Should Instagram hashtags go in the caption or the first comment?

What Instagram says

Instagram’s pages, read on 23 October 2026. None of them sets a caption against a comment, so each line is what one page says.

• Either place tags the post. The Help Center page on hashtags says you can add hashtags in the caption or the comments, and that for a post you have already uploaded you can edit the caption or include the hashtag in a comment on your photo. With a public account, the post then appears on the hashtag’s page.
• The limit counts both. The same page says you can use up to 5 tags on a post, and that with more than 5 on a single photo or video your comment won’t post. It says nothing about a caption with more.
• Search points to the caption. In an August 2021 explanation of Search, Adam Mosseri lists captions, hashtags, usernames, bios and places as what the text you type is matched with, and advises: “put keywords and hashtags in the caption, not the comments.”
• The 2025 guidance says caption. The slides of @creators’ post of 18 December 2025 say Instagram will gradually update the number of hashtags you can include in a caption for a reel or post to 5.
• A private account is the exception. The page on private posts says that if your account is private and you add a hashtag to a post, the post won’t appear on the hashtag’s page. It doesn’t separate caption from comment.

Side by side

Why the first-comment habit

Putting hashtags in the first comment is a habit, not an Instagram feature, and none of the pages we read mentions it. Our view, not Instagram’s: with a limit of 5 that counts comments too, a separate comment adds a step and nothing else, and Instagram’s guidance names the caption. Keep the 5 that describe the post in the caption, and use a comment, if at all, for something a viewer would want to read.

How to add or change them

From the Help Center:

1. When you write the caption, type # followed by text or an emoji, for example #flower.
2. To change a post that is already up, on a computer click Options at the top right of the post, then Edit, change the caption and click Done.
3. Or write the hashtag in a comment on your own post. The page says you can only tag your own posts, not other people’s.

What the pages don’t say

• Unverified: whether a hashtag in a comment is treated differently from one in a caption on the hashtag’s page. The pages on hashtag results say the order depends on factors that include when the post was shared, how others engage with it and whether it meets the Recommendation Guidelines. They don’t mention where the hashtag sits.
• Unverified: whether the 2021 Search advice still holds as written. It is more than five years old and predates the limit of 5. Nothing newer that we read repeats it, though the 2025 slides also speak of the caption.
• Unverified: what happens to a caption with more than 5. The Help Center describes only a comment that won’t post.

Captions through Mellow Hub

Mellow Hub sends the caption and has no first-comment field for Instagram: its registry of what each network takes lists a first comment for no network. The count it checks before sending is the caption’s. For Instagram, when a caption of up to 2,200 characters has more than 5 hashtags and ends with a block of them, Hub leaves out the closing ones that take it past 5 and says so; tags inside a sentence stay, and Hub warns when more than 5 remain. A comment you add afterwards in the Instagram app is outside what Hub counts, and still counts against Instagram’s limit. The free hashtag counter counts a caption you already have.

Hub is one way to publish, not the only one. The first 3 posts are free, however many networks each one goes to, and need no card. After that Hub is paid: plans start at $19 a month (Solo), after a 7-day trial with a card on file that costs nothing if you cancel before it ends, and a monthly plan's first month is 20% off. Publishing is unlimited on every plan, under a fair-use ceiling that stops automated floods (900 publications a month on Solo), where one publication is one post on one account, so a post sent to five networks counts as five toward it. There are no automatic overage charges.