A paid message to someone you are not connected to.
That is the whole idea. LinkedIn normally lets you message your connections only. InMail is the feature you pay for to skip that step and land in a stranger's inbox, and every send costs you one credit from a monthly allowance.
Two things make this topic worth getting right. LinkedIn caps how many you get much lower than most people assume, and almost every article published on the subject gets the numbers wrong.
What an InMail is, and what it is not
An InMail arrives in the normal LinkedIn inbox, labelled as an InMail so the recipient knows it came from outside their network. It is not a different inbox, not an email, and not an ad. LinkedIn does sell a separate advertising product with a similar name, which is where some of the confusion comes from.
You cannot send one on a free account. LinkedIn is unambiguous about this: "If you have a Basic (free) account, then you can only directly message LinkedIn members that you're connected to. You must upgrade to a Premium account to use InMail messages."
InMail vs a regular LinkedIn message
A regular message goes to someone you are already connected to. It is free, unlimited, and it looks like any other conversation.
An InMail goes to someone you are not connected to, costs a credit, and is labelled. That is the entire difference, and it explains the pricing: you are not paying for a better message, you are paying to skip the connection request.
Which matters, because the connection request is free. More on that arithmetic at the end.
How many InMail credits each plan gives you
Here is the table, taken from LinkedIn's own help pages rather than from other articles:
| Plan | InMail credits per month | Rollover cap |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Career | 5 | 15 |
| Premium Business | 15 | 45 |
| Premium All-in-One | 30 | not published |
| Sales Navigator Core | 50 | 150 |
| Sales Navigator Advanced | 50 | 150 |
| Recruiter Lite | 30 per seat, plus 70 you can buy | 120 |
| Recruiter | 150 per license | purchasable |
Three corrections worth making, because these get repeated constantly:
Sales Navigator Advanced gives 50, not 150. LinkedIn states it plainly: "All Sales Navigator subscription types provide the same number of credits." Paying more for Advanced buys team features and CRM sync, not a bigger InMail allowance.
Recruiter gives 150 per license, not 450.
Premium All-in-One gives 30, and this one is a genuine mess on LinkedIn's side. The number appears on its plan comparison page but is missing entirely from the help article that lists every plan's allotment. If you are on that plan and went looking for your number in the obvious place, it is not there.
For what each of these subscriptions actually costs, we broke that down in the LinkedIn Premium pricing guide.
Can you get more credits?
On Premium, no. This is the flat answer to the most common question about InMail, and it surprises people: "It's not possible to purchase additional InMail message credits outside of the monthly allotment."
If you are on Premium Career with 5 credits, 5 is your ceiling for the month. There is no top-up button. The only way to send more is to move to a plan with a larger allowance.
Recruiter Lite is the exception. Each seat gets 30, and an admin can buy 70 more per month, with the total capped at 120 per seat when the billing cycle renews.
There is also one way to message a stranger without spending anything. If the recipient has Open Profile enabled, LinkedIn says "you can message them for free". The catch is that it depends on the recipient, not on you: Open Profile is a Premium feature, so only Premium members can turn it on. When it is on, anyone can reach them at no cost, and those messages do not touch your credit balance.
How credits actually work
When they reset
This trips up people who run both products. On Premium and Recruiter, credits renew "every month, on the first day of your billing cycle". On Sales Navigator they ignore your billing date entirely and renew "on the first day of every month, regardless of your billing cycle", in UTC.
So if you subscribed to Sales Navigator on the 20th, your credits still land on the 1st.
Whether they roll over
They do, up to the cap in the table above. Unused credits carry into the next month and stop accumulating once you hit the ceiling.
The rule of thumb you will read elsewhere is that you can bank three months' worth. That holds for Premium Career (5 into 15), Premium Business (15 into 45) and Sales Navigator (50 into 150). It breaks for Recruiter Lite, where 30 a month banks up to 120, which is four months.
LinkedIn also states in two places that credits expire after 90 days. It is worth knowing that its main credits page never mentions expiry at all, so treat the 90 days as real but poorly documented.
When you get one back
Send an InMail and the credit leaves your balance immediately. You get it back if the recipient responds within 90 days. LinkedIn's credits page defines that generously: "Every InMail message that is accepted/declined or responded to directly within 90 days of it being sent is credited back. A pending InMail message isn't counted as either accepted or declined."
A decline refunds you. Silence does not. On Sales Navigator, even an auto-reply refunds the credit, and in Recruiter a Quick Reply counts.
One warning: LinkedIn contradicts itself here. Three of its help articles describe the refund as happening on acceptance only, with no mention of declines or replies. The pages that spell out the full rule are the more detailed ones, but you should not be surprised if your balance behaves differently from what you were told.
Do not confuse that 90 day refund window with the 30 day window LinkedIn uses when it measures response rates. They are different clocks for different purposes.
What happens if you cancel
Your balance goes to zero. "Any InMail messages balance will become zero when a Premium subscription is canceled." Credits also do not move between plans: you "can't transfer InMail message credits from one Premium subscription to another".
So banking credits ahead of a cancellation achieves nothing, and switching plans starts you from scratch.
The character limit, and LinkedIn's own disagreement
The figure to work with is 200 characters for the subject and 1,900 for the body.
The honest version is that LinkedIn publishes two different numbers. One help article says 1,900 characters in the body, two others say 2,000. The same article calls the subject line "required" while the page walking you through sending one labels it "(optional)". These are not different products with different rules, they are the same feature documented inconsistently.
Write to 1,900 and the question never comes up.
Do InMails actually get replies?
Nobody knows, including the people quoting numbers at you.
LinkedIn has never published an average InMail response rate. Not one. Yet a large share of the articles ranking for this topic quote a specific figure, usually "2.6 times more likely to get a response than email", and attribute it to LinkedIn. That number appears on no LinkedIn page. Others quote average response rates of 18 to 25%, or open rates near 57%, with no source at all.
LinkedIn does make one claim of its own: "InMails drive 3X higher response rates than emails." The entire attribution is the phrase "data shows". No study, no date, no method. Treat it as a vendor claim, because that is what it is.
Two real numbers do exist. LinkedIn requires recruiters to "maintain an InMail response rate of at least 13% on 100 or more InMail messages sent within every 14-day assessment period", which tells you what LinkedIn considers unacceptably low. And its talent blog reports that InMails of 400 characters or fewer get responses "at a rate that's 22% higher than the global average", measured across tens of millions of messages between May 2023 and April 2024. That second one is a delta from an average LinkedIn declines to disclose, so it tells you short beats long and nothing more.
The practical takeaway survives the missing data: keep it short.
If you received an InMail
Half the people searching this topic are on the receiving end, so briefly.
An InMail is not spam by definition. It means the sender paid to reach you, which filters out the laziest outreach, and it usually means a recruiter or a salesperson who selected you deliberately. Whether it is worth your time depends entirely on the message, same as any other.
If you are not interested, declining is better than ignoring. It refunds the sender's credit, it closes the loop, and it takes one click.
The arithmetic nobody does
Put the numbers together and InMail stops looking like an outreach channel.
Premium Business gives you 15 messages a month and no way to buy more. Sales Navigator gives you 50, at around 99 $ a month. If your prospecting plan involves reaching 100 new people a month, InMail cannot do it on Premium at any price, and on Sales Navigator it covers half of that while costing you the subscription.
Now the free path. A connection request with a note costs nothing, and LinkedIn's weekly invitation ceiling sits around 100 for an established account, which is roughly 400 a month. Our connection request limit calculator will tell you where your own ceiling sits. The trade is real, not free money: an invitation can be ignored, and you only get a conversation if the person accepts. But it is 400 attempts against 50, at zero marginal cost, and an accepted invitation gives you a connection rather than a single message.
That is the honest comparison. InMail is what you pay for when you need to reach a specific person now and cannot wait to be accepted. Volume prospecting is what invitations are for.
The catch with invitations is that they are work. Finding the right people, writing a note worth accepting, following up after someone accepts, and doing it every week rather than the weeks you remember. That consistency is also what your social selling index measures, and it is where most prospecting quietly dies.
MyFeedIn's outreach campaigns run that path on a schedule. You build a prospect list from LinkedIn search, your feeds, or the people engaging with your competitors, then design a sequence: a connection request with a personalized note, then follow-up messages with delays between each step. It paces the sends so you stay under the weekly ceiling, and it stops the sequence for anyone who replies so you take the conversation over by hand. If you would rather write the note yourself first, the connection request generator will draft one.
No credits, no monthly allowance, no balance going to zero when you cancel.