YouTube Title & Description Limit Checker
Title: 100 characters. Description: 5,000 characters.
Verified 2026-07-19 against YouTube Creator Help documentation. Platforms change these limits without notice — this page is checked on an annual-refresh cadence; if you spot a change, let us know via /contact/.
Uploading a video on YouTube means checking two separate limits at once: the title field caps out at 100 characters, and the description field allows up to 5,000 characters — figures worth checking together since both fields are filled out on the same upload screen and both affect how a video is discovered and understood before anyone clicks play.
Checking against: YouTube title, 100 characters
Your live count and remaining allowance appear here as you type.
The details
The 100-character title limit is a hard field cap, but in practice, search results and the YouTube homepage/sidebar recommendations typically truncate a displayed title well before the full 100 characters, especially on mobile screens or in a narrow sidebar thumbnail layout — YouTube doesn't publish one single fixed truncation number since it varies by device, screen size, and layout context, but a widely used practical convention among creators is keeping the most important, click-driving words within roughly the first 60-70 characters so they survive truncation in most common display contexts.
The 5,000-character description field is used for far more than a simple video summary in practice: creators commonly pack it with timestamped chapter markers, affiliate or sponsor links, social media links, credits, and calls to action — all of which count against the same 5,000-character total, so a heavily linked description can run out of room faster than the raw number suggests.
Only roughly the first few lines of the description show before a viewer has to tap "...more" to expand it (similar in spirit to Instagram's caption truncation, though YouTube's specific cutoff is measured in visible lines rather than a fixed character count) — so the same front-loading principle applies: put the single most important sentence or call-to-action first, since that's what's guaranteed to be seen without an extra tap.
A mistake specific to YouTube titles worth calling out: stuffing a title with repeated keywords in an attempt to game search or recommendations is a pattern YouTube's own creator guidance explicitly warns against, both because it reads poorly to viewers deciding whether to click and because YouTube's ranking systems are built to recognize and discount that kind of manipulation rather than reward it — the same underlying dynamic covered in more general SEO terms on /blog/keyword-density-myth-vs-reality/.
Video chapters, added via timestamps typed directly into the description (a line starting at 0:00 followed by further timestamped lines), are a specific description feature that only activates correctly if the first timestamp begins at exactly 0:00 and at least three timestamps are included in ascending order — a common technical mistake is starting the first chapter at a nonzero timestamp, which silently prevents YouTube from generating the chapter markers in the video's scrub bar at all.
Reference table
| Video title | 100 characters maximum |
| Video description | 5,000 characters maximum |
| Practical title display before truncation | ~60-70 characters (varies by device/context) |
| Chapter markers minimum | At least 3 timestamps, first one at exactly 0:00 |
Related
FAQ
- Why does my full title show in the upload screen but get cut off in search results?
- The 100-character field limit governs what you're allowed to type; it's a completely separate constraint from how much of that title YouTube's search results, sidebar, and homepage recommendation layouts choose to display before truncating with an ellipsis. Display truncation varies by device and layout and isn't a single published number, unlike the hard 100-character upload limit.
- Do links in the description count toward the 5,000-character limit?
- Yes — every character of every link, timestamp, and credit line in the description counts toward the same 5,000-character total as the rest of your description text. A description with several sponsor links, social links, and a full chapter-timestamp list can use up a meaningful chunk of that budget before you've written much narrative description at all.
- How much of my description is visible without the viewer clicking 'more'?
- Only the first few lines, before YouTube inserts a "...more" expand link — the exact line count isn't fixed and can vary by device and player size, but the practical convention is to put your single most important sentence or call-to-action in that first visible portion, mirroring the same front-loading advice that applies to Instagram captions.
- Why didn't my video's chapter markers show up in the scrub bar?
- The most common cause is the first timestamp not starting at exactly 0:00, or fewer than three timestamps being listed — YouTube requires both conditions to auto-generate chapters from a description. Double-check your first line reads exactly "0:00" (not "0:01" or "00:00:00" in a different format) and that you've listed at least three timestamps in ascending order.