How we calculate our engagement benchmarks

The figures are Instagram only

Say this first, because it is the part that matters: every benchmark on this site marked as measured is an Instagram figure. We do not publish a measured benchmark for any other platform, because our index does not hold the data to support one.

Platform coverage of the index

The index holds 130,031 creator profiles. They break down by platform as follows.

That is the whole index. There is no YouTube or X data in it, so any YouTube or X figure shown anywhere on this site is an industry estimate carried over from published sources, not something we measured. Those figures carry no sample size and no link back to this page, so you can tell them apart at a glance.

The filter

A profile enters a benchmark only if it is an Instagram profile with a computable engagement rate above zero. Engagement rate is the sum of likes and comments on a profile's recent posts divided by its follower count, expressed as a percentage. Profiles with no recorded engagement are not counted as zero-engagement creators; they are treated as missing data and excluded.

The plausible band

We then keep only profiles whose engagement rate falls between 0.1% and 25%. Everything outside that band is excluded from the published figure.

This matters more than it sounds. The raw distribution is badly contaminated at both ends: 1.0% of profiles compute to an engagement rate above 100%, which is arithmetically possible but not a real audience behaviour, and 4.0% compute above 25%. At the other end, 11.8% compute below 0.1%, which is the signature of a stale or incomplete engagement record rather than a genuinely dead account. Publishing a median across the unfiltered set would be publishing the data-quality problem, not the benchmark.

What the exclusions remove

After the platform filter and the band, 97,907 Instagram profiles remain. That is the sample behind the platform average, and the per-tier samples below are subsets of it.

The bands we publish

Tiers use the same follower boundaries the calculators use. Each band is the interquartile range of engagement rate within that tier, so it describes the middle half of creators at that size, not the extremes.

Why there is no Mega band

The index holds 557 Instagram profiles above one million followers inside the plausible band. That is too small a sample to publish as a separate benchmark, so creators above 100,000 followers are reported as one Macro band covering 8,679 profiles. A tool that asks for a 1M+ creator will show the Macro band.

TikTok: a different metric, not a different number

Our index computes TikTok engagement over followers. The industry convention for TikTok computes it over views. Those are not the same quantity and the two cannot be compared, so we publish no measured TikTok benchmark. The TikTok figures shown in the tools are the industry convention, carried over unchanged and labelled as estimates, until the definition is resolved on our side.

Vintage

These figures were computed in October 2026 against the index as it stood then. They are not recomputed on page load. When we recompute them, this page and the sample sizes in the tools change together.