tokconnect
TikTok engagement rate is the share of people who did something with a video beyond watching it: liked, commented, shared or saved. You get it by adding those four counts and dividing by views (how well the video landed with the people who saw it) or by followers (how much of the account's audience showed up). The calculator below does both, then tells you where the result sits against a September 2026 sample of 58 creators and their last 10 posts.
Use the by-views rate to judge a single video or to compare creators of different sizes. Use the by-followers rate when you are paying for an audience, because it tells you how much of the audience a brand is buying actually reacts. On TikTok the two disagree more than on any other platform, and the tables further down show by how much.
TikTok engagement rate calculator
To read the numbers off a video, open it and look at the icons on the right: the heart is likes, the speech bubble is comments, the bookmark is saves and the arrow is shares. Views are the play-count under the thumbnail on the profile grid, or the eye icon in TikTok Studio. Followers are on the profile header. Type the full number; TikTok shows 1.2M, which you enter as 1200000.
What a good TikTok engagement rate is, by follower tier
Most "average TikTok engagement rate" figures online are unsourced or pulled from a vendor's customer base. So we built our own sample. On 21 September 2026 we searched TikTok for six niche keywords (fitness, cooking, personal finance, skincare, small business, comedy), took the first ten accounts each search returned, and pulled each account's follower count and last ten posts. That gave 58 creators and 572 posts after dropping one account with a single post.
For each creator we took the median rate across their posts, so one viral video does not set their number. The rows below are the quartiles of those per-creator medians. Read "median" as the middle creator, "lower quartile" as the point a quarter of creators fall below, and "upper quartile" as the point the top quarter starts.
| Followers | Creators | By views: lower quartile | By views: median | By views: upper quartile | By followers: median | By followers: upper quartile |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10k | 5 | 6.13% | 9.09% | 12.27% | 13.98% | 14.02% |
| 10k to 100k | 7 | 3.69% | 5.86% | 6.89% | 1.57% | 5.18% |
| 100k to 1M | 17 | 4.11% | 4.66% | 7.82% | 0.40% | 0.91% |
| Over 1M | 29 | 5.25% | 5.95% | 6.94% | 0.16% | 1.11% |
| All 58 | 58 | 4.16% | 5.85% | 8.49% | 0.47% | 1.58% |
Data: TikTok profile and post data via TokConnect, pulled 21 September 2026. Engagement = likes + comments + shares + saves; each creator's median over their last 10 posts. Open the snapshot, including every post's counts.
Two things stand out. The by-views rate barely moves with account size: the median creator sits between 4.7% and 6% in every tier except the smallest, where a handful of tiny accounts with a few hundred views per post push it to 9%. The by-followers rate collapses as accounts grow, from 1.57% at 10k to 100k followers to 0.16% over 1M. Anyone quoting a single "good TikTok engagement rate" without saying which formula and which tier is not telling you much.
The two small tiers hold only five and seven creators, because a niche search on TikTok surfaces large accounts first, so treat those rows as a first reading rather than a rule. The 100k-to-1M and over-1M rows are the ones with enough creators behind them to lean on.
By niche
Niche matters less than you would expect for the by-views rate and a lot for the by-followers rate, because niches differ in how big the typical account is. Small business is the outlier: the accounts TikTok surfaced for that keyword had a median of 12,400 followers, so their by-followers rates are high even though each post reaches about two thousand people.
| Niche | Creators | Median followers | By views: median | By views: lower to upper quartile | By followers: median |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fitness | 10 | 3.0M | 5.94% | 5.44% to 6.84% | 0.08% |
| Cooking | 10 | 2.25M | 4.56% | 3.77% to 5.79% | 0.51% |
| Personal finance | 10 | 234,750 | 6.00% | 4.70% to 9.21% | 0.46% |
| Skincare | 9 | 623,200 | 4.23% | 2.61% to 4.66% | 0.59% |
| Small business | 9 | 12,400 | 7.13% | 6.13% to 12.27% | 3.95% |
| Comedy | 10 | 2.9M | 6.23% | 4.44% to 7.45% | 0.08% |
Data: TikTok profile and post data via TokConnect, pulled 21 September 2026. Open the snapshot.
Skincare has the lowest by-views rate in the sample at 4.23%, and its lower quartile is 2.61%. That fits what the videos are: product demos and routines that people watch and move on from. Personal finance and small business sit at the top by views, at 6% and 7.13%, which is what you see when the content is advice people want to keep. A 5% by-views rate is a fine result for a skincare account and an ordinary one for a finance account.
Why by-views and by-followers disagree on TikTok
On Instagram most of a post's reach comes from followers, so the two formulas rank accounts in roughly the same order. TikTok distributes through the For You feed, which TikTok describes as ranking each video on its own signals, not on who follows the account. Views are not tied to follower count, so an account's rate by views and its rate by followers are measuring different things.
The sample makes the gap concrete. The median creator's typical post got views equal to 10.6% of their follower count, and for 50 of the 58 creators the median post got fewer views than they have followers. At the other end, a cooking account with 3,755 followers had a median of 295,800 views per post: 1.17% by views, 77.71% by followers. A skincare account with 4.1M followers averaged 15,350 views: 13.04% by views, 0.04% by followers. Rank all 58 by each formula and only four creators appear in both top tens.
Search adds a second stream of views that ignores follower count entirely. A video that ranks for a query keeps collecting views from people who never saw the account before, months after posting. Those viewers like and save at their own rate, which is why an old how-to video can have a healthy by-views rate and a by-followers rate that looks absurd. Our guide to how TikTok search works covers where those views come from and how to earn them.
Comparing creators for a campaign: by views, because it is fair across sizes and reflects the audience the video actually reached. Reporting on your own account month to month: both, because a rising by-views rate with a falling by-followers rate means your videos are good but your followers are not seeing them.
Saves and shares: the numbers brands should weight
A like costs the viewer nothing. A save means they plan to come back, and a share means they put their name next to your video in someone's DMs. Both are rarer than likes, and both predict what brands pay for: a viewer who remembers the product.
Across the sample, the median creator's engagement was 83.86% likes, 7.88% saves, 5.3% shares and 0.83% comments. Saves ran at 9.5 per 100 likes. Fifty-one of the 58 creators had more saves than comments, and 49 had more shares than comments, so comments are the weakest signal of the four even though they are the one most people check.
| Followers | Creators | Likes | Saves | Shares | Comments | Saves per 100 likes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Under 10k | 5 | 82.26% | 6.01% | 2.08% | 4.03% | 8.0 |
| 10k to 100k | 7 | 83.78% | 8.00% | 4.38% | 0.83% | 11.1 |
| 100k to 1M | 17 | 84.86% | 8.17% | 3.88% | 0.80% | 9.8 |
| Over 1M | 29 | 83.94% | 7.75% | 6.63% | 0.80% | 8.6 |
Share of each creator's total engagement over their last 10 posts, median creator per tier. Data via TokConnect, pulled 21 September 2026. Open the snapshot.
Two patterns are worth acting on. Shares run highest for the biggest accounts, 6.63% of engagement over 1M followers against 2.08% under 10k, because big accounts make the kind of video people send to a friend. Saves hold at roughly 8% of engagement in every tier above 10k, which makes saves per 100 likes a clean way to compare a creator against their peers: under 8 is light, 10 or more means the videos are being kept for later. Comments only matter in the smallest tier, where a creator is still talking to individual viewers.
If you run sponsorships, ask for saves and shares alongside the rate. A creator with a 5% by-views rate made of saves is worth more to a product launch than a creator with 7% made of likes on a dance.
Score any account in one prompt
The calculator handles one video. To score a creator properly you want their last 30 posts, both rates per post, the median of each, and the saves share, which is thirty rounds of reading icons if you do it by hand. With TokConnect connected to your agent, it is one request: the agent looks the handle up, pages through the posts and returns the table.
Look up the TikTok account @handle. Pull its follower count and its last 30 posts with views, likes, comments, shares and saves. For each post compute engagement rate by views ((likes + comments + shares + saves) ÷ views) and by followers (same total ÷ followers). Give me a table of the posts, then the median of each rate, the share of total engagement that is saves, and the median views per post. Compare the medians with these benchmarks: by views, under 10k followers 9.09%, 10k to 100k 5.86%, 100k to 1M 4.66%, over 1M 5.95%; by followers, 13.98%, 1.57%, 0.40% and 0.16% for the same tiers. Tell me which tier the account is in and whether it is below, around or above the median on each rate.
Works in Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and Gemini once TokConnect is connected. Get a free key (100 credits, no card) or see the setup guides.
Run the same prompt for every handle on a shortlist and you have a ranked list in a few minutes. The influencer search guide shows how to build that shortlist from a niche keyword, and the influencer marketing page covers vetting from there: audience country, posting cadence and whether the numbers hold up across posts rather than on one hit.
The by-followers number is the one to argue about in a rate negotiation. A creator with 500k followers and a 0.2% by-followers rate reaches about 1,000 engaged followers per post, and you can check that against the price they quote. The by-views number tells you whether a video that does reach people works, which is what matters if the brief is a search-ranking video rather than a follower blast.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good engagement rate on TikTok?
By views, the median creator in our September 2026 sample of 58 accounts sat at 5.85%, with the top quarter starting at 8.49%. By followers it depends on size: 1.57% is the median for 10k to 100k followers, 0.40% for 100k to 1M and 0.16% over 1M. A rate above your tier's median is good; above the upper quartile is a creator worth paying more for.
How do you calculate TikTok engagement rate?
Add likes, comments, shares and saves for the video, then divide by views and multiply by 100. A video with 48,200 views, 2,400 likes, 31 comments, 120 shares and 210 saves has 2,761 engagements, which is 5.73% by views. To get the by-followers rate, divide the same total by the account's follower count instead. The calculator at the top of this page does both.
Is engagement rate by views or by followers?
Both are in use, and they give very different numbers on TikTok because the For You feed and search send views to people who do not follow the account. By views is the fair way to compare creators of different sizes and to judge a single video. By followers tells a brand how much of the audience it is paying for actually reacts. Say which one you mean whenever you quote a rate.
What engagement rate do brands want for sponsorships?
Most brand briefs still ask for a by-followers rate, and for creators over 100k followers anything above the tier median (0.40% at 100k to 1M, 0.16% over 1M in our sample) is already above average. The sharper test is by views over the last 30 posts, where the median creator sits near 5% to 6%, plus the share of engagement that is saves. See how we vet creators.
Do saves count as engagement?
Yes. TikTok shows saves (the bookmark icon) on every video, and they should be in the total alongside likes, comments and shares. In our sample saves were 7.88% of the median creator's engagement, nearly ten times comments, and they are the strongest signal that a viewer intends to act on the video later.
Why is my engagement rate high but views low?
Because the by-views rate only counts the people who saw the video. A video shown to 300 people who mostly follow you will score well because they already like your content; TikTok simply did not push it further. A high rate with low views means the content works and distribution did not; look at the hook, the first three seconds and whether the caption matches something people search for. Our hooks guide covers the fix.