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LinkedIn character counter

Count characters against LinkedIn's real limits as you type: post 3,000, headline 220. Emoji-safe counting, with the mobile fold at about 140 characters.

Your text

Post limit0 / 3,000 — 3,000 left

The feed collapses after ~140 characters on mobile.

Which limit?

Counts

Characters
0
Words
0
Sentences
0
Lines
0

Characters are counted the way a reader sees them, so an emoji counts once even though it is several bytes.

Every linkedin limit

Post3,000 left
Headline220 left
About section2,600 left

How to size a post, a headline and an About section

LinkedIn gives you three text fields that behave nothing alike, and the one almost nobody counts is the headline that follows you around the rest of the platform.

  1. Paste the post draft in and read it against the post ceiling. Nothing is uploaded, so an unannounced hire or launch is safe in this box.
  2. Paste as plain text if the draft came out of a word processor, so what you count is what LinkedIn will actually receive.
  3. Switch to the headline surface and write to 220 characters. It sits under your name in the feed, in search, in invitations and under every comment you leave.
  4. Paste the About section separately against its 2,600 characters, and treat the first two sentences as the whole thing, because that is all anyone sees unexpanded.
  5. Strip the emoji bullets if you used them. Each is a character here and more than one in any tool measuring code units, which is where your scheduler and LinkedIn start disagreeing.
  6. Copy the post back into the composer and judge the preview by its first two lines rather than by its total.

Three fields, three very different budgets

A post, a headline and an About section are three separate budgets, and only one of them is generous. Knowing which is which saves you rewriting the same sentence three times.

  • Post: 3,000 characters. Long posts are allowed and rarely read to the end, so treat this as headroom for a genuine essay rather than as a target to fill.
  • Headline: 220 characters. Appears under your name everywhere on the platform.
  • About section: 2,600 characters. Collapsed after ~265 characters.
  • URLs count in full. LinkedIn has no shortener in the way, so a tracking link with campaign parameters can cost more than a sentence.
  • The preview card is built from the first URL in the post. Once it has loaded you can delete the URL text itself, and the card stays while the characters come back.
  • An @mention renders as somebody's name once posted, and it is the text you typed that gets charged.
  • Hashtags are ordinary characters in the post body, not a separate field, so a block of them competes with the writing.
  • Alt text on an image has its own field and does not come out of the post.
  • Comments are capped far below posts, so a reply that fits this box can still be refused there.

Why a pasted post counts differently here

The count that surprises people on LinkedIn is the one that changes between the document and the composer. A post written in Word or Google Docs arrives carrying characters that look identical to the ones you typed and are not.

  • Curly quotes, the ellipsis character and the non-breaking space each cost exactly one character, the same as their plain versions, so they are rarely the gap you are looking for.
  • An accented name can be one code point or two depending on how it was typed: an e followed by a combining acute is two code points and one character to a reader.
  • This page segments graphemes, so it charges that name once, which is what LinkedIn shows and what the reader counts.
  • Bold and italic "fonts" pasted from a styling tool are mathematical alphanumeric symbols, two UTF-16 code units each, and they also stop the post being searchable or readable to a screen reader.
  • The fix for all of it is to paste as plain text and put the emphasis back in the words rather than in the characters.

The limit that actually binds

For most LinkedIn posts the character count is not the binding constraint, and treating it as one produces posts that are technically compliant and entirely unread.

  • The headline is the field worth counting to the character, because it is short and it is displayed nearly everywhere you appear.
  • A post that needs all 3,000 characters is usually an article, and LinkedIn has a separate format for those.
  • When you are cutting to fit, cut the first paragraph rather than the last: the opening is where the throat-clearing lives.
  • No counter can tell you whether the first two lines earn the expand, and that is the only length rule the feed really enforces.
The rest of the job

You just fixed one post. Now do the month.

The linkedin character counter solves one piece of one post. OctoSpark plans, writes and schedules the whole calendar across every network you use, publishes it for you, and reports what actually performed.

  • One calendar for every network
  • Schedule once, publish everywhere
  • Drafts written in your own voice
  • See what actually performed
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Frequently asked questions

How this tool works, what it cannot do, and what happens to what you put into it.

  • What is the LinkedIn character limit?

    A LinkedIn post allows 3,000 characters. The feed collapses after ~140 characters on mobile. This tool also counts against the headline (220) and the about section (2,600), so you can check a bio and a post without switching pages.

  • How much of my post shows before "see more"?

    LinkedIn collapses the post after roughly 140 characters on mobile and 210 on desktop, well short of the 3,000 limit. Put the hook in the first line: everything after the fold only gets read if that line earns the click.

  • Why does my emoji count as more than one character?

    Most counters measure UTF-16 code units, where a single emoji is two and a flag or skin-tone variant can be four or more. This tool counts grapheme clusters, what a reader sees as one character, using the browser's own segmenter, which is how the platforms count too.

  • Is my text sent anywhere?

    No. The counting happens in this page as you type. Nothing is uploaded, stored or logged, so you can safely paste an unpublished draft.

  • Is my data private?

    Yes. This tool does its work in your browser, so whatever you type, paste or upload stays on your device. Nothing is sent to our servers, which is also why it keeps working if you go offline after the page has loaded.

  • Is this really free?

    Yes. Every tool here is free with no account, no credit card and no usage cap. They exist so that the people who need our scheduling product find us, which only works if the tools are genuinely useful on their own.

  • Do I need an account?

    No. Open the page and use it. An account is only for OctoSpark itself, where you plan, schedule and publish a whole calendar rather than fixing one post at a time.

  • Can I use the output commercially?

    Yes. Anything you produce here is yours, including for client and commercial work. We claim no rights over it and we do not watermark it.