Instagram Engagement Rate Benchmarks 2026: percentiles by follower band, measured on 7,669 accounts

For 7,669 accounts in the Pinlyx Data API catalogue, the rate is (mean likes + mean comments) per post divided by followers, times 100, over the most recent posts held for each account (12 for 97.6% of them). The dataset reports the 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentile for five follower bands (under 10K: median 19.3%, n=224; 10K-100K: 6.4%, n=1,214; 100K-1M: 3.5%, n=3,260; 1M-10M: 2.0%, n=2,423; above 10M: 1.0%, n=548), an independent recomputation of the same percentiles from a full listing walk of the 24,101-account catalogue, the share of accounts that had not posted for 30, 90 or 365 days when crawled (11.9%, 4.9%, 1.2% of 21,664), posting cadence by band from a stratified 1,500-account sample (median 0.7 posts per week; 57.6% post less than weekly) and within-account post-format performance (reels 44.4% of posts; on accounts posting both, carousels out-earn reels in likes and comments on 60.6% of 467 accounts).

Follower counts were read between 29 August and 19 September 2026. The catalogue is a set of accounts collected for discovery and monitoring, weighted toward creators and public figures, and is not a random sample of Instagram; the limits section of the accompanying page states this and sets the figures next to published brand-account benchmarks. CSV (every figure at full precision) and JSON (with provenance per table).