What is a good Instagram growth rate? 22% a year at 1-5K

For an Instagram account with 1,000 to 5,000 followers, the largest published study puts average audience growth at 22% over a year. At 10,000 to 50,000 it is 17.2%. At 50,000 to 100,000 it is 13.62%. Those are Socialinsider's figures, from 35 million posts across 447,613 pages.

Here is the problem with using them. Buffer measures the same thing per month and puts the 1,000 to 5,000 band at 2.5%, which compounds to 34.5% a year. Two real studies, same question, answers that differ by half again. Nobody prints the time unit next to the number, so the two get quoted side by side as though they were comparable.

The short version:

• 22% a year is the best single answer for a 1,000 to 5,000 account, and it falls with every tier above that. The table is below.
• Always ask "per what?" A growth rate with no time unit attached is not a number you can use. Weekly, monthly and yearly figures circulate in the same paragraph.
• Annualise by compounding, not by multiplying. 1.5% a month is 19.6% a year, not 18%.
• Your percentage falls as you grow, and that is arithmetic, not failure. 100 new followers is 10% at 1,000 followers and 0.1% at 100,000. Same work, one tenth of one percent.
• Instagram has never published a growth benchmark, and its API has no growth-rate metric at all. Every number you have read is a tool vendor measuring the accounts that happen to use it.
• If you did not write last month's follower count down, your growth rate is not slow to calculate. It is gone.

The two studies, side by side 📊

These are the only two datasets I could open at source that publish follower growth broken down by account size and state a sample size. Everything else on page one of Google either gives a number with no study behind it, or reprints one of these two with the time unit stripped off.

| Followers | Socialinsider, per year | Buffer, per month | Buffer, compounded to a year | |---|---|---|---| | Under 1,000 | not covered | 5.1% | 81.6% | | 1,000 to 5,000 | 22.00% | 2.5% | 34.5% | | 5,000 to 10,000 | 20.29% | 2.6% | 36.1% | | 10,000 to 50,000 | 17.20% | 2.3% | 31.4% | | 50,000 to 100,000 | 13.62% | 1.7% | 22.4% | | 100,000 to 500,000 | 11.25% (to 1M) | 2.2% | 29.8% | | 1M and up | not covered | 0.8% | 10.0% |

Socialinsider analysed "35M Instagram posts, collected from 447,613 pages with an active presence between January 2025 - December 2025". Buffer states "Data from 27 million+ Instagram posts from 273,000 accounts" and labels every figure "per month", but never says what period its data covers.

Two caveats that change how you read the Socialinsider column. It says of itself: "This study contains 2025 values, presented as 2026, because, at the time of publication, there wasn't enough data for analysis, with the year just starting." And it counts "pages" without specifying business accounts, creator accounts or both. Treat either column as one panel's answer, not as the answer.

The direction is the finding, not the number

The more useful thing in Socialinsider's table is the column next to the one everybody quotes. It carries the year before.

| Followers | 2024 | 2025 | Change | |---|---|---|---| | 1,000 to 5,000 | 38.00% | 22.00% | down 42% | | 5,000 to 10,000 | 35.00% | 20.29% | down 42% | | 10,000 to 50,000 | 33.80% | 17.20% | down 49% | | 50,000 to 100,000 | 30.00% | 13.62% | down 55% | | 100,000 to 1M | 27.00% | 11.25% | down 58% |

Growth roughly halved in a year across every band, and it fell hardest at the top. If your growth this year looks like a fraction of last year's and you have been doing the same work, you are not the only one, and the benchmark you are being measured against moved underneath you.

The formula, and the two mistakes people make with it

Socialinsider states it plainly: "The average follower growth rate is calculated as the number of followers you gained divided by the number of followers you started with and multiplied by 100."

So if you began the month on 12,400 and ended on 12,900, you gained 500, and 500 divided by 12,400 is 4.0% for that month.

Mistake one: annualising by multiplying. 4.0% a month is not 48% a year. Compounded twelve times it is 60.1%. Every month you grow, the denominator for the next month grows too. Multiplying understates a good year and flatters a bad one.

Mistake two: thinking that number is gross. It is not. Your follower count already has your unfollows subtracted out of it, so a start-and-end calculation gives you net growth whether you meant it to or not. Gross follows and unfollows are a separate pair, and Instagram does report both.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Two accounts can both post 4.0% for the month. One gained 500 and lost nobody. The other gained 1,900 and lost 1,400. Those are completely different accounts with an identical growth rate, and only one of them has a problem.

Why your growth rate falls even when nothing is wrong

This is the part almost nothing on page one of Google says out loud, and it is the single most important fact about the metric.

Growth rate is a fraction, and your follower count is the denominator. As the denominator grows, the same amount of work produces a smaller percentage. Not a smaller result. A smaller percentage.

| Your size | 100 new followers is | To hit 10% you need | |---|---|---| | 1,000 followers | 10% | 100 | | 10,000 followers | 1% | 1,000 | | 100,000 followers | 0.1% | 10,000 |

Nothing about the creator changed between those rows. Socialinsider's own commentary frames the slowdown as effort: "As your numbers climb, it naturally takes more creativity (and effort) to attract each new wave of followers." Some of it is. But a good part of it is division, and a creator who reads a falling percentage as a verdict on their content is reading arithmetic as failure.

The practical consequence: comparing this year's growth rate to last year's is not a fair comparison of your work, because you were smaller last year. Two comparisons survive the problem. Absolute net followers per week, which has no denominator to inflate. And your rate against accounts of your current size, which is what the tier table above is for.

What Instagram itself says, and what it does not

Instagram has never published a follower growth benchmark. Not on its creator blog, not in its help centre, not in its developer documentation. Every tier table in circulation, including the one above, is a tool vendor reporting on the accounts that connect to it, which makes them self-selected samples of people who use scheduling software rather than a random sample of Instagram.

The API is blunter still. Instagram's account insights reference documents fifteen metrics and not one is a growth rate. It does document follows and unfollows, described as "The number of accounts that followed you and the number of accounts that unfollowed you or left Instagram in the selected time period". It is "Not returned if the IG User has less than 100 followers", and the data "may be delayed up to 48 hours".

There is a trap in that description. Unfollows include accounts that "left Instagram", so deletions and deactivations land in the same bucket as people who chose to walk away. A spike in unfollows is not automatically a verdict on your content.

Instagram does say one thing about growth, in its creator FAQ, answering how many reels to post: "when we look at creators with the greatest net follower growth rates we see, on average, they post 10 or more reels per month." That is a correlation stated by the platform. It is not a benchmark and not a promise.

The number underneath the rate, and Instagram is predicting it

Growth rate is an outcome, measured afterwards. The number you can move is how many of the people who see a post go on to follow you, and Meta's own ranking documentation says it is watching that too.

Meta publishes system cards describing what its ranking models predict. For Explore, the first model listed predicts "How likely you are to follow the author of a post". For the reels served after the one you are watching, one prediction is "How likely you are to follow the author of a reel", and among the signals feeding it is "The amount of followers the author received through the reel".

So the Follows line in your reel insights is not a vanity number. It is the creator-side view of something Meta's recommendation system is estimating. A reel that reaches 40,000 and converts 60 is a different account from one that reaches 4,000 and converts 55, and a growth-rate percentage flattens both into the same figure.

Reach and follows are two different problems with two different fixes, which is why a reach drop is worth splitting before you act on it.

Common questions ❓

What is a good yearly Instagram business page growth rate? On the largest published dataset, 22% for a page with 1,000 to 5,000 followers, 17.2% at 10,000 to 50,000 and 13.62% at 50,000 to 100,000, measured across 2025. Expect it to be lower than most figures you find quoted, because many of those are monthly numbers being read as annual.

How do I calculate my Instagram growth rate? Followers gained divided by followers you started with, times 100. Pick the period first and label it. If you want a yearly figure from a monthly one, compound it: multiply the monthly rate by twelve and you will get the wrong answer.

Is 1% growth a month good? It depends entirely on your size, and 1% a month compounds to 12.7% a year. Against the tier table above that sits below average for an account under 10,000 and roughly at average once you are past 100,000. The percentage is doing a lot of work there, which is the whole point of this post.

Why did my growth rate drop when my follower count went up? Because your follower count is the denominator. Adding followers makes the next month's percentage smaller for the same number of new people. Check absolute net followers per week before you conclude anything.

Can I see my Instagram growth rate in the app? No. Instagram shows you followers gained and lost and a current follower count, but there is no growth-rate metric anywhere in the app or the API. Every rate you have seen was calculated by somebody from raw counts. Worth knowing if you are early: Instagram's help page says you can "View trends across your followers when you have at least 100 followers", so below that the panel is not there at all.

What to do this week

Write today's follower count down. Date it. That is the whole first step, and it is the one nobody takes.

Then open your follower insights. Instagram's help page describes what sits there as "Growth (number of followers you've gained or lost)", and it is the gained and the lost that are worth reading, not the difference between them. If the lost number is large next to the gained one, your growth rate is hiding churn that a single percentage will never show you.

Then pick one recent reel and read its Follows line against its reach. That ratio is the lever. The growth rate is the scoreboard.

Here is the catch, and it is why this post exists. Instagram's documentation states that "User Metrics data is stored for up to 90 days". Ninety days back is as far as the account-level numbers go, so the annual growth rate every benchmark table invites you to calculate is, for most creators, not slow to work out. It is not there any more. That is also why Instagram's 90-day window quietly breaks a media kit.

Junibloom takes a daily snapshot of your Instagram numbers from the official API and keeps the history, so the follower count from six months ago is still there when you need to work out what actually happened. Doors open soon.