What are InMail credits: the allowance on every plan, the accrual and return rules, and how to budget them across a month.

Definition

InMail credits are the units a paid LinkedIn plan spends to message a member you are not connected to: one credit for one InMail. What are InMail credits in practice? A monthly allowance that renews, accrues to a ceiling, expires after 90 days, and comes back when the recipient responds.

Every figure on this page comes from a LinkedIn, Sales Navigator or Recruiter Help article, named where the figure appears and listed in full at the bottom, all checked Oct 1, 2026. Allowances change. Treat your own plan page as the authority and this page as the map of the rules around it.

Credits matter because they are the only part of LinkedIn outreach with a published budget, though most LinkedIn outreach runs without them. Requests, comments and follows stretch. Credits are counted, they run out, and they return on a rule you can plan around. That makes them the easiest thing on LinkedIn to manage badly.

What are InMail credits, and what does one credit buy?

One credit buys one InMail: a private message to a member outside your network, delivered to their LinkedIn inbox. LinkedIn Help calls InMail a Premium feature, and a Basic (free) account can only message members it is already connected to. The character limits differ by product, covered in their own section below.

The credit leaves your balance at send, not at delivery and not at reply. The Recruiter FAQ describes a pending InMail as one where the credit is temporarily held until the candidate responds, which is the same economics said more kindly.

A credit does not buy a conversation. LinkedIn Help states that InMail is designed for initial outreach only, and that you cannot send a follow-up InMail unless the recipient accepts and responds. If they decline or ignore you, further InMails are not permitted.

Messages to your own connections cost nothing. So do messages to members who have Open Profile turned on. Read that again before you read the allowance table, because much of a well built prospect list should never touch a credit at all. What InMail is covers the message itself.

The InMail credit rules, in one place

These are the InMail credit rules that hold across products. Everything later on this page is either a plan-specific number or a consequence of one of these.

• One send, one credit. The charge happens when you press send, whatever the recipient does next.
• A response returns it. An InMail accepted, declined or answered directly within 90 days of sending is credited back.
• Silence does not. LinkedIn Help says a pending InMail counts as neither accepted nor declined, so the credit stays spent.
• Credits accrue to a ceiling. Unused credits roll into the next month until you hit the published maximum for your plan.
• They expire at 90 days. The InMail Messages FAQ says credits expire after 90 days, and Sales Navigator Help repeats it for carried over credits.
• They do not travel. Premium credits cannot be used on Sales Navigator or Recruiter, are not transferable when you upgrade, and drop to zero when a Premium subscription is canceled.
• Open Profile is free. A member with Open Profile enabled can be contacted without a credit, within a sending limit.

How many InMail credits each plan includes

LinkedIn publishes two numbers per plan: the monthly allotment and the maximum you can hold. The source column names the Help article that states each row, because no single article lists every plan.

The plan comparison in LinkedIn Help's article on free and Premium accounts lists the same monthly figures: 5, 15, 30, 50 for Sales Navigator Core and 30 for Recruiter Lite. Sales Navigator Help adds that all its subscription types give users the same number of credits.

Hiring Pro sits outside the system. LinkedIn Help says its InMail uses a separate, job-based credit model tied to promoted jobs, delivered gradually while the job is open, and that those credits do not appear in your standard InMail message credit balance.

When credits arrive, and why the date differs

Three products, three renewal rules. This is the detail that wrecks a monthly plan built on a calendar month.

• Premium: a new allotment arrives every month on the first day of your billing cycle, set by your initial sign-up date and shown on your My Premium page.
• Sales Navigator: credits renew on the first day of every month in UTC, separate from your license or sign-up date. If they have not arrived by the second, Sales Navigator Help says to contact support.
• Recruiter: the renewal and expiration article says the team receives a new allotment once a month starting on the date the account was created. The Recruiter FAQ says credits refresh on the first day of your billing cycle.

Those two Recruiter articles may describe the same date in different words, or they may not. Product settings, under Usage overview, shows your actual refresh date, so read it there rather than choosing between the articles.

So a Premium seller who signed up on the 19th gets credits on the 19th, while a Sales Navigator seller on the same team gets them on the 1st. If the two of you plan a campaign together, plan it around the later date.

Accrual, ceilings and the 90 day clock

Unused credits carry forward, which is what makes a ceiling necessary. The InMail Messages FAQ says credits expire after 90 days. Sales Navigator Help says the same thing from the other side: unused credits transfer to the following month and must be used within 90 days.

In Recruiter the ceiling is hard. Recruiter Help says that on the refresh date, credits that would take the total above four times the monthly allotment do not roll over and expire. Returned credits can push you over it briefly, the Recruiter FAQ adds, but the balance resets to the cap then.

That rule turns hoarding into a loss. For Premium and Sales Navigator, LinkedIn Help publishes the maximum you can accumulate but does not describe what happens to a grant that would exceed it. Plan as if the Recruiter rule applies: a balance parked at the ceiling has no room for the next grant.

When a credit is returned to you

The return rule is the reason credits are cheaper than they look for a seller with a good list. LinkedIn Help: every InMail accepted, declined or responded to directly within 90 days of being sent is credited back.

Sales Navigator adds the timing for its three auto replies: each is eligible for a credit back, received immediately on the recipient's response. LinkedIn also sends the recipient an automatic reminder within three days of the InMail being sent, so a slow reply is not a lost one.

A no is worth a credit. That single fact should change how you write the ask, because a message that makes it easy to say no gets its credit back, and a message that is easy to ignore does not. The InMail best practices guide works through the wording.

When a credit is gone for good

• Nobody answers. A pending InMail is neither accepted nor declined, so nothing comes back.
• You delete it first. Sales Navigator Help says deleting an InMail that has not received a response returns no credit, and you can only edit or delete a message within 60 minutes of sending.
• You send a second one. Sales Navigator Help says a second InMail to the same person before a response uses another credit. General LinkedIn Help says you cannot send another until they respond.
• You cancel, upgrade or switch plans. The balance becomes zero when a Premium subscription is canceled, credits are not transferable when upgrading, and Sales Navigator credits are not transferred when you change subscription type.
• The clock runs out. Ninety days after a credit lands, it is gone whether you were busy or not.

Two of those five are unforced. Proofread before sending rather than after, because the 60 minute window is for fixing a typo, not for retrieving a credit. And never queue a follow-up InMail on Premium or Sales Navigator: it is either blocked or billed. Unsending a LinkedIn message covers the wider rule.

On cancellation timing, the LinkedIn Premium subscription FAQ adds that after you cancel, Premium features, InMail included, expire at the end of your billing cycle. Spend what you hold before that date, because nothing carries into a later subscription.

Open Profile messages that cost nothing

Open Profile is a Premium setting a member switches on so that anyone on LinkedIn can contact them for free, even from outside the sender's network. LinkedIn Help adds that all members can see the full profile of a Premium member who has enabled it.

The Recruiter sending limits page is blunt about the accounting: Open Profile InMails do not count toward your monthly InMail credits. It also says that once the Open Profile allowance is used, you can carry on messaging Open Profiles using your standard credits.

There is a cap. LinkedIn Help says only that it limits the number of Open Profile messages you can send in a given time period, without publishing the number for ordinary accounts. Recruiter is the exception, where the limits page gives figures per seat per calendar month.

The practical habit is small: check for Open Profile on every name before you open the compose window. The message is written exactly the same way, with the same subject and the same single ask. Only your balance at the end of the week is different.

InMail character limit: 1,900 or 2,000?

A credit buys one message of a fixed maximum length, and LinkedIn Help gives two body limits. Two articles in the general Help center say 2,000 characters. Four others, covering Sales Navigator, Recruiter and Recruiter Lite, say 1,900. The subject line is 200 everywhere, optional in two articles and required in two.

Sales Navigator Help adds a detail sellers miss: a signature can run to 150 characters, and it counts toward the total message characters. A Sales Navigator InMail with a long signature has less than 1,900 characters left for the message itself.

The safe ceiling is the lower figure. A message that fits 1,900 characters fits every product, and our LinkedIn character counter uses 1,900 for that reason. The InMail character limits article itself adds that candidates are more likely to respond to shorter messages.

What happens when credits run out

Nothing dramatic happens. You wait for the next grant. LinkedIn Help closes the obvious escape route: it is not possible to purchase additional InMail message credits outside of the monthly allotment, and there is currently no plan with unlimited credits.

Sales Navigator says the same in its own words: at this time, you cannot purchase additional InMail credits. Only Recruiter and Recruiter Lite sell top-up packs, which is covered below. Everyone else has four routes left, and none of them spends a credit.

If you run out every month, the honest diagnosis is usually targeting rather than the plan. Credits come back on responses, so a list of people who answer costs very little to work through. A list that ignores you drains the balance at full price.

InMail credits versus free LinkedIn messages

Credits only make sense next to the routes that cost nothing. LinkedIn Help says users on a Basic account can only message members they are already connected with, and that InMail is the Premium feature that reaches members outside that network. Which route a message takes decides whether it spends a credit.

The order matters for outreach. A connection request spends nothing but depends on the recipient acting on it, while an InMail reaches the inbox now and spends one credit. For most sales outreach, credits belong to the people with no free route, and email carries the follow-up that InMail messages cannot.

LinkedIn InMail credits in Recruiter versus Sales Navigator versus Premium

LinkedIn InMail credits in the three products share a name and not much else. The differences below decide how you budget, who owns the balance, how long a message can be, and what happens when you need more.

Pooling is the difference that surprises new Recruiter teams. LinkedIn Help says InMail credits are a pooled resource shared by all seats on a contract, not allocated per seat and not transferable between seats. Admins on Recruiter Corporate and RPS contracts can set monthly usage limits instead.

Two more rules hold the products apart. Premium InMail credits cannot be used to send InMail on Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Recruiter. And Sales Navigator Help says that with a Sales Navigator subscription, InMails can only be sent from Sales Navigator, not LinkedIn.com.

Holding two subscriptions gives you two separate balances, not one larger one. LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator compare the plans themselves.

Where extra credits can be bought, and where they cannot

On Premium and Sales Navigator, they cannot. On Recruiter Lite, LinkedIn Help is specific: a Purchaser Admin can buy additional credits in packs of 10, with a maximum of 70 additional InMails per seat, and the contract cannot exceed 120 InMails per seat.

The Recruiter Lite FAQ words the same cap as an additional 70 credits per month. For Recruiter Lite users, bought credits never expire, LinkedIn Help says, but the account still will not exceed 120 per seat at renewal, which is where the skipped grant rule bites.

Recruiter licenses can also buy additional packs, according to the sending limits page, and the Recruiter FAQ says Recruiter customers contact LinkedIn to do it. In both products the purchase is an administrative action, so plan it a cycle ahead rather than on the day you run dry.

Credits are not the only ceiling

A budget built only on credits misses the second set of limits. Recruiter Help publishes sending caps that apply whatever your balance says.

Recruiter users who exceed the daily figure get a notification, and sending is disabled until the following calendar day. Exceed the first week figure and it is disabled until the end of the week, where weeks start Sunday at 00:00 UTC. Exceed the monthly Open Profile cap and it waits for the next calendar month.

The same page sets a 24 hour rule per license: if any admin on a Recruiter or Recruiter Lite license sends a candidate an InMail, all admins on that license must wait 24 hours before sending another, unless the candidate responds sooner.

There is also a conduct limit. The Recruiter InMail policy forbids unwanted or untargeted mass InMail, marketing campaigns and event invitations, and says messages pass through a filtering system. If multiple InMails are flagged, sending is disabled until the following day.

And a quality limit. LinkedIn publishes a 13 percent response rate threshold for Recruiter: fall below it over a 14 day period and you get a warning, and a later breach can mean an InMail Improvement Period. Response rates follow the seat, not the person: a new seat holder inherits the previous recruiter's rate.

The Sales Navigator articles checked for this page publish no daily figure, but it has a different ceiling: Sales Navigator Help says bulk messaging is not available and InMails must be sent individually to each recipient.

InMail credits are not Sponsored Messaging

Some guides call LinkedIn's message ads Sponsored InMail, which makes them sound like a bulk version of the same credit. They are a separate product. LinkedIn's Marketing Solutions Help describes Sponsored Messaging ads, message ads and conversation ads, bought in Campaign Manager and charged on a cost-per-send basis.

No subscription credit is involved, the ads are targeted at an audience rather than written to one person, and LinkedIn controls how often a member sees them. If the plan is one message to one named buyer, that is InMail. If it is a campaign to a segment, it is advertising.

How to budget InMail credits across a month

Here is the method. It assumes nothing about your reply rate, because you do not know it yet and no published figure will tell you.

1. Write down your three numbers

   Open your plan page and record the monthly grant, the ceiling and the renewal date. Not the number in a blog post. The number your own account shows.

2. Subtract the free routes first

   Split the list into Open Profile members, first degree connections and everyone else. Only the third group is allowed to consume credits.

3. Set a weekly spend, not a monthly one

   Divide the grant by the weeks in your cycle. A weekly cap stops the pattern where three quiet weeks are followed by a Friday of careless sends.

4. Keep the balance off the ceiling

   Check your balance a few days before the renewal date. On Recruiter Lite the grant is skipped rather than queued, and the other plans publish a hard maximum, so spend down a balance that sits near it.

5. Treat returns as income

   Count credits returned this month next to credits granted. A list that returns a large share of what you spend behaves like a larger plan.

6. Reserve a tail for the accounts that need it

   Hold back part of the grant for names with no email, no mutual connection and no Open Profile. That is what a credit is actually for.

7. Review at day 60, not day 90

   Credits expire at 90 days. Put a reminder at 60 so an unspent balance becomes a deliberate push rather than a quiet write-off.

A worked month on published numbers

This worked month was written for this page. It uses only the figures LinkedIn publishes, and it contains no assumed reply rate. It shows how the rules interact, not what results to expect.

A Sales Navigator seller is granted 50 credits on the first of the month, UTC, and can hold 150. They start the month holding 120 carried over, which means the ceiling, not the plan, is the binding constraint: 20 of the new grant would take them past 150.

So the first job is not outreach. It is spending at least 20 credits before the first, on the names already researched. Sales Navigator Help does not say what happens to a grant above the cap, so do not find out the hard way. Three unspent grants fill the account at this plan.

Next, the list. Of 200 target contacts, the ones with Open Profile enabled and the ones already connected move out of the credit budget. Whatever remains is the real denominator, and the weekly cap is that number divided by the weeks left in the cycle.

Last, the returns. Every accept, decline or reply inside 90 days returns a credit, so the month's true capacity is the grant plus the returns, minus anything that expires. Track those three lines and the budget manages itself. LinkedIn prospecting covers building the list itself.

What to track, and where the balance lives

LinkedIn shows your remaining credits in different places, depending on the product. On every product the compose window also displays the credits left, which is the number you will actually look at.

• Premium: the My Premium page shows the credits you have, your InMail renewal date and the number you receive every month.
• Sales Navigator: the Sales Navigator Settings page shows remaining credits.
• Recruiter and Recruiter Lite: Product settings, Usage overview shows contract level credits left, assigned credits left where a usage limit is set, the credits expiring and the amount granted on your refresh date.

That last line is the one to argue about internally. It is close to how the Recruiter policy defines a response, because a reply, an accept and a Not Interested all count. It measures whether the people you chose react at all, which is the question a credit budget actually turns on.

Credit rules that catch sellers out

• A decline is good news for the balance. It returns the credit, while a polite non-answer costs full price.
• A full balance has no room. On Recruiter Lite, a balance at the ceiling means the next grant is reduced or skipped, not held for you.
• The renewal date is not the first of the month on Premium. It follows your sign-up date, which is rarely the date your team plans around.
• Two subscriptions are two balances. Premium credits cannot be spent on Sales Navigator or Recruiter.
• Declines are silent in Recruiter. LinkedIn Help says you are not notified when a candidate declines, even when they decline with a message.
• Message preferences can block you. You cannot message a member who has chosen not to receive InMail in their settings.
• Automation does not create credits. Sales Navigator Help rules out bulk InMail, and the policy limits still apply. See LinkedIn automation.

The follow-up rule deserves one more line, because it is where credits and etiquette collide. Recruiter supports scheduled follow-ups, each charged a credit upfront, and tells you to start a new InMail thread for a candidate who has not responded. General LinkedIn Help says additional InMails are not permitted after silence.

Those sentences sit in different help centers and describe different products. The safe reading for a seller on Premium or Sales Navigator is the stricter one: one InMail per person, then move the follow-up to another channel.

Mistakes that burn credits

• Sending to a list you have not filtered for Open Profile members, and paying for reach that was free.
• Spending a credit on someone you could reach through a mutual connection or a connection request with a note.
• Letting the balance sit at the ceiling until the renewal date quietly cancels part of the next grant.
• Writing an ask so vague that the recipient cannot even say no, which is the one outcome that returns nothing.
• Queueing a second InMail after silence, against a rule LinkedIn states plainly, instead of moving to email.
• Writing to 2,000 characters in Sales Navigator, where the Help article sets 1,900 and counts the signature.
• Planning a campaign on a third-party credit table rather than on the number your own plan page shows.
• Treating a free trial balance as permanent. See the Sales Navigator free trial for what ends when the trial does.

In a sequence

A credit is worth spending when the message could only have been written about this person, this month. The template below was written for this page. It names a trigger, connects it to one problem the recipient owns, and asks one question that is easy to answer either way.

It is short on purpose. The body limit is a ceiling, not a target, and a message that invites a fast no protects the budget better than a long one that invites nothing. More variations are in the InMail templates library.

Subject: {{trigger}} at {{companyName}}

Hi {{firstName}},

{{companyName}} {{trigger}}, and I noticed you own {{area}}.

When that happens, {{problem}} usually lands on the {{roleTitle}} desk within a quarter. We handle that part for {{similarCustomer}}.

Worth fifteen minutes, or is someone else looking at it?

{{senderName}}

Frequently asked questions