Instagram Character Counter

Instagram character limits for captions and bios

An Instagram caption can hold up to 2,200 characters and a bio up to 150, and a post may carry at most 5 hashtags. These are the text limits Meta states, checked on 16 October 2026:

Meta states the caption limit in its Instagram API reference for publishing posts, the page that also names the limits for @mentions and alt text. The bio limit is in Instagram's Help Center, and the 60 characters for a comment on a Story are on its page about Story comments. Neither Instagram's Help Center nor Meta's Instagram API reference names a character limit for a comment on a post, a username or a profile name, so the table leaves them out.

What is the Instagram bio character limit?

An Instagram bio holds up to 150 characters. Choose Bio above the text box and make the room count:

1. Say what you do and for whom in the first line.
2. Separate items with a line break rather than an emoji: in the counter's count a line break is 1 character, most emoji 2.
3. Cut words that repeat each other, since every space and comma counts too.

This three-line bio follows those tips. In the counter it takes 142 of the 150 characters, broken down line by line below, and leaves 8, room for an emoji at the end.

How the counter counts characters

The counter counts a caption strictly: 1 for each ordinary letter, space and line break, 2 for most emoji and usually 4 for an emoji with a skin tone. Meta doesn't document how Instagram counts emoji, so if Instagram counts an emoji as 1, you have a little more room than shown.

Meta also doesn't say how much of an ordinary caption the feed shows before “… more”, so put the point of the post in its first line. For an Instagram feed ad, Meta's Ads Guide recommends 125 characters of primary text and says longer ad text may be truncated. Other character counters, Gaugeify and AlwaysOn among them, also quote about 125 characters (both as of October 2026). The preview under “Where it gets cut” marks only the 2,200-character limit, not the point where the feed shortens the caption.

Below the count, the counter shows how many hashtags the caption holds against the 5 a post allows, and the number turns red past 5. Press “Insert an example” and it reads “3 of 5 hashtags”. The counter offers two fields, Caption and Bio; to check one caption on other networks too, use the social media character counter.

Instagram's hashtag limit is now 5, not 30

Instagram now allows up to 5 hashtags on a post, down from 30. Its @creators account announced the change on Threads on 18 December 2025: “Starting today, Instagram will allow up to 5 hashtags in a reel or post.” Instagram's Help Center says you can use up to 5 hashtags on a post, and warns that with more than 5 on a single photo or video, “your comment won't post”.

Instagram's hashtag page in the Help Center changed the same month: an archived copy from 7 December 2025 still says 30, and one from 21 December 2025 says 5. Meta's Instagram API reference still says 30 for a caption, and another Help Center page, on comment errors, still says 30 for a single comment.

The counter checks a caption against 5, the number the Help Center gives. Pick the hashtags that describe the post best and drop the rest before you publish.

Planning LinkedIn posts as a team

Scripe is a social media management platform for B2B teams and agencies, built LinkedIn-first. Today it publishes to LinkedIn, not to Instagram.

If your team also posts on LinkedIn, that means many posts, written by several people and reviewed before they go out. In Scripe's content calendar you plan them for the company page and every colleague's profile, with a review step when your team wants one. To count a LinkedIn post, use the LinkedIn character counter.