YouTube Title Length Checker - 100 Character Limit

The numbers that matter

YouTube has two hard limits. A video title can be at most 100 characters. A description can be at most 5,000 characters. Both counts include spaces, punctuation, and emoji. YouTube Studio will not save anything longer.

Then there is the soft limit, the one that actually costs views: truncation. In search results, suggested videos, and the home feed, long titles get cut off with an ellipsis. Where the cut lands depends on the device, the screen width, the layout, and even the letters you use, since a W is wider than an i. As a rough guide, the first 60 to 70 characters are what most viewers see in full. Treat that as an approximation, not a rule YouTube publishes.

How to use this checker

There are two boxes. Paste or type your video title into the first one, labeled Title. The second box is labeled Meta description, a shared label from our general length tools; use it for your YouTube description. Each box shows a live character count as you type.

That is the whole tool, on purpose. It does not connect to your channel or preview thumbnails. You compare the counts against the numbers above: 100 for the title, 5,000 for the description, and roughly 60 to 70 for the part of the title you need people to read.

Worked example: tightening a title

Draft: "I Tested 7 Budget Apps for 30 Days, Here Is the Only One Worth Paying For". The checker shows 73 characters. That is well under 100, so YouTube accepts it, but on a phone the ending, the actual payoff, is likely hidden behind an ellipsis.

Compare "How I Paid Off $42,000 in Debt in 18 Months (Step by Step)" at 58 characters and "Paid Off $42K of Debt in 18 Months: The Exact Budget I Used" at 59. Both keep the hook and the number inside the zone most viewers see. The second one swaps a vague parenthetical for a concrete promise, which usually earns the click.

The fix for the budget app title is to lead with what gets searched and cut the filler: "Best Budget App? I Tested 7 for 30 Days" says the same thing in 39 characters.

Front-load the keyword

Put the phrase people search at the start of the title, then the hook. If truncation happens, it eats the end, not the part that tells YouTube and the viewer what the video is about. "iPhone 17 Battery Test: 3 Days Without a Charger" survives any cut. "I Went 3 Days Without Charging My New iPhone 17 and Here Is What Happened" risks losing the product name on small screens.

Numbers, brackets, and a clear outcome tend to help click-through, but do not sacrifice clarity for them. A title that overpromises can win the click and lose the watch time, and YouTube weighs viewer satisfaction heavily.

Descriptions: 5,000 characters, but only the top counts

You have room for about 800 words, and there are good uses for it: chapters with timestamps, links, credits, and a proper summary that helps search understand the video. But viewers only see the first line or two before the "more" link, roughly the first 100 to 150 characters depending on the device.

So write the opening sentence like a second title. Repeat the main keyword naturally, state what the viewer gets, and put your single most important link there if you have one. Push the boilerplate, like gear lists and social links, to the bottom.

Counting quirks

Emoji can inflate a count. Many emoji take two UTF-16 code units, and combined ones like family or flag emoji use several, so a counter may read 2 to 8 for what looks like one symbol. If your title is within a few characters of 100 and uses emoji, paste it into YouTube Studio to confirm.

Accented letters normally count as one character each. Line breaks are not allowed in titles, but they do count toward the description limit.