How to use it
- Describe what happens in the video, in order. The caption should match what people see in it.
- Add the words someone would type into TikTok search to find it, like “repot snake plant”. They go near the start of the caption.
- Pick a call to action, a length and how many hashtags you want: none, 3 or 5.
- Edit the caption you like and check it in TikTok before you post.
TikTok’s caption rules
| What | Rule | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Caption length | 2,200 characters for a video caption, counted in UTF-16 units (most emoji count as 2) | TikTok Content Posting API |
| Hashtags and mentions | Written in the caption itself and counted toward its length. No separate hashtag cap is documented. | TikTok Content Posting API |
| How captions are used | Captions, sounds and hashtags are video information TikTok's For You recommendations use, alongside how people interact: what they like, share and watch to the end | TikTok Newsroom: How TikTok recommends videos |
Checked against each platform’s own help and developer pages in October 2026.
TikTok’s app may let you write a longer caption than its developer docs allow. We couldn’t find the app’s limit on TikTok’s own pages, so we write to the documented 2,200 and count the way TikTok’s docs do.
What a TikTok caption is for
- Saying what the video is about, in words. TikTok lists captions among the information it uses to recommend videos, so name the topic plainly.
- Search. A caption that starts with “How to repot a snake plant” matches what people type into the search bar.
- A next step. A question for the comments, or “follow for part 2” when there is a part 2.
- Hashtags that describe the video, like #SnakePlant, not ones that describe TikTok. The TikTok hashtag generator explains why we leave out #fyp.
Honest limits
The model can’t watch your video. It writes from your description, so check that every caption matches what’s on screen. It doesn’t know what’s trending or how your past videos did, and we don’t have TikTok search data. For the same video on Instagram, the Instagram caption generator holds to Instagram’s five-hashtag limit.