How many hashtags can you use on Instagram Reels?

What Instagram says about hashtags on a reel

We found no Help Center page about hashtags on reels alone. These four pages, all read on 23 October 2026, are the ones that say anything bearing on it.

The first two give the same number, 5. Nothing we read gives reels a different figure from posts.

Where the hashtags go

In the reel flow, the computer version of Instagram’s page on recording a reel says that after you choose and trim the clip and tap Next, you can write a caption, add a location, tag people and add alternate text, then tap Share. The caption is where you type a # followed by a word or an emoji, as the page on hashtags describes. Hashtags in a comment count toward the same limit of 5. Whether the caption or a comment is the better place is covered in the hashtag strategy answer.

Choosing the few

Instagram’s own advice, from the second and third slides of its announcement and from its FAQ:

1. Be intentional. Use hashtags relevant to the content you are publishing. Instagram’s example is a beauty creator using beauty-related hashtags so people interested in beauty find the content.
2. Skip the generic ones. Instagram names #reels and #explore. It says such tags don’t help content appear in places like Explore and could hurt its performance.
3. Tie a trend to the topic. A trending hashtag helps when it is relevant to what the reel is about. Using an unrelated one is what the FAQ warns against, because the reel may be shown to people who don’t care about it.

In the pages we read, Instagram gives no figure for how much a hashtag adds to a reel’s reach, and no best number below 5. It doesn’t say that using all 5 is better than using two.

What Instagram’s pages don’t say

• Unverified: what happens to a reel caption with more than 5. The Help Center speaks of a comment that won’t post, and the API reference still says 30. Which one a reel posted from an app meets is not stated.
• Unverified: when you get the new limit. The announcement says Instagram will gradually update the number. We found no schedule.
• Unverified: the Hashtag sticker in a reel. The sticker page says you can add stickers to a reel and that not all stickers are available for reels. It lists a Hashtag sticker without saying which surfaces have it.
• Unverified: whether a hashtag works differently on a reel than on a post. The pages give one rule for both and describe no difference.

Reels through Mellow Hub

Hub publishes a reel through Instagram’s API: one video, with a caption of up to 2,200 characters. Before it sends, Hub counts the hashtags in the caption as the free hashtag counter does. When a caption has more than 5 and ends with a block of hashtags, Hub leaves out the closing ones that take it past 5, for Instagram only, and says so. Tags written inside a sentence stay, and Hub warns when more than 5 remain. The other networks get the caption as you wrote it. Posting from the Instagram app is the other way to publish a reel.

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.