Instagram Character Counter

Instagram cut hashtags from 30 to 5 in December 2025. Adam Mosseri confirmed the change, and it's been corroborated across multiple outlets since. If you're still planning posts around "use all 30 tags," that advice is now nearly a year out of date and won't help your reach the way it used to.

The 5-tag cap counts caption and comments together. This is the part that trips people up. Hiding extra hashtags in your first comment used to work as a workaround to the old 30-tag limit. Now, every hashtag anywhere on the post, caption or comments, draws from the same pool of 5.

Front-load your caption's first 125 characters. That's all a feed viewer sees before they have to tap "...more," so your hook, offer, or question needs to land inside that window, not after it.

Your username and display name are separate 30-character fields. No one else on the platform can hold your exact @handle, and changing it casually can break old links people saved or shared. Your display name (the bold text above your handle) can include spaces and gets refreshed more freely, so put your brand's real name there and keep the handle simple.

Alt text isn't a hard limit, it's a recommendation. Instagram doesn't cut you off at a specific character count for alt text the way it does for captions or bios, but shorter, more literal descriptions (under about 100 characters) tend to work better for accessibility than long, keyword-stuffed ones.