# What LinkedIn actually restricts for

> LinkedIn has written down why it restricts invitations. It has not written down the number. Here is what is stated, what is reported, what is folklore, and what we do about each.

By Adarsh Mamgain, 12 October 2026. From the Hellofew blog at https://hellofew.com/blog.

The restriction notice does not tell you what you did. It says your ability to send invitations has been temporarily restricted, that it will lift in about a week, and that withdrawing the pending ones will not help. Then you go looking for the rule you broke, and you find three hundred blog posts that all say a hundred a week and all cite each other.

I went looking properly, for my own account, before I built anything. Here is what LinkedIn has actually put in writing, what the session provider reports from running a lot of accounts, and what is folklore. The full table with links is on [the limits page](/limits); this is the short version with my reading of it.

## What LinkedIn says, in its own words

Its help page on restrictions gives three reasons. You sent many invitations within a short amount of time. Many of your invitations were ignored, left pending, or marked as spam by the recipients. You sent an excessive number and they suspect an automation tool. That is the whole list, and it is more useful than any number, because each one is a behaviour rather than a threshold.

It also says a weekly limit exists and never says what it is. It says most restrictions clear within a week, up to a month if the reason was too many outstanding invitations, and that it will not lift one on request. And on notes: a free account gets up to three personalised invitations a month at two hundred characters; Premium gets unlimited notes.

## What is reported but not stated

Unipile, the provider that holds the session, reports 80 to 100 invitations a day and around 200 a week for a paid, active account, and about 150 a week for a free account sending without notes. It also reports that accounts under about 150 connections, or recently created, may have their invitations held for manual review before they appear at all. LinkedIn has said none of this. It is a careful observation from a large sample, which is worth a lot, and it is not a rule.

## What is folklore

A hundred a week. It matches what people see and I run under it myself, but LinkedIn has never written it down, and Premium does not raise it. Up to two hundred a week if your Social Selling Index is high: plausible, repeated everywhere, confirmed nowhere. An accept-rate percentage that triggers restriction: LinkedIn says ignored invitations are a reason and gives no number. Every percentage in this category, mine included, is one the tool chose.

## What I did with each of the three reasons

Many invitations in a short time. The ceiling is 20 a day and 80 a week on a rolling window, a new account ramps from 5, and the gaps between sends are at least 150 seconds and drawn at random rather than scheduled, because twenty invitations exactly three minutes apart is its own kind of short time.

Many ignored or left pending. This is the one most tools do nothing about, and it is the one I was most afraid of, because it is caused by bad targeting and bad targeting is invisible from the inside. So the accept rate is watched and acted on: caps halve below 15%, inviting stops below 8%, and a blunter check runs from day four on the first ten. [The breaker](/blog/the-accept-rate-breaker) has its own post.

Looks like an automation tool. Working hours only, 20 minutes clear of either end, weekends and your country's holidays skipped, one fixed address in the country you log in from, and nothing sent the same day somebody accepted, because a connection accepted and a pitch arriving minutes later is the clearest signature there is. Under 150 connections it sends nothing at all.

## What none of that can promise

That you will not be restricted. LinkedIn's terms prohibit third-party automation, detection keys partly on things nobody outside LinkedIn controls, and anyone who tells you their tool cannot get you banned is telling you the one thing that is checkably false. What I can promise is that every limit above is published, is a constant in the source, and is run against every one of the three reasons LinkedIn has actually given. How often the product had to act on them is on [the numbers page](/numbers), across every customer, with the restrictions counted too.