What Is a Good Engagement Rate on LinkedIn in 2026?

LinkedIn engagement rate is the least talked-about number in influencer marketing, and the most underestimated. While brands debate nano versus micro on Instagram, B2B buyers are quietly making purchase decisions based on a thought leader’s last five posts — and the engagement rate on those posts is the fastest signal of whether the audience is real and paying attention.

The short version: the largest recent study of personal profiles puts the median LinkedIn engagement rate at 2.50% of impressions, ranging from about 2.7% for 1K–5K-follower profiles down to about 1.5% above 100K (AuthoredUp, 372,812 posts, Sep 2025–Feb 2026). If your rate is above the median for your tier, you’re outperforming half of comparable profiles.

One thing to settle first, because it changes every number on this page: both large studies we could open measure engagement per impression, not per follower. A per-follower rate for the same post can come out very different. When you compare yourself to a benchmark, use the same denominator it does.

Personal profiles vs. company pages: don’t mix the two

Personal profiles and company pages behave like different products, and the published benchmarks for them come from different studies with different methods:

• Personal profiles: a 2.50% median engagement rate by impressions across 372,812 posts (AuthoredUp, updated September 2026).
• Company pages: a 5.20% average engagement rate by impressions across 2,450,610 posts from brand pages with 1K–1M followers (Social Insider, March 2026). Social Insider notes the study “contains 2025 values, presented as 2026.”

Those two figures are not comparable with each other: one is a median of personal posts, the other an average of brand posts, from different samples. An average is pulled up by a minority of very strong posts; a median isn’t. So the honest conclusion is not “company pages beat personal profiles” or the reverse — it’s that you should benchmark a personal profile against personal-profile data and a company page against company-page data, and never cross them.

LinkedIn engagement rate benchmarks by follower count (2026)

These are AuthoredUp’s medians for personal profiles, calculated as interactions (reactions, comments, reposts, clicks) relative to impressions (AuthoredUp). “Median” means half the posts in that tier did better and half did worse.

Follower count	Median engagement rate (by impressions)
Under 1K	2.56%
1K–5K	2.68%
5K–20K	2.53%
20K–50K	2.38%
50K–100K	1.78%
100K+	1.53%
All profiles	2.50%

The shape: engagement holds almost flat from 0 to about 50K followers (2.4–2.7%), then drops at 50K+ and again above 100K. AuthoredUp identifies the 1K–5K tier as the one with the highest rates on the platform.

Not every source agrees, and it matters which formula you use. ViralBrain’s August 2026 benchmark report (35,738 creator posts) puts the “good” band for 1K–5K followers at just 0.5–1.36%, and for 100K+ at 0.1–0.27% — far lower than the table above, and falling far faster with size. That report doesn’t state its denominator. Rates that low and that size-sensitive are what you’d expect from dividing by followers rather than impressions, but we can’t confirm it, so treat the two sets of numbers as measuring different things rather than as a contradiction to average out.

How to calculate it correctly

The formula the benchmarks above use:

(Total reactions + comments + reposts) ÷ impressions × 100

LinkedIn’s post analytics show impressions for your own posts, so you can compute this directly. If you’d rather not do it by hand, our free LinkedIn engagement rate calculator runs the same formula — enter a handful of recent posts with their impressions and it shows where you land against the medians in the table above.

Run it across your last 10–12 posts and exclude any outlier that was reshared by a large account (it will distort the picture). If you post sporadically, use a 60-day window instead of a post count.

You’ll also see a by-followers version:

(Total reactions + comments + reposts) ÷ followers × 100

It’s the only option when you’re sizing up someone else’s profile, because you can’t see their impressions. Just don’t hold a by-followers number up against the by-impressions medians above — they aren’t measuring the same thing.

Engagement varies sharply by content format

Social Insider breaks its company-page data down by format. These are average engagement rates by impressions, from its 2025 data (Social Insider):

Format	Avg. engagement rate (company pages, by impressions)
Native document (PDF carousel)	7.00%
Multi-image	6.45%
Video	6.00%
Image	5.30%
Text-only	4.50%
Poll	4.20%
Link post	3.25%

For personal profiles, AuthoredUp reports the same direction as relative multipliers rather than rates: documents earn 1.30× engagement and text posts 0.78× (AuthoredUp).

Both sources put documents at the top and text-only near the bottom. Practically, if your overall engagement rate looks soft but you mostly post text, the format is doing at least part of the work. Switch one text post per week to a document or multi-image post and watch what your own baseline does before concluding your audience is the problem.

Industry: compare within it, not across it

Neither study we opened publishes engagement rates by industry, so we don’t either. What holds regardless: LinkedIn’s audience is self-selected by profession, so a creator’s niche shapes how much commenting and sharing is normal. If you’re comparing two creators in different industries, the follower-tier table matters less than how each compares with peers in their own field.

What a low rate signals on LinkedIn

A rate well below the median for your tier has a few explanations:

1. Connection decay. LinkedIn networks accumulated over years often include connections who have left the platform, changed industries, or simply stopped engaging. The follower count stays high; the active portion of the audience shrinks.
2. Content-audience mismatch. LinkedIn’s algorithm distributes content to people who engage with similar content. A creator who pivots topic (say, from HR tech to cryptocurrency) can see engagement drop until the algorithm recalibrates.
3. Bought or low-quality connections. Mass connection-request campaigns (accepting everyone who connects) inflate follower count with people who have no genuine interest in the creator’s content.

The difference between options 2 and 3 is usually visible in the comment section. A creator with a real but misaligned audience gets some comments — they’re just from the wrong people. A creator with inflated connections gets almost no comments at all, or comments that are generic and unrelated to the post content. You can cross-check the pattern with our authenticity checker.

Comment-to-like ratio: LinkedIn’s sharpest signal

On LinkedIn, the comment-to-like ratio is often more revealing than the headline rate. A post that earns 80 likes and 40 comments is a fundamentally different thing from a post with 80 likes and 3 comments. The first is sparking real conversation in an audience that has opinions about the topic. The second is getting polite applause from passive observers.

We haven’t found a published benchmark for this ratio that we’d stand behind, so we don’t give you a target number. The useful comparison is with yourself: track the ratio across your own posts and look at what the high-ratio ones have in common. When pitching to a brand, “2.8% engagement with an average of 35 comments per post” is a stronger line than a bare percentage — it tells the brand the audience actually argues back.

Worked: two posts, same engagement rate, different value

Both posts are from the same profile, and each was seen 11,000 times (impressions).

	Post A	Post B
Likes	340	92
Comments	12	226
Reposts	8	42
Engagement rate	(340+12+8) ÷ 11,000 = 3.27%	(92+226+42) ÷ 11,000 = 3.27%
Comment-to-like ratio	12 ÷ 340 = 3.5%	226 ÷ 92 = 246%

Identical rates, and both above the 2.50% all-profile median. If the percentage were all you reported, these two posts would be interchangeable.

They are not remotely interchangeable. Post A got scrolled past and tapped — the applause pattern: roughly one comment for every 28 likes. Post B started an argument: more comments than likes, and a repost count that says people put their own name next to it in front of their network.

For a B2B brand evaluating this creator, Post B is the evidence that the audience has opinions and will voice them next to a product. That is what the sponsorship is actually buying.

How to report it. “3.3% engagement, averaging 180 comments per post” is a materially stronger line in a media kit than “3.3% engagement” — and it is the one a brand cannot get by scraping your follower count. If your comment ratio is the strong half of your numbers, lead with it.

What to actually aim for

1. Identify whether you’re measuring a personal profile or company page — the benchmarks come from different studies, and comparing across them leads to the wrong conclusion.
2. Calculate your rate over 10–12 posts by impressions, excluding obvious viral outliers.
3. Find your follower tier in the table and compare against its median.
4. If you’re above the median, that’s the number to lead with in pitches and media kits.
5. If you’re below, audit your format mix before assuming your audience is weak — in both studies, documents beat text-only posts.

Free LinkedIn tools

All three are pure client-side math on numbers you enter — no login, no API, nothing stored:

• LinkedIn engagement rate calculator — your rate against the tier medians above, plus a consistency read across posts.
• LinkedIn follower growth projector — a 12-month projection and time-to-milestone.
• LinkedIn CPM & CPE calculator — what a sponsored LinkedIn campaign actually costs per thousand impressions and per engagement.

One honest caveat: LinkedIn has no free public API for looking up an arbitrary profile, so our authenticity checker can’t score a LinkedIn account the way it scores YouTube and Twitch. We’d rather say that plainly than publish a number we can’t source.

LinkedIn in 2026 rewards specificity. A creator with 8,000 followers and a comment section full of senior professionals debating a niche point can be more valuable to a B2B brand than a far bigger account with no visible expertise. On LinkedIn, the quality of the conversation is the product — and the engagement rate is how you know whether you have one.