A YouTube title can be up to 100 characters. The same Help page gives a description 5,000 characters. YouTube’s API gives a video’s tags 500 in all, and the commas between them count. Type above to count your text against every limit at once. The counter warns you when it runs over or holds a character the API won’t accept.
Does a YouTube description have a character limit?
Yes. YouTube Help gives a video description “a character limit of 5,000 characters”. YouTube’s API also doesn’t accept < or > in a description or a title, so the counter flags both. Paste a whole description above to see how much room is left and how many hashtags it holds.
How does YouTube count tags?
YouTube’s API limits a video’s tags to 500 characters in all. The commas between tags count, and a tag with a space counts as if it had quotation marks around it. In the API’s own example, Foo-Baz counts 7 and Foo Baz counts 9. That’s how tags can look shorter than 500 and still be over.
Type your tags with commas between them, and the counter includes the commas and quotation marks in its count:
| Tags you type | Count |
|---|---|
sourdough, bread baking, DIY |
28 |
science experiment, volcano, kids science |
43 |
travel vlog, Lahore, food street, Pakistan travel guide |
58 |
YouTube Help gives no number for tags, and says tags “play a minimal role in your video’s discovery.”
How many hashtags can a YouTube video have?
A YouTube video can have up to 60 hashtags, and up to three show by the title. YouTube Help says the three “considered most engaging” appear there, which may not be the first three you typed. Over 60, YouTube ignores them all. A hashtag can’t contain spaces.
For the description, the counter finds each # that starts a word and warns you past 60. A # inside a link’s address isn’t counted.
Do YouTube Shorts have their own character limits?
YouTube doesn’t publish separate limits for Shorts. A Short is uploaded like any other video, so we take it that the video limits apply: 100 characters for the title and 5,000 for the description. That’s our reading of YouTube Help, since no YouTube page states Shorts limits. The Video title and Video description counts above apply to a Short.
What are the rules for a YouTube handle?
A handle is 3 to 30 characters, YouTube Help says. In Han or Hangul it’s 1 to 10, and in Ethiopic, Hiragana, or Katakana 2 to 20. It can use letters or numbers from 75 languages, plus underscores, hyphens, periods, and middle dots (_ - . ·) anywhere except the start or end.
A handle can’t look like a URL or a phone number. Handles aren’t case-sensitive, so @KitchenScienceClub and @kitchenscienceclub are the same handle. You can change your handle and your channel name each twice within 14 days, YouTube Help says.
The counter skips a leading @ and measures the length only, so check the script ranges and separators yourself.
Which YouTube character limits aren’t published?
Some limits that other sites state as fact appear on no YouTube Help or API page we checked. A number without a YouTube source can be wrong or out of date, so this page labels it as reported and doesn’t flag text that goes past it.
- Comments. YouTube gives no number. Its API has a
commentTextTooLongerror, so a cap exists, and other sites report 10,000 characters. The counter compares a comment with that 10,000 and never flags it. To find a comment you posted before, use the YouTube comment history search. - Channel name. YouTube Help gives no length. The API’s channel reference lists 30 characters for a channel’s title, which is likely out of date. Other sites claim 50 or 100.
- Playlist title and description. Neither YouTube Help nor the API gives a number. Other sites say 150 or 100 characters for the title.
- Hashtags beyond 60. Some sites give a limit of 15. YouTube Help states no such number, only that YouTube ignores every hashtag on a video with more than 60.
- Post text. YouTube Help limits a post’s images and poll answers, and gives no limit for its text.
- A single tag. The API limits a video’s tags together, at 500 characters, and gives no length for one tag.
How does this counter count characters?
It counts Unicode code points, so a letter, a space, a Han character, and most emoji each count as 1. Neither YouTube Help nor the API says what a “character” means, and YouTube doesn’t document how emoji count. Some emoji, such as flags, join two or more code points, so leave a little room when you use them.
More tools for the videos you publish
To see where a long title gets cut off on a phone, on Home, or in search, try the YouTube title checker. To send viewers to a moment in your video, make a link that starts there with the YouTube timestamp link generator. To put the video on your own site, use the YouTube embed code generator. Retube, our free browser extension, groups the channels you subscribe to into topic feeds inside YouTube, such as Cooking or Science.
To set that up by hand or with Retube, read how to organize YouTube subscriptions.