How many hashtags should you use on TikTok?

Three to five, and every one of them should describe what is actually in the video. If you are asking how many hashtags you should use on TikTok, that is the answer, and since August 2025 the app has counted only the first five anyway.

The more useful answer: hashtags are not how TikTok search finds your video. Search matches the words in your caption, your on-screen text and what you say out loud. A hashtag is a category label. A keyword is what someone typed. This page puts both sets of numbers side by side.

How many hashtags to use on TikTok

Use three to five. One broad tag for the category you are in, two that name your sub-niche, and one for the exact thing the video shows.

TikTok's own Creator Academy is stricter than most creators expect: less is more, it says, and two to three relevant hashtags per video, chosen because they fit rather than because they are big.

The cap did not change that guidance. It made it compulsory.

The five-hashtag cap

In early August 2025 creators started hitting a wall in the caption field. TikTok had capped hashtags at five per post and published no explanation for it. A year later the cap is still there, and scheduling tools have rewritten their advice around it.

Some accounts reported seven rather than five during the rollout, so check your own caption field before you plan a set.

What this kills is hashtag stuffing. What it does not change is which signal ranks you in search. That was never the hashtag.

What hashtags do, and what keywords do

They sit in the same caption and do two different jobs.

The right way to read that last row: you are not choosing between them. You are using the hashtag to tell TikTok what shelf to put the video on, and the keyword to win the search that sends people to that shelf. How TikTok search works covers the ranking side in more detail.

A hashtag's views and a topic's searches are not the same number

Here is the comparison that settles most hashtag arguments. On the left, what TikTok's hashtag search returns for a niche. On the right, a real search topic inside that niche, pulled the same day.

Data: hashtag counts from TikTok hashtag search, topic figures from TikTok Creator Search Insights, both via TokConnect, pulled 19 September 2026. Snapshots: hashtags and search topics.

Look at the skincare row. #SkinCare has collected 979.8 billion views since the tag existed, spread over 60 million videos. Divide it out and the average video on that tag has had about 16,000 views, most of them years ago, none of them yours.

The topic column asks a different question: what are people looking for this week. Around 4.8 million searches landed on "anti aging and acne skincare" in seven days, and TikTok has matched 998 videos to it. Nine hundred and ninety-eight is a number you can compete with.

The BookTok row is the one worth sitting with. The tag has 551.7 billion lifetime views and 85 million videos, which gives you nothing to act on. The topic "BookTok books and FYP trends" had 2.4 million searches in a week and zero videos matched to it. That is a content gap: demand with nothing answering it. Adding #BookTok does not find that gap. Searching the topics does. Our content gap guide explains how TikTok decides a video counts as an answer.

The rule set

This is what we do for every video, in order.

1. Find the search phrase first. Search your niche in Creator Search Insights and take the phrase with real weekly searches and a beatable video count. Keyword research, step by step.
2. Say the phrase out loud in the first three seconds. TikTok transcribes audio. Highest-value item on the list, and free.
3. Put the phrase in on-screen text. Not a stylised version of it. The words themselves.
4. Write the caption as a sentence containing the phrase. "Anti aging skincare that actually works on acne" beats "my skin journey".
5. Then add three to five hashtags. One broad (#SkinCare), two niche (#SkincareTips, #skincareproducts), one specific to the video. Stop.
6. Never use a tag that does not fit. A wrong tag sends the video to people who swipe past, and that is the signal that buries it.

Which hashtags to pick once you have the keyword

Relevance first, then size, never the other way round. A tag with 979 billion views and no connection to your video is worth less than a tag with 800 million that describes it exactly.

The reason is mechanical. TikTok uses hashtags to decide which audience to test the video on. A precise tag gets a small, interested test audience, the one most likely to watch to the end. A giant generic tag gets a broad one that mostly does not care.

For the numbers by niche, see the best TikTok hashtags by niche, with lifetime views and video counts for twenty niches. The trending hashtags page refreshes the same counts weekly.

One habit worth stealing: search your shortlisted tag inside TikTok before you post and check that the top videos on it look like yours. If they do not, the tag is lying about what it is.