How Many Comments Does a Reddit Post Get? We Analyzed 34,095 Posts to Find Out

There is no single answer to how many comments a Reddit post gets, because the honest answer depends on two things: how big the community is and whether you are asking about a typical post or a successful one. So we stopped guessing and crawled the numbers ourselves. In July 2026 we analyzed 34,095 posts across 50 subreddits, from communities with 24 thousand subscribers to giants with 67 million, and built comment benchmarks for each size tier.

Across the 34,095 Reddit posts we analyzed in July 2026, the median post sitting on a subreddit's front page has 6 to 22 comments depending on community size, while posts that reached a subreddit's top listings earned a median of 19 comments in small communities and 571 in mega communities.

Key takeaways

• A typical post on a subreddit's hot page has a median of just 6 to 22 comments, even in subreddits with tens of millions of subscribers.
• Successful posts (the ones that reach top-of-month or top-of-year listings) earn a median of 19 comments in small subs, 53 in mid-size, 105 in large, and 571 in mega subreddits.
• Averages lie on Reddit: mean comment counts run roughly 1.7 to 2 times higher than medians in every tier because a small number of viral threads drag the average up.
• The comment-to-upvote ratio inverts with size: small subreddits earn a median of 157.8 comments per 100 upvotes, mega subreddits earn 3.7.
• Within the same size tier, discussion-driven subreddits earn 3 to 4 times the comments of showcase subreddits, so format matters as much as size.
• Use the 50-subreddit lookup table below to find the benchmark for your exact community.

How many comments does a typical Reddit post get?

The median post sitting on a subreddit's hot page has 8 comments in small communities, 6 in mid-size, 9 in large, and 22 in mega subreddits. That surprises most people. Even in subreddits with 20 million subscribers, half the posts on the front page at any moment have single-digit or low-double-digit comment counts.

Here is the hot-listing data from our crawl:

Table 1: Comments on a typical hot-page post, by community size

Two honest caveats before you benchmark against this. First, these are posts that made it to hot, which already filters out submissions that died on arrival. The true median across every post ever submitted is lower than these figures, and no public listing lets anyone measure it directly. Second, a quarter of hot-page posts in every tier had 5 comments or fewer at the moment we crawled, so a quiet thread is not a failed thread, it is the default state.

This is also why platform-wide trivia stats are useless for benchmarking. Reddit averaged 126.8 million daily active uniques in Q1 2026 according to its shareholder letter filed with the SEC, but that scale is spread across millions of communities. Your post competes inside one subreddit's feed, and that is the only place a benchmark means anything. If you want to see how ranking inside that feed actually works, we broke down how Reddit's ranking algorithm weighs votes and time separately.

How many comments do successful Reddit posts get?

Posts that reached their subreddit's top-of-month or top-of-year listings earned a median of 19 comments in small subreddits, 53 in mid-size, 105 in large, and 571 in mega communities. These are the posts everyone remembers when they picture "a Reddit post," and they are 2.4 to 26 times above a typical hot-page post depending on tier.

Table 2: Comments on top-listing posts, by community size

Notice the mean column. In every tier the mean runs roughly 1.7 to 2 times the median (37.6 vs 19 in small subs, 996.3 vs 571 in mega). Comment counts follow a long-tail distribution: most successful posts cluster near the median while a handful of monster threads pull the average far above what a normal post experiences. Any article that quotes you an "average comments per post" without a median next to it is quoting the monsters.

The gap between Table 1 and Table 2 is itself a finding. In small subreddits, a top post has about 2.4 times the comments of a typical hot post (19 vs 8). In mega subreddits the multiple is about 26 (571 vs 22). The bigger the community, the more winner-take-all its comment activity becomes: giant subs concentrate discussion into a few huge threads while everything else scrolls past quietly.

What counts as a good comment count for your subreddit's size?

A good comment count is one at or above the 75th percentile for your community's size tier: roughly 43 comments in small subreddits, 122 in mid-size, 235 in large, and 1,228 in mega communities, measured against posts that reached top listings. Hitting the 90th percentile (88, 237, 482, and 2,318.8 respectively) puts a post in genuinely great territory.

How to actually use these numbers:

1. Find your tier. Check your target community's subscriber count. Our tiers overlap at the edges (a 3.3M-subscriber community can behave like either a small or a large sub depending on activity), so if your sub sits near a border, benchmark against both tiers. You can pull any community's size, activity, and posting rules with our free subreddit stats checker.
2. Benchmark against the right ladder. If your post is a few hours old and sitting in the sub's feed, compare against Table 1. If it peaked and you are doing a post-mortem, compare against Table 2.
3. Judge the trend, not the snapshot. Comment counts compound: early replies keep a thread alive in sort orders and invite more replies. The absolute count matters less than whether it is still climbing in the first hours. Posting when the community is actually awake is the cheapest lever here, and our free best time to post tool shows any subreddit's active hours. We covered the timing evidence in depth in our best time to post on Reddit guide.

One thing this study cannot tell you is causation. We measured how many comments posts have, not what those comments did for ranking. Treat these tables as a ruler, not a recipe. For the recipe side, our guide to building active discussion on your posts covers what turns a quiet thread into a conversation.

Why do small subreddits earn more comments per upvote?

Because in small communities, commenting is the primary way members participate, while in mega communities the overwhelming majority of viewers only scroll and vote. Our data makes the inversion stark: the median top-listing post earns 157.8 comments per 100 upvotes in small subreddits and just 3.7 per 100 in mega subreddits, a gap of roughly 43x.

Table 3: Comments per 100 upvotes on top-listing posts

Read the small-sub row again: the median successful post there has more comments than upvotes. These communities function like forums, not feeds. A founder posting in a 50K-subscriber niche community is not really competing for upvotes at all, they are competing for replies, because replies are what members see, judge, and respond to.

That has a practical consequence for anyone marketing in small and mid-size communities: the comment section is the product. A post with a healthy score and an empty comment section reads as ignored, while a modest score with an active discussion reads as a community moment. It is also why seeded discussion moves outcomes hardest in exactly these tiers, which we unpacked in how buying Reddit comments accelerates promotion. If you would rather skip the cold-start problem on an important post and have real accounts open the discussion, that is exactly what our buy Reddit comments service does.

One honest limitation: this ratio only tells us how the two counters move together on posts that succeeded. It does not tell us which one causes the other, and the mid-tier's wide spread (25th percentile of 9.4 vs 75th of 145.5) shows mid-size communities are a mix of both behaviors rather than a clean middle point.

Which subreddits get the most comments?

Within our sample, r/technology had the highest median comment count (872.5 on top-listing posts) and r/roastmystartup the lowest (5). But the more useful finding is the spread inside each tier: the same-size community can produce 3 to 16 times more comments depending on whether its format invites discussion or showcasing.

The pattern repeats in every tier. Advice and question formats beat showcase formats among the communities we crawled:

• r/relationship_advice (median 325) vs r/photography (49), both large-tier: 6.6x
• r/Cooking (210) vs r/photography (49): 4.3x
• r/Baking (135) vs r/MechanicalKeyboards (34), both mid-tier: 4x
• r/indiehackers (80) vs r/roastmystartup (5), both small-tier: 16x

If comments are your goal, the subreddit's native format matters as much as its size. A useful recon step before posting: pull the community's most-commented titles and see what shape of post starts conversations there. Our free subreddit title scraper does that in one click.

Here is the full lookup table from the crawl. Find your community or its closest twin by size and topic. All figures are comment counts on top-listing posts. Jump to a tier: small · mid · large · mega.

Table 4: Comment benchmarks for all 50 subreddits (top-listing posts)

Small tier (24K to 3.3M subscribers)

Mid tier (273K to 4.5M subscribers)

Large tier (3.3M to 21.8M subscribers)

Mega tier (16.6M to 67.5M subscribers)

The mega tier's top 1% column is where Reddit's famous numbers live: the 99th percentile post in r/pics carries 10,032.2 comments. Threads at that scale are historic events for a community, the same territory as the most upvoted Reddit posts of all time.

How did we collect and analyze this data?

We crawled 34,095 posts from Reddit's public listings across 50 subreddits in July 2026, using our own collection infrastructure. Posts came from four listing types: top of year (14,807 posts), top of month (10,756), hot (8,147), and new (385). Posts in the sample were created between July 2023 and July 2026.

Details that matter for interpreting the numbers:

• Tiers. The 50 subreddits were grouped into four size tiers: small (14 subs, 24,437 to 3,292,585 subscribers), mid (13 subs, 272,543 to 4,507,510), large (13 subs, 3,279,769 to 21,766,926), and mega (10 subs, 16,597,969 to 67,487,818). The ranges overlap at the edges because tier assignment followed the crawl design rather than strict subscriber cutoffs, so communities near a border are best read against both neighboring tiers.
• Two ladders, not one. Top-of-year and top-of-month posts (25,563 combined) power the "successful post" benchmarks. Hot posts (8,147) power the "typical post" benchmarks. The 385 new-listing posts were collected in the crawl but excluded from comment benchmarks, since comment counts on brand-new posts have not matured.
• What a comment count is. All figures are Reddit's public comment counter at crawl time. That counter does not distinguish human replies from bots or moderator comments, and we cannot separate them from listing data.
• Percentiles over averages. Comment distributions are heavily long-tailed, so we report medians and percentiles throughout, with means shown only to demonstrate how misleading they are. Percentile values are interpolated, which is why some carry decimals.
• Known limitations. Top listings oversample winners, so the successful-post benchmarks describe posts that already succeeded, not the odds of succeeding. The hot snapshot reflects a single crawl window in July 2026. The comment-to-upvote ratio was computed on top-listing posts with a positive score and describes correlation, not causation. And our 50 subreddits skew toward marketing, business, and hobby communities, so heavily meme-driven or regional communities may behave differently.

We publish these caveats because a benchmark you cannot trust is worse than no benchmark. Where the data is inconclusive, such as the true comment count of the median submission across all of Reddit, we say so rather than extrapolate.

FAQ

How many comments does the average Reddit post get?

A typical post on a subreddit's hot page has a median of 6 to 22 comments depending on community size, based on our July 2026 analysis of 34,095 posts. Posts that reach a subreddit's top listings earn far more: a median of 19 in small communities up to 571 in mega subreddits.

What is a good number of comments on a Reddit post?

Judged against posts that reached top listings, a good count is the 75th percentile for your community's size: about 43 comments in small subreddits, 122 in mid-size, 235 in large, and 1,228 in mega communities. Reaching the 90th percentile puts your post in genuinely great territory for that tier.

What is a normal comment-to-upvote ratio on Reddit?

It depends heavily on community size. In our data, the median top-listing post earned 157.8 comments per 100 upvotes in small subreddits, around 50 per 100 in mid and large communities, and just 3.7 per 100 in mega subreddits. Small communities discuss, mega communities mostly scroll and vote.

Why do big subreddits have fewer comments per upvote?

Mega communities behave like broadcast feeds: millions of viewers scroll and vote, but only a tiny fraction ever reply, and discussion concentrates into a few huge threads. Small communities behave like forums where replying is the main way members participate, so their comment counts often exceed their upvote counts.

Do more comments mean a post will rank higher?

Not necessarily, and our study measured counts, not causes. Comment activity keeps threads visible and alive in sort orders, but Reddit's hot ranking is driven primarily by votes and time. Treat comment benchmarks as a measuring tool for performance, not as a guaranteed lever for ranking.

Related reading

• Reddit Engagement: How to Build Active Discussion on Your Posts
• How Buying Reddit Comments Accelerates Post Promotion
• Best Time to Post on Reddit: Data-Backed Guide
• Reddit Algorithm Explained: Upvotes, Time and Engagement
• Most Upvoted Reddit Posts of All Time