YouTube title, description, and tag character limits, explained
100 characters for a title sounds like plenty — until you see how few of them actually get read.
Updated September 2026
YouTube's official limits are generous on paper: 100 characters for a title, 5,000 for a description. In practice, the gap between what you're allowed to write and what a viewer actually sees before deciding whether to click is bigger here than on almost any other platform covered in this series.
What's actually visible
A 100-character title only shows in full in a handful of places. In YouTube search results and suggested-video feeds — where most clicks actually come from — titles typically truncate around 60–70 characters on desktop, and closer to 45–50 on mobile. Descriptions are even more compressed: of the full 5,000-character allowance, only roughly the first 150–157 characters show in search results or above the fold before a "Show more" link.
Every YouTube limit in one place
| Field | Limit | Visible before truncation |
|---|---|---|
| Video title | 100 characters | ~60–70 in search (desktop), ~45–50 mobile |
| Description | 5,000 characters | ~150–157 above the fold / in search |
| Tags (combined) | 500 characters | Hidden metadata, not shown to viewers |
| Single tag | ~30 characters | — |
| Hashtags per video | 15 maximum | Top 3 displayed above the title |
| Comment | 10,000 characters | — |
| Channel name | 30 characters | — |
| Channel description | 1,000 characters | — |
Using more than 15 hashtags on a single video causes YouTube to ignore all of them, not just the excess ones — worth knowing before stacking on "just a few more."
Why your title's first 60–70 characters do most of the work
Because the truncation point in search and suggested videos falls well short of the 100-character maximum, the practical writing target is closer to 50–70 characters: enough room for a specific keyword and a reason to click, front-loaded so it survives truncation everywhere it appears. The remaining characters up to 100 aren't wasted — they still get read by anyone who opens the video page directly — but they shouldn't carry your most important information.
Tags matter less than they used to — same story as everywhere else
If this sounds familiar, it's the same shift covered in writing captions for social search: YouTube's own systems now lean much more heavily on the title, description, and actual viewer behavior (watch time, click-through rate) to understand and rank a video, rather than the tags field. Filling all 500 tag characters with generic keywords is generally a weaker use of time than tightening the title and the first 150 characters of the description.
Frequently asked questions
How many characters can a YouTube title be?
100 characters maximum, but search results and suggested-video feeds typically truncate around 60–70 characters, so the practical limit for what viewers actually see is much shorter.
How many characters can a YouTube description be?
5,000 characters. Only roughly the first 150–157 characters show in search results or above the fold before a "Show more" link, so the opening lines matter most.
How many tags can you use on YouTube?
Tags share a combined 500-character budget, with each individual tag limited to about 30 characters. YouTube has said tags carry limited ranking weight compared to the title, description, and viewer engagement signals.
What is the YouTube comment character limit?
10,000 characters — far more generous than the limits on titles or descriptions.
Check your title and description length live as you write using CounterWord's counter (it includes a built-in YouTube title limit), or preview exactly how a title and description will render using the Google Search Preview Tool for the web-search side of discovery.