YouTube Title Length Checker
Check YouTube title and description length so your wording is not cut off in search and suggested videos.
100 characters remaining (0 / 100)
5000 characters remaining (0 / 5000)
- Title chars
- 0
- Title left
- 100
- Desc chars
- 0
- Desc left
- 5000
YouTube titles are limited to 100 characters. Descriptions allow up to 5,000 characters.
Runs in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded.
Overview
YouTube accepts titles up to 100 characters and descriptions up to 5,000. Neither number is the one that matters most, because almost nothing in either field is visible where the decision to click gets made. This checker counts both against the hard caps and tells you how much room is left, so you can write inside the real constraint rather than discovering it in the upload form.
The gap between what YouTube stores and what YouTube shows is the whole problem. Search results, the suggested column, and the home grid each truncate titles at different points - typically somewhere around 60 characters on desktop and considerably less on a phone in portrait. Descriptions collapse after roughly two lines behind a "more" link that most viewers never open.
So the practical target is not 100 characters. It is getting the distinctive idea into the first 50 or 60, and the reason to watch into the first 150 characters of the description.
Front-loading, and what belongs at the end
Whatever survives truncation is whatever came first. That makes the opening of a title expensive real estate and everything after it a bonus. A title reading "Everything You Need to Know About Compressing Images for Instagram in 2026" spends its visible budget on filler; "Compress Images for Instagram Without Losing Quality" says the same thing in the space that actually renders.
Series numbering, channel names, and episode identifiers belong at the end if they belong at all. Viewers already see your channel name below the title, so repeating it costs characters and returns nothing. The exception is a genuinely known series where the identifier is what someone is searching for.
Avoid all caps for the same reason SERP titles avoid it: it reads as shouting, it consumes more horizontal space per character than mixed case, and it makes the title harder to scan among neighbours that are not shouting. Bracketed qualifiers like [2026 Update] or (Full Tutorial) can genuinely help when the audience cares about recency or format - used on every video, they become noise.
- Put the subject and the outcome in the first 50-60 characters.
- Move channel names, series numbers, and hashtags to the end or drop them.
- Use brackets sparingly and only when the qualifier changes the click decision.
- Match the title to what the video actually delivers - a title that oversells shows up as a retention collapse in the first thirty seconds.
Treating the description as two separate fields
The first two lines of a description appear above the fold on the watch page and are the portion most likely to be used as context in search. Write them as a standalone summary: what the video covers and who it is for, in plain language, without an intro like "In this video, we will be taking a look at…" that burns the visible space on preamble.
Everything below the fold is a different document with a different audience - timestamps, links, gear lists, affiliate disclosures, chapter markers, and credits. It has 5,000 characters to work with and almost nobody reads it linearly, so structure beats prose. Chapters in particular are worth the effort: correctly formatted timestamps starting at 00:00 produce a chapter list on the player scrubber.
Stuffing keywords into the lower description does not work and has not for years. The description informs how the video is understood; it does not substitute for the title, and repeating your target phrase twelve times makes the visible portion worse without improving anything invisible.
What the counters measure
Both fields are measured as JavaScript string length - the count of UTF-16 code units - against the documented limits of 100 characters for the title and 5,000 for the description. Remaining characters are shown live and turn red with an over-limit message once you pass either cap.
One consequence of counting code units is that most emoji count as two rather than one, because they sit outside the Basic Multilingual Plane and are stored as surrogate pairs. Emoji built from sequences - flags, skin-tone variants, family groups - count higher still. If your title is close to the cap and includes emoji, expect the counter to run ahead of the number of glyphs you can see.
The tool measures storage limits only. It cannot model display truncation, because where a title is cut depends on the surface, the device width, the rendered width of the specific characters, and layout changes YouTube makes without announcement. Use the counter for the hard cap and your own judgement for the first 60 characters.
The same video titled two ways
Input
Title A: The Complete Beginner Guide to Compressing Images for Instagram Without Losing Any Quality (2026) Title B: Compress Images for Instagram Without Losing Quality
Output
A - Title chars: 104 · Title left: 0 · Status: Over limit (4 characters over the 100 limit) B - Title chars: 53 · Title left: 47 · Status: Within limit
Title A fails the hard cap by four characters, but the more serious problem is invisible to the counter: on a phone it would be cut somewhere around "The Complete Beginner Guide to Compressing…", so the word Instagram - the term that would make someone recognise this as their video - never appears. Title B fits inside the likely display truncation entirely and leaves 47 characters of headroom if a qualifier turns out to be useful.
Limitations
- This checks the storage caps of 100 and 5,000 characters. It does not simulate where YouTube visually truncates a title, which varies by surface, device, and character width.
- Emoji and other non-BMP characters count as two or more units, so the count can exceed the number of visible glyphs.
- No preview of the title as rendered in search results, the suggested sidebar, or the mobile home feed is provided.
- Nothing here evaluates keyword relevance, click-through likelihood, or how the title compares with competing videos on the same query.
- Tags, chapters, hashtags, and thumbnail text are not analysed, even though all four affect how the video is found and chosen.
When not to use this tool
- If you want alternative title phrasings rather than a length check, the headline formula generator produces variants you can then measure here.
- For the tags field specifically, the YouTube tag generator works against the separate 500-character tag budget.
How to use it
- 1
Paste your working title and check that the distinctive words land inside the first 50-60 characters, not just under the 100-character cap.
- 2
Write the first two lines of the description as a self-contained summary, since that is the portion visible before the "more" fold.
- 3
Add timestamps, links, and credits in the remaining description space and confirm the counter stays under 5,000.
- 4
Trim any title flagged as over limit from the end - series numbers and channel names first, subject words last.
Questions
Is the ideal title length 60 characters or 100?
One hundred is the hard cap YouTube enforces; roughly 60 is where most surfaces stop displaying. Write to the display figure and treat the remaining 40 characters as optional overflow that only completists and search crawlers will see. A title that reads complete at 55 characters is stronger than one that needs all 100.
Do hashtags in the description help discovery?
The first three hashtags in a description surface above the title on the watch page, which is a small navigational benefit. Beyond three they are ignored, and using more than fifteen anywhere in the metadata can cause YouTube to disregard all of them. Two or three genuinely relevant tags is the useful amount.
Should the title and the thumbnail text say the same thing?
No - they should complement rather than duplicate. The thumbnail has room for three or four words and works best carrying the emotional or visual hook; the title carries the specific, searchable phrasing. Repeating identical words across both wastes half of a two-part message.
Can I change a title after publishing?
Yes, at any time, and testing a new title on an underperforming video is a normal practice. Change one element at a time - title or thumbnail, not both - and give it a couple of weeks, since impression volume needs to accumulate before a click-through change means anything.