Character Limit Checker › YouTube title limit
YouTube publishes one number, 100 characters, and enforces it at upload. It publishes nothing about the shorter point a search row cuts your title at, which is the one that decides whether your hook is read. This page shows both.
| Field | Limit | Yours | Verdict | Where it cuts |
|---|
The cut used here is an estimate, not a published number. YouTube states the 100 character limit and says nothing at all about where a title is visually truncated, and the figure changes with the surface, the window width and the layout of the day. Seventy characters is the figure third party guides settle on for search results, which is why it is the default and why the field is editable.
A YouTube title has two ceilings. The first is the hard cap: 100 characters, stated by YouTube on its own help page, enforced by the upload form and identical everywhere. The second is the visible cut: the point where a list view runs out of room and replaces the rest with an ellipsis. YouTube publishes nothing about the second one, and it is the one that decides whether your hook survives.
Almost every title that gets written is well under 100 characters, so a counter that only watches the cap goes green on titles that arrive on screen half-eaten. A 96 character title is legal and, on a search results row, is read as its first seventy or so characters followed by three dots. The part after the cut is not lost from your description or your metadata, it is simply the part a scrolling viewer never sees.
YouTube publishes the number and not the unit. The tiles above therefore show both readings: grapheme clusters, which is what a reader would call a character, and UTF-16 code units, which is what most platform software measures when it says characters. For a plain Latin or Korean title they are the same. Add emoji and they separate, because an emoji outside the Basic Multilingual Plane is one grapheme and two code units, and a flag or a family emoji is one grapheme and four or eleven code units. When they disagree, assume the stricter one.
It will not tell you which characters YouTube rejects. The help page says a title cannot include invalid characters and does not publish the list, so this page does not guess at it. It also does not predict click through rate: it measures where a sentence gets cut, which is a smaller and much more checkable claim.
| Number | Value | Where it is published |
|---|---|---|
| Video title limit"Video titles have a character limit of 100 characters and cannot include invalid characters." The unit is not stated, and the invalid character list is not published. | 100 characters | YouTube Help, Add video detailsthe platform's own documentation states it |
| Video description limitPublished on the same help page, and repeated in YouTube's own guidance on writing descriptions. | 5,000 characters | YouTube Help, Add video detailsthe platform's own documentation states it |
| Description limit, second statement"The description allows a maximum of 5000 characters." Same number from YouTube's guidance on titles and descriptions. | 5,000 characters | YouTube Help, Titles and descriptionsthe platform's own documentation states it |
| Visible cut in list views"While you can use as many as 100 characters in your YouTube title, the optimal length is 70 characters (including spaces) as anything over that will in any case be shortened." YouTube itself publishes no truncation figure. | about 70 characters | Influencer Marketing Hub, YouTube character limitsa third party measured it, the platform publishes nothing |
One hundred characters. YouTube states it on the help page for adding video details, and the upload form enforces it. What YouTube does not state is the unit, so this page shows both readings: grapheme clusters and UTF-16 code units. They agree for plain text and separate as soon as you add emoji, and the safe assumption is the larger of the two.
Because the cap and the cut are different problems. A title of 96 characters is accepted at upload and still arrives in a search row as its first seventy or so characters plus an ellipsis. Seventy is the figure third party guides use for search results; YouTube publishes nothing about visual truncation, so it is an editable field here rather than a hard coded rule, and the preview redraws as you change it.
It depends on which count you mean, which is why both are on the page. A single emoji is one grapheme cluster, which is what a reader sees, and two UTF-16 code units, which is what most server side length checks measure. A flag is one grapheme and four code units, and a family emoji is one grapheme and eleven. If a title with emoji is near 100 in the UTF-16 column, treat it as near the limit even when the character column looks comfortable.