Engagement Rate or ER is a metric that helps you understand how engaged is an influencer’s audience. Low ER indicates that the audience does not like the content. Extremely low ER says that most of the creator’s followers are bots or inactive accounts.
According to our State of Influencer Marketing 2025 report, the average Instagram engagement rate (ER) in 2024 was 1.59%, a decrease of 0.26% compared to 2023. Therefore, it's important to determine whether your ER meets this average. In this article, we'll break down an easy way to calculate the Instagram engagement rate.
How to Calculate Instagram Engagement Rate?
In plain language, ER is the likes and comments divided by the follower count. Although it might sound like duck soup, in reality, you will need to make an analysis yourself, post by post. And believe us, nobody got time for that.
Truth be told, there are a thousand and one services that will make it for you. HypeAuditor is one of them.
Instagram Engagement Rate Formula
Post Engagement Rate (classic) = (Likes + Comments)/Followers * 100%
It was a reasonable approach since follower count was once a reliable enough proxy for who would actually see a post.
Over time, though, Instagram's content distribution changed. Reels now routinely reach audiences far beyond an account's follower base, and algorithmic surfacing means reach and follower count have drifted apart. Because of that, the follower-based formula became harder to use as a consistent benchmark across accounts.
To better reflect how content is seen and interacted with today, HypeAuditor now calculates Instagram ER as:
ER per post = (Likes + Comments) ÷ Views × 100
For example, if a post has 570,289 likes and 2,856 comments, and it received 8,600,000 views:
(570,289 + 2,856) / 8,600,000 × 100 = 6.66%
However, for accounts that don't have enough Reels, we use the old follower-based formula - so the denominator adjusts depending on the influencer's dominant content format.
If you want to compare two influencers rather than individual posts, use the Average Engagement Rate - calculated the same way, but across a set of posts. Usually the last 12 posts work well as a sample, though for accounts that post very frequently (say, 3 times a day), it's better to look at all posts from the last 30 days.
Using the same account, here's the average ER across 12 posts: (2,794,424 + 410,871 + 360,196 + 485,698 + 147,586 + 320,658 + 270,635 + 354,257 + 450,235 + 354,698 + 264,874 + 2,896,547) / 103,200,000 × 100 = 8.83%
103,200,000 is the total combined views across those 12 posts.
Calculating ER takes a lot of time, that’s why we advise using tools like HypeAuditor where you can find ER in a second. You can use our Free Instagram Engagement Rate Calculator.
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