LinkedIn Acceptance Rates: 25,879 Real Invites (2026)

Quick answer: Across 25,879 LinkedIn connection requests sent from 23 accounts between 29 May and 12 October 2026, 27.4% were accepted. The middle half of accounts landed between 20.7% and 42.2%, with a median of 24.9%. Who you target and which account sends matters far more than the weekday or the hour. Most acceptances come fast: 64% within a day and 90% within a week.

Most advice on acceptance rates is a guess dressed as a number. These are measured. Below are the numbers, exactly how they were counted, and what they do not show.

How these numbers were counted

• What counted as an invite: a LinkedIn connection request that actually went out (not one that was queued, skipped or blocked). Each person was counted once per campaign.
• When it was measured: only invites sent at least 7 days before the measurement, so no invite was judged before the person had a fair chance to answer. Sent between 29 May and 12 October 2026.
• What counted as accepted: the person accepted after the invite was sent. Someone who was already connected through another route did not count.
• Where it comes from: 23 FollowArc accounts (a person, team or client each) running outreach through FollowArc, across 86 campaigns. Test and demo workspaces were left out. No account, person or company is identified here.

What is a good LinkedIn acceptance rate?

In this data, about 25% is the middle, and the overall figure is 27.4% because a few high-performing accounts send a lot. Treat roughly 20% as the floor for ordinary targeting and 40% or more as what a well-matched or already-warm audience can reach. We did not run a controlled test on why the top accounts do better, so read the reasons as hypotheses: tighter targeting, a stronger profile and more relevant audiences are the likely drivers.

The practical point is the spread. Two accounts using the same tool ended up more than 34 points apart. The account and the audience set the ceiling. The settings you tune afterwards move the result by a few points.

Does the weekday matter?

Barely. Across all seven days the rate stayed between 26.5% and 28.4%, a spread of under two points on thousands of invites per day.

If you are choosing between sending on Tuesday or Thursday, pick whichever is easier to keep consistent. The data does not support a "best day".

Does the time of day matter?

The raw numbers look like it does, and that is a trap. Averaged across all accounts, invites sent from 7 to 11 in the morning (Central Time) were accepted 24% to 26% of the time, while invites sent after 2 in the afternoon looked higher (31% at 2 PM, 36% at 4 PM, 40% at 6 PM). Read that way, late is better.

It is not real. We compared the same account's morning invites (before 11 AM) against its afternoon invites (1 PM or later), and the afternoon did better in only 5 of 15 accounts, by an average of minus 1.8 points. The apparent pattern comes from which accounts happen to send late, not from the hour. Different accounts, audiences and time zones were being mixed.

The lesson is general: compare like with like. A pattern across accounts can come entirely from who is in each group. To test your own timing, split your own invites between two windows and keep the audience the same. Our guide to the best time to send LinkedIn messages shows a simple way.

How fast do people accept?

Quickly, which is useful because it tells you when you can judge a campaign. Counting each person once, across the 6,911 invites that were accepted:

The median acceptance happened about 7 hours after the invite. The remaining 10% trickled in over the following weeks.

Two consequences. First, an invite sent yesterday has more than a third of its eventual acceptances still to come. Judge a batch only after at least 7 days, which is why every figure in this post uses that rule. Second, a campaign can look worse on day two than it will end up. See the LinkedIn outreach metrics that matter for how to count each stage.

Does adding a note help?

A little, and less than the raw numbers suggest. Across all invites, those sent with a note were accepted 29.1% of the time against 25.5% without one. That gap is mixed up with which accounts use notes, so we checked it inside each account. In the 13 accounts with at least 100 invites of each kind, a note won in 8 of 13, by a median of 4.5 points (an average of 3.4).

So a note tends to help, modestly, and not everywhere. It is worth testing on your own audience rather than assuming. There are examples of what to write in LinkedIn connection request message examples.

What these numbers do not tell you

• They are not a random sample of LinkedIn. These are accounts run through one platform, many of them agencies and consultants with defined target lists. A cold, broad audience will usually do worse.
• Acceptance is not the goal. A connection is a step. Replies and meetings are what matter, and the next stages have their own rates.
• Small groups are noisy. The weekday, time and note comparisons are directional. The 7-day timing and the spread between accounts are the strongest findings.
• We did not control for audience. Targeting is the biggest unmeasured factor, and we did not isolate it.

How to use this

1. Set your own baseline first. Send a few hundred invites to one audience and measure after 7 days. Compare yourself to yourself before comparing to anyone else.
2. Treat about 25% as a middle reference, and a large gap as a targeting question. If you are at 12% and the middle is 25%, fix who you are sending to and your profile before touching timing.
3. Test one thing at a time, inside the same account. Notes, wording or timing, never several at once. It is the only comparison that holds up.
4. Wait 7 days before you judge, and do not change a campaign on its second day.
5. Keep volume steady and safe. Pace and weekly limits matter for account health; see how many connection requests you can safely send.

To turn your own acceptance, reply and meeting rates into expected results, use the free outreach ROI calculator.

Where FollowArc fits

FollowArc runs the outreach these numbers come from: connection requests, follow-ups and replies, with sending paced inside configured windows. It reports acceptance only on invites that have had time to be answered, the same rule used here, so the number you see is the honest one. You can try FollowArc free for 7 days and measure your own baseline.

Figures are from FollowArc data, 29 May to 12 October 2026, and are aggregated and anonymous. We will refresh them as more invites mature.