Enter your followers and average likes and comments, and this calculator returns your engagement rate next to sourced 2025 and 2026 benchmarks, each labeled with its formula.
What is a good engagement rate on Instagram?
There is no single good engagement rate on Instagram, and any page that hands you one without naming its formula is guessing. Published benchmarks for the same period run from 0.36% to 4.3%, a spread fully explained by two things: what counts as an engagement, and whose accounts were measured.
Brand panels counting likes and comments land between 0.3 and 0.7%. Creator panels land around 1.5% on the same math. Count saves and shares and the median clears 4%. The table below carries each figure with its source, year, formula and population, so compare your rate against the row that matches how you measured. Every figure was re-checked against the live sources in July 2026.
How to use the calculator
The engagement rate formula
Engagement rate by followers (the public standard)
Example:
An account with 10,000 followers averages 320 likes and 30 comments per post: (320 + 30) ÷ 10,000 × 100 = 3.5% engagement rate.
Two counting conventions exist, and they change the number. Most public benchmarks count likes and comments per follower, which is what this calculator defaults to. Buffer, Later and Sprout Social also count saves and shares, often called true engagement; tick the box to switch, and the result is relabeled so you compare against the right rows.
A per-reach version exists too, and it is not interchangeable: one published example scores the same post at 4.14% by followers and 12.08% by reach. This calculator stays per-follower because followers, likes and comments are public, so the same math works on your account, a competitor's, or a creator you are vetting.
Sample window: your latest 12 posts, the same window HypeAuditor samples.
Why engagement rate is worth tracking (and what it cannot tell you)
Instagram engagement rate benchmarks by source
The primary 2025 and 2026 studies side by side, with the definition and population that produced each figure:
| Source | Data year | Population | Definition | Figure |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Rival IQ Social Media Industry Benchmark Report | 2025 report (Feb 2025) | 150 brands in each of 14 industries; 4M+ posts | Engagements (likes, comments, shares, reactions; no saves) divided by followers, per post; medians | 0.36% median across industries; top 25% of brands at 1.02% and above |
| Socialinsider Instagram benchmarks | 2025, plus Q2 2026 update | 35M posts from 447,613 mostly business accounts | (Likes + comments) divided by followers | 0.48% average for 2025, down 24% year over year; 0.45% in Q2 2026 |
| HypeAuditor State of Influencer Marketing 2025 | 2024 | 76M accounts; creator skew | (Likes + comments) divided by followers | 1.59% average, down from 1.85% in 2023 |
| Buffer engagement rate study | Published Sept 2025 | 27M+ posts from 273K connected accounts; creator and small business skew | (Likes + comments + saves + shares) divided by followers | 4.3% median; tier medians dip from 5.2% (under 1K) to 3.5% (100K to 500K), then rise to 5.0% past 1M |
The 10x spread is not an error: definitions and populations differ, so compare against the row that matches yours. One precision note: Rival IQ's live page states its top quartile as both 1.02% and 1.05%, so hold that threshold loosely as roughly 1%.
Handling DMs by hand vs automating with Inrō
A reach-based rate can run three times a follower-based one on the same post, so never compare rates built on different formulas.
One viral post drags the average for weeks. Average your last 12 posts and leave the outlier out.
The tier ranges most calculators print trace back to no primary study. A benchmark without a source and a date is decoration.
Vet your profile the way brands vet you: likes and comments per follower, compared inside your follower tier, never against one global average.
Comments signal intent in a way likes never do, and every comment is a conversation you can carry into DMs.
Brand accounts run lower than creator panels in every named study, so compare against the brand median in the table, not a creator screenshot.
Fix one formula and one source across every client report, and restate both whenever a client asks why the number moved.
An engagement rate without its formula attached is meaningless. Published averages run from 0.36% to 4.3% for the same period, so a verdict only counts against a named source that shares your definition, account type and size.
Turn good engagement into leads
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Frequently asked questions
There is no universal number, and any single-figure answer hides the two things that decide it: the formula and the population. For brand accounts measured on likes and comments per follower, the 2025 median is 0.36% and 1.02% or higher puts you in the top 25% (Rival IQ). Creator panels average 1.59% on the same math (HypeAuditor, 2024 data). Count saves and shares too and the creator median is 4.3% (Buffer, 2025). Compare within your tier and account type, with one definition, and watch the trend rather than any single reading.
For a brand account measured on likes and comments per follower, yes: 2% is well past Rival IQ's 2025 top-quartile threshold of 1.02% and more than four times Socialinsider's 0.48% average for 2025. For a small creator judged on Buffer's saves-inclusive data, 2% sits below the median of every tier (5.2% under 1K followers, 4.6% for 1K to 5K, 3.7% for 10K to 50K). Both readings are correct. The verdict changes with the definition and the population, which is exactly why this calculator labels both.
In some formulas. HypeAuditor, Socialinsider, and most lookup calculators count likes and comments only. Buffer, Later, and Sprout Social include saves and shares, often called true engagement, and Sprout's April 2026 analysis credits saves and shares with the most algorithmic weight of any interaction type. The catch: saves and shares are visible only to the account owner, so public benchmarks mostly exclude them. This calculator lets you add them and labels the result, so you always know which convention your number belongs to.
By followers when comparing accounts, by reach when judging your own content. Follower counts, likes, and comments are public, so the per-follower rate is the only one you can compute for an influencer you are vetting or a competitor you are watching, and it is the convention benchmarks use. Engagements divided by reach reads truer for your own posts, because discovery now sends plenty of non-followers to your content, but reach is private to your insights. Pick one, apply it the same way every time, and track the trend.
Twelve recent posts is the working standard: HypeAuditor samples the last 12 and excludes statistical outliers, and most tools use somewhere between 10 and 25. Copy the outlier rule by hand: drop the one viral post before you average, or it will flatter your rate for weeks. Fewer than 10 posts makes the number jumpy. More posts steady it, at the cost of reacting slower to recent changes.
Partly because everyone's is. Socialinsider measured average per-follower engagement at 0.48% for 2025, down 24% in a single year, and HypeAuditor's creator average slid from 1.85% in 2023 to 1.59% in 2024. The feed has shifted to discovery: reach increasingly comes from non-followers, and people respond by watching, saving, sharing, and sending DMs instead of liking. Much of that either falls outside a likes and comments formula or gets divided by a follower count that no longer represents who actually sees your posts. So before rewriting your content strategy, check your rate against the platform trend. A slide that matches the market is the environment. A slide that outpaces it is worth investigating post by post.
Because there is no standard formula, and the tools do not agree on one. A third-party test by kuli.one ran the same creator through five calculators and got 1.07% on Phlanx, 1.19% on inBeat, 4.50% on HypeAuditor, and an impossible 112.52% on Keyhole. None of the math is broken. The tools count different interactions, divide by different denominators, and average different numbers of posts. That is why this page prints its formula next to the result: likes plus comments (plus saves and shares if you add them), divided by followers, averaged over the posts you enter. Anyone can reproduce your number.
No. There is no login, no username lookup, and no API call: you type the numbers and the math runs in your browser. Nothing is fetched, stored, or sent anywhere. That keeps it private, free to run on any account whose posts you can see (including a creator you are vetting), and immune to the breakage that hits lookup tools whenever Instagram changes its API.
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