Say nothing, resume normally

If you stopped for three months and are starting again, the correct handling of the gap is to not handle it. Nobody is auditing your timeline, and the sentence you were going to write explaining it is the only thing that would make the gap visible.

What does need attention is everything that went stale while you were away, and that is a checklist rather than a confession.

Why the explanation hurts

A buyer looking at your listing is asking one question: will this person deliver. Your last review being from March is weak evidence, and it fades the moment a new one appears.

An explanation is strong evidence, because you volunteered it. "I took some time out for personal reasons and I'm back now" converts a fact nobody noticed into a fact you have drawn a box around, and it invites the follow-up question of whether it is going to happen again.

What to update before you resume

Prices first, because the market has probably moved and your old number is now either underpriced or attached to a promise you cannot keep.

Turnaround second, and set it honestly for the speed you can hold this week rather than the speed you held at your peak. A missed turnaround in your first job back is far more expensive than a slower one advertised.

Availability, formats you no longer offer, and any dated line in the biography. The general maintenance argument is in the piece on what a live profile signals, and coming back is just that job done all at once.

Then stop. Resist the rewrite; the copy was not why you stopped and it is not why you will restart.

What recovery actually looks like

Ranking recovers with completed work, not with time or edits. The best evidence for this comes from a field experiment on the oDesk marketplace: Amanda Pallais (American Economic Review, 2014) hired 952 inexperienced workers and found that being hired, and receiving a public evaluation, substantially improved their later employment.

Expect the first week back to be quiet in a way that feels like proof of something. It is not: you are being sorted below people who have been continuously active, and the only input that changes that is a finished job with a recent review attached.

Two or three completed jobs usually put a returning earner back into normal visibility, and the second one arrives much faster than the first. Older reviews still count - they do not expire, they just get outweighed - so you are restarting from a better position than a genuinely new listing, even when the first fortnight does not feel like it.

Being reachable matters more than usual during this period, because early enquiries after a gap skew towards buyers who want something now. The post on replying fast without living online has the practical version, which is mostly about picking two windows rather than being permanently available.

The one gap worth mentioning

If the gap is visible for a reason - a suspension that was reversed, a change of alias, a format you publicly retired - say the minimum factual thing once, in a sentence, without narrative.

Everything else is your business. The trade has no continuous-service norm and no one keeping score, which is one of the genuinely good things about being paid per job rather than per year.

Buyers, asked what they check on a returning listing, mostly describe checking the date of the most recent review and nothing else, which matches the account of how a commission normally opens. If your absence was long enough that the scoring conventions themselves shifted, the current scoring reference is worth a read before you take a job under the old assumptions. The same applies to any numeric claim you carried over from before - the standards for what counts as a defensible figure have moved faster than most people's profiles have.

For what a dormant Rate Cock listing does and does not retain, and what reactivating involves, the judges page is the source.