Every LinkedIn character limit in 2026 (and where your text really gets cut)

A LinkedIn post allows 3,000 characters, a headline 220, the About section 2,600, a comment 1,250, and a connection request note 300. Those are the hard caps, the point where the box stops accepting text. Almost none of them is the number you should actually be writing to.

• Post: 3,000 characters.
• Headline: 220 characters.
• About section: 2,600 characters.
• Comment: 1,250 characters.
• Connection request note: 300 characters.
• Experience description: 2,000 characters per role.
• Each skill: 80 characters.
• Direct message to a connection: 8,000 characters.
• InMail: 200 characters of subject, around 1,900 in the body.
• Article: around 110,000 characters, which nobody has ever reached.

Bookmark that list if you like, but the useful part of this page is the next section. Writing to the cap is the most common mistake on this platform, and the cap is not where readers stop.

Far earlier than 3,000. In the mobile feed a post is cut after roughly three lines or about 140 characters, whichever comes first. On desktop it is roughly three lines or about 210 characters. Everything after that sits behind a see more link that most people never tap.

That is the real limit. You have 3,000 characters of room and about 140 characters of attention, and the second number decides whether anyone reads the first. It is why the opening line matters more than everything under it combined.

The fold is also line-sensitive, not just character-sensitive. A post with several short lines hits the line budget before the character budget, so aggressive line breaks in the opening will cut you off sooner than a single flowing sentence would. You can see exactly where the cut lands for your own draft in the LinkedIn post preview, which renders both devices, or count against the fold live in the character counter.

3,000 characters is what LinkedIn allows. About 140 is what you actually get. Write the first two lines as if they are the whole post.

Long enough to make one point properly and no longer, which for most posts lands somewhere between 1,200 and 1,600 characters. The cap is not a target. A post that runs to 3,000 characters is usually two posts that have not been separated yet.

Length is less important than shape. Short blocks with space between them read easily on a phone, and a wall of text loses people before the first idea arrives, regardless of how many characters it contains. That mechanic and the rest of the reach levers are in seven changes that double your LinkedIn reach.

The field takes 220 characters and shows far fewer. Beside your name in the feed, in search results and under your comments it truncates early and inconsistently, so anything past roughly 120 characters is a bonus for people who open your profile rather than something most readers see.

Front-load accordingly: what you do and who you do it for in the first half, the proof trailing behind. The full formula, with twelve worked examples, is in how to write a LinkedIn headline.

Around the first 300 characters on desktop and closer to 200 on mobile, out of an allowed 2,600. Everything else is behind see more, so the opening two or three lines carry the whole section whether you intended them to or not.

Which is why the standard opener is so costly. A sentence about your years of experience across a variety of industries spends every visible character saying nothing at all. Open with the specific work instead, and the structure that follows it is in how to write a LinkedIn About section.

Practical target: 800 to 1,200 characters total. Running to the 2,600 cap almost always means you are writing to three audiences at once.

Comments allow 1,250 characters and the good ones use a fraction of it. Connection notes allow 300, which is genuinely tight and genuinely useful, because it forces you to say one specific thing instead of a paragraph of preamble.

For comments, two to four sentences is the working range. Long comments read as a post someone published in the wrong place, and the ones that earn profile visits add a specific example or a real counterpoint rather than volume. More on that in why commenting grows an account faster than posting.

For connection notes, 300 characters is roughly two sentences: one showing you know who they are, one saying why you are connecting. Anything more and it reads as a pitch. The shapes that get accepted are in who to connect with on LinkedIn.

Yes, and it catches people out. LinkedIn has no native bold or italic, so styled text is made from alternative Unicode characters, and those can consume more of your budget than the plain letters they replace. A post that fits can stop fitting once you style a line.

There is a bigger cost than the count. Screen readers announce those characters as individual symbols rather than words, so a styled headline can be unreadable to anyone using assistive technology. Use it sparingly, never for whole paragraphs, and never for the words that carry your meaning. The LinkedIn text formatter does it properly and says the same thing on the page.

Write against the fold rather than the cap, and check before you publish rather than after. The two numbers worth watching are the first 140 characters of a post and the first 120 of a headline. Everything else has enough room that it is rarely the constraint.

The character counter covers every surface on this page and marks the fold line as you type, and the post preview shows the finished thing on desktop and mobile. Both are free and neither needs an account.

If you would rather not think about any of it, that is the point of innernote. It learns how you actually write and turns a rough thought or a voice note into a post already shaped for the scroll, with the fold, the length and the formatting handled, so the only thing left is deciding whether you meant it. See how it works, or start free, no card needed.