What Is a Good Engagement Rate on Instagram?

Researched and written by the Lumienzo team. Sources are named inline. Last reviewed 1 September 2026.

Short answer: nobody can tell you until you say what the rate is divided by. The two most-cited benchmarks in this industry put the same creators at 2.19% and 6.23%, a difference of nearly three times, and both are correct. One divides by followers, the other by the people who actually saw the post. Almost every article quoting a "good" engagement rate omits this, which is why the numbers never agree.

What do the two big benchmarks actually say?

Both are real, recent and defensible:

HypeAuditor, in its 2025 State of Influencer Marketing, built from a dataset of 76 million Instagram accounts, puts creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers at an average engagement rate of 2.19%.
eMarketer, publishing in January 2026, puts that same tier at 6.23%.

Same platform, same follower band, nearly triple the number. The gap is not an error in either dataset. It is a different denominator.

The two denominators, in plain words

Engagement by followers. Interactions divided by total follower count. This is the older, more common definition, and it falls as an account grows, because a follower who signed up three years ago and never opens the app still sits in the denominator forever.
Engagement by reach. Interactions divided by the number of accounts that actually saw the post. Reach is normally a fraction of followers, so this percentage comes out much higher.

Neither is wrong. Mixing them is. Holding a creator's by-followers rate against a by-reach benchmark makes a perfectly healthy account look broken, and doing it the other way round makes a weak one look excellent. If a media kit quotes an engagement rate without naming the denominator, that is the first question to ask, and the answer tells you a lot about how carefully the rest of the numbers were assembled.

Does audience size change what "good" means?

Substantially, and in the direction most people expect. HypeAuditor's 2025 report found the smallest tier records the highest average engagement, and that this tier is also the market: creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers are 76% of all Instagram influencers. On TikTok the effect is stronger still, with the smallest tier at 11.9% and making up 87% of TikTok influencers.

Two practical consequences. If you are a creator with a small following, your engagement rate is your strongest argument, and you are the normal case rather than the exception. If you are a brand, a large account with a middling rate may reach more people in absolute terms while converting far worse per dollar, and neither number on its own tells you which.

Is engagement rate even the right question?

It is a decent proxy for attention and a poor proxy for intent. A like costs nothing. A comment asking where do I buy this is a person telling you they want the product, and it is the signal brands are really paying for. This is why we build matching on what comments say rather than on how many hearts a post collected.

Engagement is also the easiest metric to buy. Influencer Marketing Hub's 2026 Benchmark Report, from more than 600 respondents, found fake or purchased engagement made up 10.2% of all reported fraud and audience-quality problems, with inauthentic or templated comments a further 10.6%. Instagram itself said in November 2018 that it had started removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments coming from third-party growth apps. A high rate over a comment section full of generic praise is the pattern to distrust. Our guide on spotting fake followers covers the rest of the checklist.

How to use engagement rate without fooling yourself

State the denominator, always. Ask for it, and give it when you quote your own.
Compare like with like. Same denominator, same platform, similar follower band, similar niche.
Read the comments, not just the count. Questions about the product beat volume every time.
Prefer connected-account data over screenshots. A screenshot is a hand-picked week and can be edited in minutes.
Do not price off engagement alone. Our guide on what creators charge covers what actually moves a rate.

How Lumienzo handles this

Creators connect their own accounts through the platform's official login, so buyers see the platform's own reporting rather than a screenshot, with the denominator stated. On top of that, Lumi reads what the audience is actually saying, so a match is based on demonstrated buying intent rather than on a single percentage. See how it works for brands, for creators, or join the waitlist.

Common questions

It depends entirely on what the rate is divided by, which is why published benchmarks disagree so wildly. HypeAuditor’s 2025 State of Influencer Marketing, built from 76 million Instagram accounts, puts creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers at an average 2.19%. eMarketer, publishing in January 2026, puts the same tier at 6.23%. Both are defensible: the lower figure is engagement divided by follower count, the higher one is engagement divided by the people who actually saw the post. Before you judge any creator’s rate, ask which one you are looking at.

Why do engagement rate benchmarks disagree so much?

Because there are two different denominators in common use and most published figures do not say which they used. Engagement by followers divides interactions by total follower count, which drags the rate down as an account grows and as inactive followers pile up. Engagement by reach divides interactions by the number of accounts that actually saw the post, which is usually a small fraction of followers, so the resulting percentage is much higher. Comparing a by-followers rate against a by-reach benchmark makes a healthy creator look broken, and the reverse makes a weak one look excellent.

Do smaller creators really get more engagement?

On the published data, yes, and it is not a small effect. HypeAuditor’s 2025 report, covering 76 million Instagram accounts, found creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers make up 76% of all Instagram influencers and record the highest average engagement of any tier. The pattern is even sharper on TikTok, where the same report puts the smallest tier at 11.9% and finds they are 87% of TikTok influencers. Small is the normal case, not the exception.

Is engagement rate even the right thing to measure?

Only partly. A high rate tells you people react; it does not tell you they want to buy. Comments asking where to buy, what shade, or whether it ships are a stronger signal of commercial intent than a like, and they are the thing brands are actually paying for. Engagement rate is also easy to fake, which is why buyers increasingly ask for numbers straight from a connected account rather than a screenshot.

Can engagement rate be faked?

Yes, and it commonly is. Influencer Marketing Hub’s 2026 Benchmark Report, based on more than 600 respondents, found fake or purchased engagement accounted for 10.2% of all reported fraud and audience-quality problems, with inauthentic or templated comments a further 10.6%. Instagram said in November 2018 that it had begun removing inauthentic likes, follows and comments generated by third-party growth apps. A rate that looks impressive next to silent, generic comments is the classic bought pattern.

A note on these sources

HypeAuditor sells audience-analysis software, so its figures are vendor data and we have labelled them as such; the dataset size is genuinely large and it publishes its methodology, which is more than most. eMarketer is a research firm. We have deliberately left out a set of widely circulated "2026 engagement benchmarks" that appear only on AI-generated sites and contradict the reports they claim to cite. If a number is not attributed on this page, that is why.