YouTube Title Character Limit

The YouTube video title character limit is 100 characters. Only about the first 70 characters are visible in desktop search results, and roughly 40-55 characters show on mobile before the title is truncated. That 100-character cap is a hard limit enforced at upload — you literally cannot type more — while the ~70-visible figure is a display truncation, not a rule.

This is a common point of confusion: the title limit (100) is a completely different, and far smaller, cap than the YouTube description character limit of 5,000 characters. This page covers the title, plus every adjacent field — tags, playlist titles, and community posts — so you never conflate them again.

YouTube character limits at a glance (2026)

Sources: YouTube's own help documentation for titles and descriptions and tags. Limits are current as of 2026 and can change — always verify against YouTube Studio before you rely on an exact figure.

How many characters can a YouTube title be?

A YouTube video title can be up to 100 characters, including spaces, punctuation, and emoji. This is a hard cap: YouTube Studio simply stops accepting input once you hit 100, and the title field also rejects certain invalid characters such as angle brackets (< and >).

YouTube's help page states it verbatim: "Video titles have a character limit of 100 characters and cannot include invalid characters." The cap has been 100 for over a decade and remains unchanged in 2026.

How much of your title is actually visible?

Here is where the 100-character cap gets misleading. Just because you can write 100 characters doesn't mean viewers see all of them. YouTube truncates the visible title with an ellipsis (…) depending on the surface:

• Desktop search results: roughly the first 60-70 characters show.
• Mobile app home feed: often only 35-50 characters.
• Mobile search: about 50-60 characters.
• Suggested-videos sidebar: about 40-55 characters.

There is no single official number for the visible cut because it depends on device, screen width, iOS vs. Android, and which surface the title appears on. The practical takeaway: front-load your keywords and hook into the first ~50 characters, then use the remaining space for secondary context that still helps YouTube categorize the video. Titles that use the full length aren't penalized — some analyses even find longer, keyword-rich titles perform well — but assume most viewers only read the front half.

How the 100 characters are counted

YouTube counts titles by UTF-16 characters, so almost everything you type — a letter, a space, a comma, a standard emoji — counts as 1 against the 100. The nuance worth knowing honestly: some emoji are built from multiple code points. A flag emoji, a skin-tone-modified emoji, or a ZWJ-sequence emoji (like a family or a profession glyph) can eat 2 or more of your 100 characters even though it renders as a single picture. So a title that "looks" like 90 characters can silently be over the cap if it's emoji-heavy.

This is also why fancy Unicode text inflates your character count. Those 𝗯𝗼𝗹𝗱 and 𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭𝘪𝘤 styled letters you paste into a title aren't real formatting — they're separate Unicode code points, and a single styled glyph can consume 2+ of your 100 characters. If you paste a "bold" title, you can blow through the 100-character cap with far fewer visible letters than you'd expect. See how fancy text inflates your character count for the mechanics.

You can check the exact length live — before you publish — with BoldlyType's free character counter. Paste your title and it counts against the 100-character cap in real time, including the extra weight that emoji and styled Unicode add. Related: how to check character count before posting.

What about YouTube tags?

All of a video's tags share a single 500-character budget combined — not 500 characters per tag. Spaces and the commas separating tags count toward that 500.

One honest caveat: a multi-word tag (one containing a space, like video editing) is wrapped in quotation marks by YouTube internally, so it can consume extra characters against the 500 budget compared to a single-word tag. Sources conflict slightly on exactly how this is counted — some counting tools treat a space as a plain single character — so the safe rule is simply that multi-word tags eat into the 500-character budget faster than single-word ones.

Also worth knowing: YouTube has rewritten its own tags help page to say tags "play a minimal role in your video's discovery." Tags still exist and still enforce the 500-character field, but they matter far less than your title, description, and spoken content. Don't stuff them.

What about playlist titles?

A YouTube playlist title can be up to 150 characters — 50 more than a video title — and it cannot include <, >, or line-separator characters. The playlist description shares the same 5,000-character limit as a video description.

Title vs. description: don't confuse the two

The single most common mix-up: the title cap is 100, while the description cap is 5,000. That's a 50x difference. If you found this page looking for the longer field, you want the YouTube description character limit post instead — it covers the 5,000-character description, the ~157 characters visible above the "…more" fold, and how to format links and timestamps.

Compare other platforms' limits

YouTube is one field in a much larger cluster. If you cross-post, these sibling references cover the exact caps elsewhere:

• Facebook post character limit
• Instagram caption character limit
• Twitter / X character limit
• TikTok caption character limit
• LinkedIn post character limit
• Threads character limit
• Bluesky character limit

Bottom line

Write your YouTube title to 100 characters max, but treat the first ~70 (desktop) / ~40-55 (mobile) as the part that actually earns the click — front-load it. Watch emoji and pasted "fancy" Unicode, which can silently eat 2+ characters each. And keep the title (100) mentally separate from the description (5,000), the playlist title (150), and the shared 500-character tag budget.