Medium Character Limit: Titles, Subtitles, Bios, and the Field With No Cap

Medium is one of the few major writing platforms where the field people care about most — the actual story — has no character limit at all. It's the fields around the story where things get less clear, and where a fair number of the numbers repeated online turn out to be practical conventions rather than hard technical caps.

The Story Body Has No Character Limit

This one is well corroborated and not in dispute: Medium places no hard cap on how long a published story can run. The editor supports rich formatting, embeds, and images regardless of length, and writers have published pieces of virtually any size without hitting a wall. The only practical constraint is reader attention, not the platform itself — which is part of why Medium markets itself around long-form writing rather than short bursts.

Titles and Subtitles: One Number Holds Up, One Doesn't

Several reference sites confidently list a 100–140 character limit on Medium story titles. In practice, that number is worth treating with real skepticism: Medium itself has published pieces on its own platform specifically to test this, including at least one story whose title runs to several hundred characters and was posted successfully, with no technical block stopping it. That doesn't mean an extremely long title is a good idea — practically, anything past roughly 60–70 characters gets cut off in feeds, search results, and social previews — but it does mean the "140-character limit" repeated across SEO reference sites appears to describe a recommended practical length, not something Medium's editor actually enforces.

A number repeated across enough reference sites starts to sound like a fact, but the only way to know whether a limit is actually enforced is to test it. For Medium's title field, testing it shows the opposite of what most sources claim.

The subtitle — the short line of text that appears under a story's title and in social previews — is more consistently documented at around 140 characters, cited independently by more than one source describing Medium's own interface behavior. This is a genuinely different field from the title itself, and from the separate SEO description discussed below; all three can be edited independently for the same story.

SEO Title and Description Are Their Own Fields — and Google Decides the Real Cutoff

Buried in Medium's story settings is a separate SEO Title and SEO Description pair, distinct from the headline and subtitle a reader sees on the page. Medium's own blog is direct about what happens to these: Google will truncate an SEO Title beyond roughly 60 characters in search results, regardless of how much text is actually entered into the field. The SEO Description works the same way in practice — Medium's interface accepts more text than Google will ever display, since Google typically cuts search snippets down to somewhere around 155–160 characters. This is the same truncation-by-search-engine pattern covered in more detail in the meta title and meta description posts — the input field and the field's real-world display limit are two different numbers, and Medium is a clean example of that gap.

Profile Bio and the About Page Are Also Two Different Fields

Medium separates a short profile bio — commonly cited around 160 characters, though this comes from third-party reference sites rather than Medium's own documentation — from a longer, more recently added About page that supports rich formatting, images, and (per Medium's own announcement of the feature) an increased character allowance over what it replaced. Medium's blog post introducing the expanded About page doesn't state the new exact number, so the honest answer here is that the short bio has a widely repeated approximate figure, and the About page has a documented increase without a documented specific ceiling.

Responses Have a Rate Limit, Not a Character Limit

Medium doesn't appear to publish a specific character cap on responses (comments) at all. What is documented — including in a story published by a Medium user who ran into it directly — is a rate limit: up to 100 responses within a 24-hour period, after which further responses are blocked until the window resets. That's a meaningfully different kind of restriction than a per-response character cap, and it's easy to conflate the two if a response gets rejected and the cause isn't obvious.

How Medium Compares to Other Blogging and Long-Form Platforms

Medium's "no limit on the actual writing" approach puts it in the same category as Substack, which was covered earlier in this series and also has no official post-length cap — though Substack's real-world constraint comes from Gmail's HTML clipping rather than from the platform itself, as detailed in the Substack character limit post. Medium's constraints, by contrast, sit almost entirely in the metadata around a story — title, subtitle, SEO fields, bio — rather than in the story itself. For anyone publishing the same piece to both platforms, or cross-posting from a personal blog, that distinction matters more than either platform's individual numbers: the story is safe either way, but the surrounding fields need separate attention. The broader character limits by platform overview covers how that same "the platform, not a fixed rule" pattern shows up elsewhere too.

What to Actually Check Before Publishing

Given how much of Medium's metadata relies on practical convention rather than an enforced cap, the safest approach is to write a title and subtitle short enough to survive feed and social truncation, keep the SEO Title under roughly 60 characters and the SEO Description under roughly 155, and treat the bio and About page length as flexible rather than fixed. The fastest way to check any of these against a real number before publishing is to paste the text into an actual counter. Clear Count gives an instant character count for a title, subtitle, or bio with nothing uploaded anywhere.

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Medium's honest answer is: the story itself has no limit, the subtitle has a reasonably well-documented ~140-character convention, and the widely repeated title limit doesn't survive an actual test. The fields that matter most for how a story is found and clicked — SEO title, SEO description, bio — are shaped less by Medium's own input caps than by what Google and social previews will actually display, which makes "how many characters can I use" a less useful question than "how many characters will actually show."