X (Twitter) follow limits: 400 a day, then the 5,000 rule

400. X's page about following says every account can follow up to 400 accounts per day, and its limits page adds that the count includes actions from every device, the website, the apps and the API alike.

There's no hourly number. Follow too many accounts too quickly and X tells you to try again "in an hour or so". The hourly figures other guides quote, such as 50 an hour, aren't X's.

X doesn't say when that day starts: once you've used the 400, its page says only that you can follow more "after a day has passed". X also warns that it may lower its limits for a while when the site is under heavy use, and that it posts an update on its status site when it does.

Verified accounts don't get more, going by X's English pages. From April 2019 the follow-limit page let verified accounts follow 1,000 a day, and that line disappeared between 22 and 23 December 2022, with no announcement we could find. As of October 2026, X's pages in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Dutch and Japanese still carry it. They're old translations: the same languages' limits pages still show a posting limit the English page has since replaced.

Every account can follow 5,000 accounts. After that, X says, you may have to wait until you have more followers, and how many more you can follow is "automatically calculated based on your unique ratio of followers to following". X doesn't publish the ratio. Twitter's own example, back when the threshold was 2,000, was that you can't follow 10,000 people if only 100 people follow you.

It limits following, not followers. Nothing on X's pages caps how many people can follow you.

X's advice at the wall is to wait for more followers or to unfollow a few accounts. If you choose the second, start with the accounts that don't follow you back: our "Not following back" list shows them, biggest first. On Free it compares up to 4,000 accounts you follow, so at 5,000 you need a paid plan: Kong ($7.99/mo, for accounts under 5,000 followers) compares up to 10,000. We don't unfollow anyone for you.

X's follow-limit page gives four reasons for this message, and the message doesn't say which one you've hit.

A follow that won't go through on one account is a different case. X's help on following issues says that an error message when you tap Follow on someone's profile means they have blocked you from following them. More on that in how to know if someone blocked you. And an account with protected posts has to approve your request first.

"Client error" isn't one of X's follow messages. X's developer documentation uses the term for the errors an app gets back from X's API, so if you saw it, it most likely came from the app or tool you used.

Not a published one. No page in X's Help Center gives a number of unfollows per day. Its API documentation lists 50 follows and 50 unfollows every 15 minutes per account, but that's for developers, and since 20 April 2026 X no longer lets apps on its self-serve API plans follow or unfollow.

What X does forbid is unfollowing in bulk. Its rules name "follow churn", following and then unfollowing large numbers of accounts to inflate your own follower count, and they forbid apps that follow or unfollow in a bulk, aggressive or indiscriminate manner. The risks of mass-unfollow tools are in our guide to the accounts that don't follow you back.

Older guides still quote 2,000 and 1,000. Both were Twitter's limits once.

Twitter's reason in 2008 was that automated accounts had followed so many people that they "threatened the performance of the entire system". In 2019, Yoel Roth, then in charge of site integrity, explained the 400 in a thread: nearly half of the accounts that followed more than 400 a day were churning, which came to more than 20 million follows a day, and 99.87% of users wouldn't be affected by the lower limit.

Even the wording is old. X's limits page in 2026 says "The technical follow limit is 400 per day". In April 2010, Twitter's said "The technical follow limit is 1,000 per day".