YouTube Shorts title length and character limits

The limits YouTube states, as of 11 October 2026

What YouTube does not state

• How many characters of a title are visible before it is cut off. No number is printed.
• A character limit for text shown on the video. Captions burned into a Short are part of the picture, not a metadata field, so the pages set no limit for them.
• A minimum title length.

A worked count

Take the title Why most podcast clips lose people in three seconds. It is 51 characters, spaces included, which leaves 49 under the limit. Count spaces and punctuation, because they use characters too. Our caption character counter does the counting for you.

The description rule has a catch for non-English text. Studio help says 5,000 characters; the API says 5000 bytes. In UTF-8, a letter outside basic Latin, such as a Hindi letter, takes more than one byte, so an API upload can fit fewer characters than a Studio upload. If you publish through the API, count bytes.

Hashtags, tags and honesty rules

Hashtags go in the title or description, cannot contain spaces, and should relate to the video. Tags play a minimal role in discovery, YouTube says, and mostly help with commonly misspelled content. Piling excessive tags into the description is against YouTube's spam, deceptive practices and scams policies, and so are maliciously misleading titles. A title has to deliver what it promises. For wording, read YouTube Shorts title best practices and hashtags in the title or description.

Titles for clips cut from a longer video

A KeyMo clip is scored out of 10 and comes with a one-line reason, which is a handy starting point for the hook in your title. You type the title in YouTube when you post the exported clip, and the 100-character cap applies there. Clip length matters too; see the Shorts length limits.