Socialinsider’s 2026 LinkedIn benchmark puts the average company page engagement rate at 5.20%, up 8% year on year, across 1.3 million posts from 16,645 business pages published between January 2024 and December 2025. Native document posts lead at 7.00%.
Before you compare that to any other platform: LinkedIn’s 5.20% is calculated against impressions, not followers. The same study’s Instagram figure of 0.48% is calculated against followers. Putting those two numbers in one slide is the most common error in cross-platform social reporting.
Note: Figures here were verified against the Socialinsider 2026 LinkedIn benchmarks as of September 2026. Platforms change these without notice.
Engagement by post format
| Format | Engagement rate (by impressions) | Year on year | Average posts per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Native document (carousel PDF) | 7.00% | +14% | 2 |
| Multi-image post | 6.45% | not stated | 1 |
| Video | 6.00% | +7% | 4 |
| Image | 5.30% | +9% | 7 |
| Text only | 4.50% | +12% | 1 |
| Poll | 4.20% | not stated | 1 |
| Link post | 3.25% | not stated | 4 |
Two things stand out. Link posts sit at the bottom at 3.25%, roughly half the document rate, which is the clearest data point in the study for the long-standing claim that LinkedIn suppresses outbound links. And the formats with the highest rates are the ones pages publish least: documents average 2 posts a month against 7 for images.
Every format in the table rose year on year where a comparison is given, which is unusual. Most platforms show engagement drifting down.
The formula, and why 5.20% is not 17x Instagram
Socialinsider defines the LinkedIn rate as engagement divided by impressions, times 100. Impressions are the number of times the post was served, so this measures how often a delivered post produced an action.
Work through one document post: 180 reactions, 40 comments and 30 reposts, so 250 interactions. The page has 12,000 followers. The post served 4,000 impressions and reached 3,100 unique members.
| Calculation | Arithmetic | Result |
|---|---|---|
| By impressions (LinkedIn benchmark method) | 250 / 4,000 | 6.25% |
| By reach | 250 / 3,100 | 8.06% |
| By followers | 250 / 12,000 | 2.08% |
The same post is 6.25% or 2.08% depending on the denominator. To compare LinkedIn against Instagram honestly, recompute both on the same basis, then compare. The engagement rate calculator will do all three at once.
A second wrinkle: LinkedIn’s impression counts include repeat impressions to the same member, so a post that a few people saw many times will score lower than one delivered once to many. That is a feature if you care about frequency, a distortion if you do not.
Company pages are not personal profiles
This study covers business pages. Personal profiles on LinkedIn behave differently, and we could not find a comparable large-sample 2026 study of profile engagement with a stated methodology, so this page does not give a number for them. Anyone quoting one should be asked for the sample size and the formula.
What the benchmark is for
A benchmark is a starting point for comparison against your own trend, not a target. A page with 400 followers measuring itself against 5.20% learns nothing: LinkedIn’s distribution to small pages is erratic enough that one post picked up by an employee network will swamp the month.
Practical version:
- Use engagement by impressions, since that is what LinkedIn’s own page analytics gives you and what the benchmark uses.
- Split by format before you split by anything else. The 3.25% to 7.00% spread across formats is bigger than most other variables you control.
- Compare quarter to quarter against yourself.
- If you post mostly links and your rate looks low, the format is the explanation. Test the same content as a document or a native text post before concluding your content is weak.
The format finding lines up with the general advice in what to post on LinkedIn, and the low link rate is worth reading against how to write the post itself.
Publishing documents and video on a schedule
Native documents score highest and get published least, largely because they take work and rarely get queued in advance. BulkPublish schedules LinkedIn documents, video, images and text posts to company pages and personal profiles from one queue, and its reports break results out by format so you can see whether the 7.00% pattern holds for your page. More on the mechanics in how to schedule LinkedIn posts.