Hashtag Counter & Limit Checker
Counting the “#” characters in a caption does not tell you how many hashtags you posted. A hyphen ends a tag halfway through, a stray space after a “#” tags nothing at all, and the same word typed twice in different capitalisation is one tag, not two. Paste your caption below and this page scans it the way the platforms do: the count each one will register, the tags that are quietly broken, and both the hashtag and character limits for Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn and YouTube.
Your caption
Paste the whole caption. Hashtags anywhere in it are found, including a block at the end.
What the platforms will see
Hashtags
6
what the platform registers
Distinct
5
ignoring case
Duplicates
1
repeats add nothing
Not tagging
1
# with no valid tag after it
| Platform | Hashtags | Limit | Caption length |
|---|---|---|---|
| 6 / 30 | hard cap | 149 / 2,200caption | |
| TikTok | 6 / 5 | guidance only | 149 / 2,200caption |
| X / Twitter | 6 / 2 | guidance only | 149 / 280post |
| 6 / 5 | guidance only | 149 / 3,000post | |
| YouTube | 6 / 60 | all ignored above | 149 / 5,000description |
Caption length counts what you can see: an emoji is one character, and so is a family emoji built from several joined together. X weights every link at 23 characters and some emoji at 2, so treat the X row as an estimate when your post contains either.
6 hashtags is above the 5 that usually works on TikTok. Nothing is enforced — this is guidance, not a cap.
6 hashtags is above the 2 that usually works on X / Twitter. Nothing is enforced — this is guidance, not a cap.
6 hashtags is above the 5 that usually works on LinkedIn. Nothing is enforced — this is guidance, not a cap.
4 hashtags need a look
- #behindthescenes
- Already used earlier in the caption — platforms treat it as one tag regardless of case.
- #motion-design
- Stops early: this posts as #motion, not #motion-design. Hyphens, apostrophes and other punctuation end a hashtag.
- #
- Not a hashtag — the # is followed by a space or punctuation, so nothing is tagged.
- #2026
- Digits only. X will not turn a hashtag with no letters into a link.
Cleaned list — 5 distinct
#BehindTheScenes #motion #brandfilm #2026 #StudioLife
Each tag once, in the order it first appeared, cut at the character that ends it — exactly what the counts above are based on.
Design the post the caption belongs to
Moda sizes and lays out the creative for every platform in the list, from one canvas.
Try Moda free →The limits, and how differently they fail
Instagram caps a caption at 30 hashtags and simply refuses to publish past it — annoying, but you find out immediately. YouTube is the dangerous one: add more than 60 hashtags to a video and YouTube ignores every hashtag on it, including the first sixty, with nothing in the interface to tell you it happened. X and LinkedIn enforce no hashtag cap at all, so any number you have read for them is editorial guidance rather than a rule, and this page labels it that way instead of inventing a limit. TikTok is the same, with the real constraint being its 2,200-character caption, which every hashtag eats into. Because those four behaviours are genuinely different, the table shows which kind of limit each row is rather than colouring them all the same red.
What silently breaks a hashtag
A hashtag runs from the “#” until the first character the platform does not allow in one — letters, digits, marks and underscores are in; everything else stops the tag dead. That means “#motion-design” posts as “#motion”, “#can’t-stop” posts as “#can”, and “#100% organic” posts as “#100”. None of these produce an error anywhere; they just tag something narrower than you meant, and the flagged list here shows the surviving tag next to what you typed. Two more cases produce no tag at all: a “#” followed by a space, and a “#” glued to the end of a word, as in “great#deal”. A tag made only of digits, such as “#2026”, is real on most platforms but X will not turn it into a link.
Duplicates are counted once by the platform and twice by your character budget
Platforms deduplicate case-insensitively — “#StudioLife” and “#studiolife” are one tag — so repeating a hashtag buys no additional reach whatsoever. It does still consume caption characters, and on Instagram it still counts toward the 30. That makes duplicates pure loss, and they are easy to create when you paste a saved hashtag block underneath a caption that already used two of the same tags inline. The cleaned list at the foot of the results is the deduplicated set in first-appearance order, ready to paste back over the block you started from.
Where the character count is close rather than exact
Characters here are counted as Unicode code points, which matches what the platforms do for ordinary text in any script. Two things make the platform’s own number differ: X gives most emoji a weight of two and counts every link as 23 characters no matter how long the URL is, and platforms disagree about whether a multi-code-point emoji such as a flag or a family is one character or several. So treat the caption figure as accurate for text and approximate for a caption thick with emoji and links. The hashtag count has no such caveat — it is exact.
Frequently asked questions
How many hashtags can you use on Instagram?
Thirty in a caption, and that is a hard cap: Instagram refuses to publish a caption with more. A first comment gets its own allowance of 30, which is why the “hashtags in the first comment” habit exists. Instagram’s own guidance suggests three to five is enough for reach, so the cap is a ceiling rather than a target.
Does YouTube really ignore all hashtags if I add too many?
Yes. YouTube honours up to 60 hashtags on a video, and past that it disregards every hashtag on the video rather than trimming to the first sixty. Nothing in the upload flow warns you, which is why this page calls that limit out separately from a plain cap. Do not confuse 60 with the three hashtags YouTube shows beside the video title: that is a display rule, and the hashtags it leaves out are still working from the description.
Why does my hashtag get cut off?
Because something in it is not a letter, digit, mark or underscore. Hyphens, apostrophes, full stops, percent signs, ampersands and emoji all end a hashtag at that point. “#motion-design” becomes “#motion”. The fix is to close the words up — “#motiondesign” — or to capitalise each word for readability, as in “#MotionDesign”, which posts identically and is easier for screen readers.
Do capital letters make a hashtag different?
No. Every platform here matches hashtags case-insensitively, so “#StudioLife” and “#studiolife” lead to the same feed and count as one tag. Capitalising the first letter of each word is still worth doing: it is purely visual, and screen readers pronounce a camel-cased hashtag as separate words instead of one run-on string.
Is my caption uploaded anywhere?
No. The scan runs entirely in your browser — the page makes no network request with your text, and nothing is stored or logged. You can confirm it by opening your browser’s network tab and typing into the box.
Should I put hashtags in the caption or the first comment?
On Instagram both are indexed, so it is a presentation choice rather than a reach one: the first comment keeps the caption clean and buys a second allowance of 30 tags. Elsewhere it is not a real option — X, LinkedIn and TikTok index the post text, and YouTube reads the description and title. This page counts what is in the box you paste, so check a first-comment block as its own paste.