LinkedIn character limit

3,000 characters. LinkedIn Help's page on posting updates says "Posts can contain up to 3,000 characters," and that if you need more, you can write an article using LinkedIn's publishing platform instead. That's roughly 10 times X's 280 and 10 times Bluesky's 300.

LinkedIn Help also says it "may limit how many posts a member or a LinkedIn Page can make in a certain time period." Length isn't the only constraint; frequency is limited too, though LinkedIn doesn't publish the number. Our API caps each LinkedIn account at 50 posts per 24 hours.

Everything in the text: letters, spaces, punctuation, line breaks, emoji, hashtags and URLs at their full length. Unlike X, LinkedIn doesn't count links as a fixed 23. Images, documents and other attachments don't count toward the text limit.

LinkedIn doesn't document its counting unit. Our API counts graphemes, what a reader sees as one character, so 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 counts 1 and café counts 4. For ordinary text, every method gives the same answer. Where they differ, mostly with emoji and Unicode bold letters, leave some headroom near 3,000.

Counts below are graphemes, as our API's preflight measures them.

• Hiring: staff engineer, platform team. Remote in US time zones. Details and the full job description are on our careers page. is 125 characters, about 4% of the limit.
• A post with a 56-character tracking URL spends 56 of the 3,000 on it, not 23 as on X.
• Two paragraphs separated by a blank line spend 2 characters on the line breaks.
• 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱 in Unicode bold is 4 graphemes but 8 UTF-16 code units. If LinkedIn counts code units, bold text costs double; we don't know which it uses, so treat bold-heavy posts near the limit with care.
• A 3,001-character post fails our preflight with text_too_long before LinkedIn sees it.

In LinkedIn's app, you can't publish it until you shorten it. Through LinkedIn's Posts API, the request fails with a 400 and the error FIELD_LENGTH_TOO_LONG, which LinkedIn describes as a field length exceeding the allowed maximum, with the advice to reduce the commentary.

Through our API, it doesn't get that far. Preflight returns a 422 preflight_failed with a text_too_long issue such as "Text is 3120 characters; LinkedIn allows 3000." and the fix "Shorten it by 120+ characters, or set platform_options.linkedin.text to a shorter version." Nothing is published, and dry_run: true gives the same check without storing anything.

LinkedIn's API takes post text in its "little" text format, where characters like ( ) [ ] { } < > @ | * _ ~ \ have meaning; a mention is written @[Name](urn:li:organization:...). We escape those reserved characters with a backslash so they appear as typed, and leave #hashtags intact so they still link.

That escaping happens after we count. Q&A (live) with @team: bring [questions] *now* is 46 characters as you wrote it and 53 after escaping. LinkedIn doesn't document whether escape characters count toward its limit, so a post right at 3,000 with many brackets or asterisks is worth trimming a little.

Not natively. LinkedIn posts have no bold or italic formatting, so people use Unicode letters that look bold or italic. Our LinkedIn text formatter converts text that way, and warns that screen readers read those letters poorly. Use it for a word or two, not whole paragraphs.

To see how a draft will look in the feed, including where line breaks fall, paste it into the LinkedIn post preview.

If you're over 3,000, these give back the most characters for the least rewriting.

• Shorten tracking URLs. Every character of a link counts on LinkedIn.
• Cut blank lines between short paragraphs; each one costs 1 to 2 characters and they add up in list-style posts.
• Move long-form content into a LinkedIn article, which LinkedIn Help suggests when a post won't fit, and link to it from a short post.
• If you crosspost, keep the long version for LinkedIn and send shorter ones to X and Bluesky with platform_options. See crossposting and scheduling LinkedIn posts from the API.