Characters
0/ 2,200
2,200 left
Hashtags
0/ 30
none before the cut
@-mentions
0/ 20
none
What the feed shows
The first 125 characters, then “… more”. Everything greyed out is a tap away, which most people never make.
yourhandle your caption will appear here, cut where Instagram cuts it
The limit people hit, and the one that costs them
Two of Instagram’s caption rules are hard failures. A caption over 2,200 characters is refused. A 31st hashtag is refused, and so is a 21st @-mention — Instagram does not trim the extras and post the rest, it rejects the whole thing. If you schedule through a tool, that rejection usually arrives long after you stopped looking.
The rule that actually costs you readers is softer and nobody enforces it. The feed shows about the first 125 characters and folds the rest away behind “… more”. Everything after that fold is read by the small share of people who tap. A caption whose point lands in the fourth sentence has, for most of its audience, no point at all.
Instagram refuses a caption over 2,200 characters, but the limit that costs you readers is the 125 characters the feed shows before “… more”.
What to do with the preview
- Read only the black text. That is your caption as most people meet it. If it does not make sense on its own, or does not make anyone curious, rewrite the opening rather than the ending.
- Move the hashtags down. Tags before the fold spend the space that was meant to do the work. They rank the same at the bottom.
- Mind the early line breaks. The preview is given a fixed amount of room, so a caption that breaks twice in its first lines is hidden sooner than its character count suggests.
- Keep the first line short enough to survive. If the whole first line is longer than the preview, it is cut mid-sentence — the worst place to be cut.
The same check that runs before we post
The counts here are not a separate opinion about Instagram’s rules. Ninecast is a planner that publishes to Instagram from Notion or Airtable, and it checks every post against these limits before sending it — the page you are on and the publisher share the same code, so they cannot drift apart.
If you want the check to happen where you plan, rather than in a browser tab you remember to open, that is the product. The full list of what Instagram requires before any app can post for you is on the requirements page, and the crop checker does for images what this does for words.
Questions that follow
How long can an Instagram caption be?
2,200 characters. It is a hard limit rather than a truncation: go over it and the post is refused, not shortened. Spaces, line breaks and emoji all count, and an emoji can count as two.
How many characters of a caption show before “more”?
About 125. The feed shows roughly the first 125 characters and hides the rest behind “… more”, which most people never tap. Instagram has never documented the figure, but 125 is what it does in practice — so the point of the caption belongs in that first sentence.
How many hashtags can you use on Instagram?
30 per post, counting the caption and the first comment together. A 31st is not ignored — the post is rejected. There is no bonus for using all 30 either; the cap is a ceiling, not a target.
How many accounts can you @-mention in a caption?
20. Like the hashtag cap, going over refuses the post rather than dropping the extras.
Do line breaks work in Instagram captions?
Yes. Line breaks are kept as typed, and they are worth spending: a caption broken into short lines is read, a wall of text is scrolled past. They do cost you space before the cut, though, because the feed gives the preview a fixed amount of room.
Is my caption sent anywhere?
No. The check runs entirely in your browser. The caption is never sent to a server and is not stored — there is no endpoint behind this page for it to go to.
Do I need an account to use it?
No. The caption checker is free and needs no account. Ninecast, the planner it belongs to, is separate and has its own free trial.
Try it on your own calendar
30 days free. No card, no password, no account. The guide walks through setup in ten minutes.
Start free