- Weekly invites: roughly 100–200, set per account. Under 80 if you're on a free plan.
- Note length: 300 characters on every tier.
- Notes on a free account: about 5 per month, then requests send without one.
- Pending invites: trouble starts around 1,500 outstanding.
- Total connections: hard cap of 30,000.
LinkedIn does not publish its rate limits. Everything below is measured rather than documented, which means the numbers you find online disagree with each other, sometimes by a factor of two. Where that happens on this page, we say so and explain which figure we'd act on, rather than picking the convenient one.
The weekly invitation limit
This is the limit that catches people out, because it is counted per week while every tool asks you to configure a number per day. Set 45 invites a day against a 200-a-week ceiling and the account runs at full speed for four and a half days, then stops. Averaged out, it sent about 28 a day, and from the outside it looks like the daily setting was being ignored.
| Account | Commonly cited weekly ceiling |
|---|---|
| Free | ~80 (some sources say up to 100) |
| Premium | ~100 |
| Sales Navigator | 100–200, depending on account standing |
| Under ~3 months old | ~50, regardless of plan |
The disagreement worth knowing about: several sources hold that the raw weekly cap is the same across all three tiers, around 100, and that paying buys search depth and InMail credits rather than invite volume. Others put Sales Navigator at 200 for accounts in good standing. Both camps agree on the thing that actually matters, which is the next section.
Your acceptance rate is the real limit
LinkedIn adjusts your ceiling based on how people respond to you. Three signals do most of the work:
- Acceptance rate. Below roughly 30%, LinkedIn reads your outreach as spam and quietly tightens your cap. No notification; the volume just drops.
- "I don't know this person" reports. The most damaging single signal. A handful is enough to trigger a restriction well before you approach any published number.
- Account age and Social Selling Index. A profile under three months old is throttled harder than an established one on the same plan.
The 300-character note
Connection notes are capped at 300 characters, counting spaces and emojis, and that number is the same on Free, Premium, Sales Navigator and Recruiter. If you find an article saying 200 for free accounts, it's describing an older state of the platform.
LinkedIn truncates rather than warning you. If your note ends with a personalisation token, a company name, a job title, a long value can cut the sentence off mid-word. Leave 30 or 40 characters of headroom and the problem disappears.
The more common mistake isn't length, it's intent. A note has one job: give someone a reason to accept. Pitching inside 300 characters reliably lowers acceptance, which lowers your ceiling, which is the opposite of what you wanted.
Free accounts: about 5 notes a month
Since 2024, free accounts have had a monthly quota on personalised invites, widely observed at 5, occasionally reported as 10. Once it's gone you can still send connection requests for the rest of the month, they just go without a note.
This one deserves more attention than it gets, because it's monthly while everything around it is weekly or daily. A sequence that personalises every invite burns the whole allowance in the first two or three days. Premium, Sales Navigator and Recruiter have no monthly note cap.
Worth knowing: a blank request is not automatically worse. To someone who has engaged with your content, a bare invite is normal. Notes earn their keep with complete strangers.
Pending invitations count against you
Every unanswered invite sits on your record. A few hundred is unremarkable. Past roughly 1,500 outstanding, LinkedIn may stop you sending new ones altogether, and a large pending pile is itself read as evidence of mass-inviting people who don't want to hear from you.
Withdraw invites that have gone unanswered for more than two to four weeks. The slot frees immediately and the recipient is never notified. The one catch: after withdrawing, you can't re-invite that person for about three weeks.
Safe daily pacing
There is no official daily cap. But sending a week's worth on Monday is one of the clearest automation signals you can produce, so the useful question is how to spread the weekly allowance rather than how much you can send in a day.
| Guideline | Why |
|---|---|
| 15–25 invites/day | Spreads a 100–200 weekly allowance evenly |
| Under ~10 per hour | Avoids the burst pattern spam filters look for |
| Working hours only | Weekend and 3am activity is an obvious tell |
| Randomised gaps | Perfectly even intervals are more suspicious than volume |
| Max ~3% of your network per week | Keeps growth rate proportional to who you already know |
If you're already restricted
Most restrictions are automated tripwires rather than judgements about you, and most clear on their own.
- Soft-lock: "weekly invitation limit reached". Invites frozen, everything else works. Clears in 3 to 7 days.
- Identity lock: LinkedIn signs you out and asks for government ID. Review typically takes 3 to 7 business days.
- Suspension: needs a formal appeal to support.
While you wait: turn off automation, withdraw your oldest pending requests, and don't test whether the lock has lifted by sending one. Probing can restart the timer. When you're back, run 5 to 10 manual requests a day for the first week.
What good tooling should do about this
Any tool that only exposes a daily number is handing you a way to walk into the weekly cap. A short checklist, whatever you use:
Outvelo does the first five, and shows you the safe range for your account type next to the number you're setting, so an unsafe limit is visible when you choose it rather than three weeks later. See how it works.
Where these numbers come from
LinkedIn publishes none of this, so every figure above is drawn from outreach platforms that measure it empirically, cross-checked between several of them and against what we see across the accounts running on Outvelo. Where the published figures conflict, this page says so in the relevant section rather than picking a side quietly.
Limits change without announcement. If you spot a number here that no longer matches what you're seeing, tell us at [email protected] and we'll re-check it.