate screen at all. Some of those places pay six cents a word and some pay sixty, and I was treating them identically. The community writer programs list above publishes rates, which cuts forty programs down to about eight worth applying to.

So use this page. It is a good page and I keep it current now. Just don’t let it be the only thing you do, because the list is the easy part and the easy part is where everyone else already is.

So Much for Exhaustive

I had the idea to write this post so that I wouldn’t have to hunt through all of my bookmarks and do Google searches next time I went looking for writing work. It turned out to be a lot of work, and then I left it alone for three years and half of it rotted anyway.

It’s current as of July 2026. If you find a dead link or know somewhere that belongs here, let me know and I’ll add it.

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Stephan Miller

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Kansas City Software Engineer and Author

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