Original research · 2026-04-10 – 2026-08-17
TikTok engagement rate benchmarks 2026
We measured 38,971 TikTok videos from 5,181 creators across 17 niches to answer one question properly: what engagement rate should a brand actually expect, given who they are about to pay?
The finding
Engagement rate barely moves as creators get bigger. Median engagement sits in a 6.35–7.69% band across every follower tier from 1K to 1M+, and mid-tier creators are the lowest of the five, not the highest. The widely repeated claim that engagement collapses with follower count does not appear in this sample.
What does collapse is view-to-follower ratio — from a median of 9.79× for nano creators to 0.03× for mega creators. Both numbers get called “engagement” in vendor marketing, which is how the two claims got merged. They measure different things: engagement rate asks what viewers did, view-to-follower ratio asks how far the video travelled.
Engagement rate by follower tier
Engagement rate is (likes + comments + shares) ÷ views, computed per video and aggregated as a median. P25 and P75 show the spread — half of all videos in a tier land between them.
| Tier | Median ER | P25 – P75 | Views/follower | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nano 1K – 10K followers · 1,999 creators | 7.69% | 3.95% – 12.85% | 9.79× | 2,765 |
| Micro 10K – 100K followers · 1,854 creators | 7.09% | 3.60% – 11.79% | 3.41× | 2,771 |
| Mid-tier 100K – 500K followers · 775 creators | 6.35% | 3.73% – 10.24% | 0.08× | 8,587 |
| Macro 500K – 1M followers · 203 creators | 6.95% | 4.13% – 10.48% | 0.06× | 8,746 |
| Mega 1M+ followers · 350 creators | 6.85% | 3.95% – 10.91% | 0.03× | 16,102 |
Engagement rate by niche
The niche spread is more than twice the tier spread — 4.20% to 11.19% — which makes it the comparison that actually matters when you are judging one creator. A tech creator at 6% is above their niche median; a beauty creator at the same 6% is below theirs. Niches with fewer than 100 videos are omitted rather than published thin.
| Niche | Median ER | P25 – P75 | Median views | Videos |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Education 28 creators | 11.19% | 7.53% – 14.68% | 55,450 | 186 |
| Gaming 51 creators | 8.46% | 4.62% – 14.89% | 91,550 | 790 |
| Dance 45 creators | 8.41% | 4.68% – 11.44% | 45,600 | 537 |
| Beauty 350 creators | 8.22% | 5.06% – 12.31% | 106,800 | 1,799 |
| Comedy 182 creators | 8.15% | 5.00% – 11.77% | 90,900 | 2,828 |
| Music 273 creators | 8.00% | 5.12% – 11.23% | 38,300 | 1,087 |
| Photography 22 creators | 7.16% | 5.49% – 14.25% | 119,000 | 127 |
| Fashion 97 creators | 6.95% | 3.19% – 11.43% | 45,000 | 389 |
| Parenting 262 creators | 6.79% | 3.58% – 11.26% | 77,900 | 1,869 |
| Food 85 creators | 6.59% | 4.25% – 10.15% | 78,150 | 1,132 |
| Travel 140 creators | 6.51% | 3.47% – 11.11% | 20,700 | 1,331 |
| Sports 239 creators | 6.44% | 4.32% – 9.71% | 97,800 | 1,741 |
| Finance 33 creators | 5.79% | 3.74% – 8.91% | 14,400 | 509 |
| Fitness 105 creators | 5.71% | 3.64% – 8.58% | 39,800 | 805 |
| Tech 338 creators | 5.12% | 2.20% – 8.94% | 64,700 | 1,664 |
| Art 29 creators | 4.43% | 2.50% – 7.38% | 15,100 | 186 |
| Home 37 creators | 4.20% | 1.87% – 10.17% | 115,400 | 197 |
How we measured this
Every figure comes from public video metrics observed between 2026-04-10 and 2026-08-17. Engagement rate is computed per video as (likes + comments + shares) ÷ views, then aggregated as a median across videos — never as an average of averages, which would let one prolific creator dominate a niche.
Videos with fewer than 100 views and accounts under 1,000 followers are excluded, as are accounts our classifier flags as brand or shop accounts rather than creators — their engagement behaves differently and they are not what a buyer means by “creator”. A niche needs at least 100 videos before it gets a published row.
What this sample is not
This is not a random sample of TikTok. These videos surfaced through keyword searches run by KOLens users, which biases the corpus toward videos that performed well enough to rank for a search term. The effect is strongest on the smallest accounts: a nano creator typically enters this dataset because one video travelled far beyond their following, which is most of why the nano view-to-follower median reads 9.79×. Read that column as a property of how creators get discovered, not as a forecast for a creator you already have in mind.
Engagement rate is far more robust to that bias, because both its numerator and denominator come from the same video — but it is not immune either: videos that travel beyond a creator's following pick up viewers with no prior attachment, which pushes engagement rate down. If anything, that biases the large-creator tiers downward, which makes the flatness of the tier curve a conservative finding rather than an inflated one.
Niche labels come from a mix of self-declared account categories and our own classifier. Roughly 60% of accounts in the wider database carry no usable category and are absent from the niche table entirely — they are still counted in the tier table, which needs no category.
Cite this study
These numbers are free to quote, chart, or reproduce — including commercially — under CC BY 4.0, with attribution and a link back so your readers can check the sample size and the caveats above.
KOLens (2026). TikTok Engagement Rate Benchmarks 2026: 38,971 videos across 17 niches. Retrieved from https://kolens.ai/tiktok-engagement-benchmarks<a href="https://kolens.ai/tiktok-engagement-benchmarks"
title="TikTok Engagement Rate Benchmarks 2026 — KOLens">
TikTok engagement rate benchmarks (38,971 videos, KOLens 2026)
</a>Frequently asked questions
What is a good TikTok engagement rate in 2026?
Across 38,971 videos in this sample, the median engagement rate is between 6.35% and 7.69% depending on follower tier, and between 4.2% and 11.2% depending on niche. A useful reading: below the 25th percentile for the creator's own niche is weak, and above the 75th percentile is strong. Comparing a beauty creator against a tech benchmark will mislead you — the medians are 8.22% and 5.12% respectively.
Does engagement rate really fall as a creator gets bigger?
Not in this sample, and this is the finding most likely to contradict what you have read elsewhere. Median engagement rate for nano creators (1K–10K) is 7.69% and for mega creators (1M+) it is 6.85% — a spread of under two points, with mid-tier creators actually sitting lowest at 6.35%. What does collapse with size is the view-to-follower ratio: a median of 9.79 for nano creators against 0.03 for mega creators. Those are different claims that often get merged into one. Engagement rate measures what a video's viewers did; view-to-follower ratio measures how far a video travelled relative to the audience the creator already had.
How is engagement rate calculated here?
(likes + comments + shares) ÷ views, computed per video, then aggregated as a median across videos. Views is the denominator, not follower count. This is the definition that answers 'did the people who saw this act on it', which is the question a brand paying for a placement is actually asking. Definitions that divide by follower count conflate reach and response, and produce numbers above 100% for any video that travels beyond its creator's following.
Why use the median instead of the average?
TikTok performance is extremely long-tailed — one breakout video can pull a creator's mean engagement far above anything they typically produce. The median describes the video a brand should actually expect. We publish the 25th and 75th percentiles alongside it so the spread is visible rather than hidden inside a single number.
Can I cite or republish these numbers?
Yes. The figures on this page are free to quote, chart, or reproduce for any purpose, commercial included, with attribution and a link back to this page so readers can check the methodology and the sample size. There is a ready-made citation and an embeddable table below.
Benchmark a real creator, not a table
These medians tell you where the bar sits. To see where one specific creator sits against it, run their handle through the free engagement rate calculator — or search a keyword and get a ranked list of creators with engagement, average views and contact emails.