Free tool
Caption length checker for Instagram, TikTok and YouTube
Include the hashtags — every platform counts them as part of the caption.
- TikTok0 / 2,200
2,200 characters left in the caption.
- Instagram Reels0 / 2,200
2,200 characters left in the caption.
- Instagram Post0 / 2,200
2,200 characters left in the caption.
- YouTube Shorts0 / 5,000
5,000 characters left in the description.
- YouTube long-form0 / 5,000
5,000 characters left in the description.
Counting works the way the publish check does: one character per UTF-16 code unit, so most emoji count as two and line breaks count as one. Nothing you type here is uploaded or stored — the count runs in your browser.
Why the limits differ
Three platforms, two numbers, and one very common way to blow past both.
The limit is a hard stop
TikTok and Instagram both refuse a caption over 2,200 characters, and YouTube refuses a description over 5,000. Nothing truncates for you — the post simply fails.
Hashtags spend the same budget
Hashtags aren't a separate field on any of these platforms. They are appended to the caption before it is measured, so thirty tags can be several hundred characters of your allowance.
Visible length is a different number
The limit is what the platform accepts. What a scroller reads before tapping is a line or two, decided by their screen width — not by a character count you can plan around exactly.
TikTok, Instagram Reels and Instagram Posts all cap the caption at 2,200 characters. YouTube's description field is a different kind of field — it carries chapters, links and credits as well as the pitch — so both the Shorts and long-form targets allow 5,000.
That difference is the reason a caption written for YouTube rarely survives a copy-paste to the other four. It's also why per-target caption overrides exist at all: one long description for YouTube, one tight caption for everything vertical.
Titles are separate again. YouTube requires one and caps it at 100 characters; TikTok uses a title only on photo posts. The video specs cheatsheet has the full table.
What gets truncated in-feed versus in full view
Hitting the limit is one problem. Being read is a different one.
In the feed
Instagram and TikTok both collapse a long caption behind a “more” control after a line or two. Where the cut lands depends on the device, the font size and the language, not on a fixed character count — which is why any specific number you have seen quoted for it is a rough average at best.
In full view
Once expanded, the whole caption is there up to the hard limit. On YouTube the description behaves the same way: a couple of lines under the title, the rest behind “show more”.
The practical rule that falls out of this: write the first sentence as if it's the only one anybody reads, because for most of the feed it is. Everything after the fold — context, credits, the call to action, the tags — is for the people who already stopped.
And be careful with line breaks. They count as characters and they push the fold up, so a caption formatted as five short paragraphs shows less before the cut than the same words in one block.
How hashtags count toward the limit
The single most common reason a caption that looked fine gets rejected.
None of these platforms treat hashtags as a separate field with its own allowance. Whether you type them inline or keep them in a block at the bottom, they are part of the caption string the platform receives, and they are measured with it.
ContentWorkflow makes that explicit: the caption and the hashtag list are joined — each tag prefixed with # — and the joined result is what gets measured against the limit. Up to 50 hashtags are allowed per target. Thirty tags averaging fifteen characters is around 480 characters of your 2,200, before a word of the caption.
Two extra things worth knowing. On YouTube Shorts, the app appends #Shorts when it isn't already in the text, which costs a handful more characters. And most emoji count as two characters, not one, because the count is done in UTF-16 code units — the same way the publish check counts them.
The tool above counts everything you paste, hashtags included, so paste the caption exactly as you intend to post it.
Limits change — this page reflects today
Worth saying plainly on a page whose whole job is quoting numbers.
These are the limits ContentWorkflow enforces right now, read directly from the code that runs the publish. They are not scraped from the platforms live, and platforms move the goalposts without much warning.
If a publish is refused with a limit that doesn't match what this page says, believe the platform. The app surfaces its error verbatim rather than hiding it behind a generic failure.
Counted here, enforced there.
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