YouTube title and description length limits

YouTube's Upload videos help page gives the title limit as 100 characters. Its sentence on titles reads: "Video titles have a character limit of 100 characters and cannot include invalid characters." The same page gives 5,000 characters for a description.

The embedded counter starts at the title limit, so a description needs its own check at 5,000. That check happens in the full counter, which opens with 100 still set as the maximum, so you'll change that number yourself.

The API reference is a separate source, and it counts differently. Its videos reference lists the title at 100 characters and the description at 5,000 bytes. A byte count depends on the encoding. The reference names UTF-8 for the characters but not for the limit, so UTF-8 bytes is the likeliest measure. In UTF-8, a basic English letter takes one byte, most accented Latin letters take two, most Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters take three, and emoji usually take four. A description with 4,900 plain characters and 60 accented letters like é is 4,960 characters but 5,020 bytes, so it's over the API limit while a character count still shows room. The full counter shows UTF-8 bytes in its Text breakdown, so you can paste a description there and read the byte total. The byte count matters most if you upload through the API or a tool built on it. Anyone posting in YouTube Studio or the app should follow the Help page.

The API reference allows any valid UTF-8 character in titles and descriptions except < and >. The Help page says titles and descriptions can't include invalid characters, but the part of the page we read doesn't list them, so don't assume < and > are the only ones. The counter doesn't check for invalid characters, so a count that fits doesn't prove the text is accepted.

The counter also can't show where a title might be cut off in search or on a phone, and no official YouTube page we checked gives that point. It has no separate count for tags or hashtags. For how emoji and combined characters change the count, see emoji and Unicode counts.