LinkedIn Outreach Benchmarks 2026: Acceptance, Reply, and Message Response Rates from 13.2M Outreach Attempts

Expandi analyzed 13,218,869 connection requests, 6,730,447 outbound messages, and 3,766,161 accepted connections sent through 13,302 active LinkedIn accounts between May 2025 and April 2026.

The platform-wide averages: 28.5% connection acceptance, 3.0% connection-note reply, 10.4% message reply.

But the platform average is the least useful number in this report. Every segment breakdown that follows shows wide variation behind it: Staffing & Recruiting hits 36.5% acceptance while Apparel & Fashion sits at 19.9%.

The cost of benchmarking against the wrong number is concrete: quotas get set against averages that don’t apply, campaigns get cut for “underperforming the benchmark” when they’re actually beating their segment, and coaching aims at the wrong variable while the data points to something else.

This is one of the largest publicly available LinkedIn outreach benchmarks from a single platform, with every metric broken down by sender industry, seniority, and company size.

What the platform-wide numbers say based on 13.2 million connection requests

Across all 13,302 active accounts on Expandi between May 2025 and April 2026, the platform-wide averages were:

These three rates are independent. Each has its own numerator and denominator, with no shared events.

Connection acceptance measures whether the request itself was accepted. Connection-request reply rate measures whether the connection note received a reply, separate from acceptance. Message reply rate measures whether outbound messages (including welcome messages, follow-ups, group messages, event messages, InMails, and emails) received replies.

For comparison:

• Cleverly cites 30–45% acceptance as the “healthy” range in its 2026 benchmark
• Belkins reported 26.4% in its 2025 study, a co-authored analysis across multiple platforms that included Expandi data

Expandi’s own research put the figure at 29.6% across 70,000+ campaigns. The 28.5% in this 12-month dataset sits within that 26–32% range, on a much larger sample.

But the platform average is the least useful number in this report. Every cohort breakdown that follows shows wide variation behind it.

Connection acceptance and reply rates by industry

TL;DR

Staffing & Recruiting leads at 36.5% acceptance.

Computer Software, the largest cohort on the platform, sits at 27.5%.

The full spread across 60+ industries with meaningful volume runs from 17.5% (Consumer Electronics) to 40.1% (Broadcast Media).

The top industries by volume, with all three rates:

Find the full 60+ industry breakdown in the appendix at the bottom of this page.

A few findings worth pulling out.

Staffing & Recruiting hits roughly 2x platform average on every metric. 36.5% acceptance, 6.6% connection-request reply, 18.9% message reply. This corroborates what Cleverly found on a separate dataset — Recruiting & Staffing leading all verticals at 18–25% reply rate. Two independent studies point at the same pattern: when the platform’s purpose and the use case align, the numbers move.

Computer Software is the biggest cohort and the worst converter among high-volume cohorts. Software accounts for 14% of all platform volume but lands in the lower half on both reply metrics: 2.8% connection-reply, 8.8% message-reply. The Belkins/Expandi 2025 study reported 4.77% reply rates for SaaS, the lowest of any vertical they measured. Two independent datasets show the same pattern. The cause isn’t isolable from sender-side data — plausible drivers include outreach saturation among software buyers, harder relevance screening from technical audiences, ICP-fit averaging down across the segment, or some combination. What the data does establish: acceptance rates in Software look fine on paper but hide a reply problem behind them.

VC & PE punches above its volume. 34.9% acceptance, 5.5% connection-reply, 11.0% message-reply. Investors connect at well above-average rates and respond at above-average rates. Worth noting if your ICP includes them.

Apparel & Fashion, Telecom, Facilities Services, and Media Production sit below platform average across the board. Apparel & Fashion (19.9% acceptance, 1.5% conn-reply, 7.1% msg-reply), Telecommunications (21.8%, 1.8%, 11.2%), Facilities Services (23.2%, 2.1%, 9.6%), Media Production (23.4%, 1.9%, 7.2%). These are sender industries, meaning when senders from these sectors run outreach, they hit lower numbers across all three metrics. The cause is harder to isolate from the data alone — it could be ICP-fit issues, profile signal, or audience overlap with low-response recipient segments.

Two industries look like outliers but lack the sample size to confirm it. Civil Engineering shows 39.9% acceptance and 25.5% message-reply across just 13 accounts. Broadcast Media shows 40.1% acceptance across 14 accounts. Both look like top performers, but the numbers are driven by a handful of high-volume users. Treat as directional, not definitive.

Sender seniority barely changes outcomes

Across 13,302 senders, every seniority bucket lands within a 3-point band on acceptance rate. C-Level senders sit at 29.4%. Junior/Entry senders sit at 26.3%. Director, VP, and Manager-level senders fall between.

The widest spread sits on connection-request reply rate, where Directors (3.5%) and Senior ICs (3.9%) outperform by roughly a point. A plausible read: a connection note from a named specialist (“Director of RevOps at [Company]”) often reads as more relevant than the same note from an anonymous founder.

The conventional wisdom that C-level senders perform better because of title weight doesn’t hold in this dataset. C-Level acceptance is 29.4%; Manager-level acceptance is 27.3%. The gap is 2.1 points across 6.5 million connection requests. Recipient seniority matters enormously when targeting. Sender seniority barely changes the result.

Company size doesn’t determine performance

82% of all Expandi outreach volume comes from companies with 200 or fewer employees. Across every company size bucket, acceptance rates run 26–29% and message reply rates run 9–11%. The data shows no meaningful pattern by headcount.

A 5-person startup achieves the same acceptance rate as a 10,000-person enterprise. There’s a 2–3 point dip in the 201–1,000 employee range on acceptance and message-reply rate, but it’s too small to act on for strategy purposes.

What changed in 12 months of monthly trends

Acceptance rate held stable at 28–30% across the year, with one dip to 25% in November 2025. Message reply rate held at 10–11%. Connection-request reply rate drifted from 3.5% (May 2025) to 2.2% (April 2026), a 37% relative decline.

Four observations.

Acceptance rate held stable. The 28–30% band held across eleven of twelve months. The single deviation, November 2025 at 25%, is worth flagging but not over-interpreting from a monthly view alone. Annual KPIs anchored at ~28–29% acceptance fit the data.

Connection-request reply rate is in a measurable decline. From 3.5% in May 2025 to 2.2% in April 2026. A 37% relative drop over twelve months is significant. Possible drivers include increasingly generic connection-note templates as more senders converge on similar phrasing, changes in how LinkedIn surfaces connection notes to recipients, or audience habituation. The dataset doesn’t isolate the cause, but the trend is consistent enough to plan around.

Message reply rate held flat at 10–11%. The conversation that happens after the connection is accepted shows no erosion. Message reply rates stayed within a stable 10–11% range across the year.

Volume grew without acceptance erosion. Monthly request volume rose from 1.11M (May 2025) to 1.25M (March–April 2026), about 13% growth. If the platform were saturating, acceptance rates would be expected to fall as overall outreach increased. They didn’t. The dataset doesn’t show saturation effects on acceptance over the period.

The connection-reply decline is the one finding that points to a clear strategy adjustment.

If your team relies on connection-note replies as a primary pipeline input, the input is shrinking. Warm-touch sequences — profile view, content engagement, then connect — counteract the trend by building familiarity before the request hits. [Smart Sequences](LINK: Smart Sequences feature page) is built around this structure.

What this means for your outreach strategy

Three takeaways the data supports.

1. Benchmark by your segment, not by the platform average. If your team is in Computer Software and hits 27% acceptance, you’re on benchmark for your industry. If your team is in Staffing & Recruiting and hits 27%, you’re 10 points below your peers. The 28.5% platform average is the wrong reference point for either team. Pull your industry row out of the table above and benchmark from there.

2. Stop optimizing variables that don’t change outcomes. Sender seniority and company size both fall in this category. The data shows a 2–3 point spread across every seniority bucket and every company size bucket. If your team is debating whether the CEO should send the requests, or whether enterprise outreach needs a different playbook than SMB outreach, the data says it won’t materially affect results. The variables that determine outcomes are upstream — who you target, what you say, when you reach them, and how the sequence is structured.

3. Plan for the connection-reply decline. Whatever caused the 3.5% → 2.2% drift over twelve months, the implication for outreach teams is the same: connection notes are returning less. Teams that rely on note replies as a pipeline input need a hedge. Two shifts make sense:

• Warm-touch sequences before the connection request. Profile view, content engagement, then connect. This raises the chance the recipient recognizes the sender’s name before deciding to accept.
• Post-connection messaging as the primary reply lever. Message reply rate held flat at 10.4% across the year.

Per-request, the two pathways are roughly even right now: at platform averages, 100 connection requests statistically correspond to about 3 connection-note replies and roughly 3 post-connection message replies over time (at the current 3.0% rate).

Once those 28 acceptances convert at 10.4%, another ~3 message replies. But only one of those pathways is stable. Connection-note replies dropped 37% over the year. Message replies didn’t move. The lever worth investing in is the one that isn’t shrinking, and that compounds when you run multi-step sequences against the accepted base, where the 10.4% applies to every touchpoint.

The Campaign Builder is the visual flow tool where these sequences get assembled — actions on one axis (profile view, post like, follow, connection request, message, follow-up, email) and conditions on the other (If connected, If visited your profile, If post liked, If email opened, and five others), with branches routing prospects based on what they do.

This is what Smart Sequences refers to: the conditional logic that reroutes a flow when prospect behavior doesn’t match a linear schedule. The warm-touch flow described above — profile view, then content engagement, then connect, then post-connection message — runs inside a single Builder campaign rather than three tools coordinated by hand.

Signals sits at the front of that flow. Instead of importing a cold list, the Signals action adds prospects to a campaign automatically when they visit your profile, visit your company page (both LinkedIn Premium / Sales Navigator-gated), or engage with a specified post. An ICP filter screens the inbound — wrong seniority, wrong industry, too small — before anyone enters the sequence.

The downstream message can then reference what the prospect actually did, which is the relevance lift that moves outcomes above the 10.4% baseline.

Try Expandi on your own outreach

These benchmarks come directly from Expandi’s platform.

The 13.2 million connection requests, 6.7 million outbound messages, and 3.7 million accepted connections in this report were all sent through Expandi accounts between May 2025 and April 2026.

Start a 7-day free trial and see where your outreach lands against the segment data above.

FAQs about LinkedIn outreach benchmarks

Methodology

All rates calculated from Expandi production data, May 1, 2025 through April 30, 2026.

Connection acceptance rate = accepted connections / total connection requests sent (including mobile and CSV-uploaded). Connection-request reply rate = replies to the connection-request note / total connection requests sent. Message reply rate = replies to outbound messages / total outbound messages sent. The three metrics are independent; they share no events between numerator and denominator. Coverage: 94% of volume has industry mapped; 6% is “Unknown” (sender account has no linked LinkedIn company).

This is a sender-side benchmark. It answers what outcomes users in a given industry, seniority, or company size segment achieve when running outreach on Expandi. It does not project performance by recipient industry, seniority, or size — that would require a contact-side analysis on a separate dataset.

Appendix: Full industry breakdown

The complete data across all industries with meaningful sample sizes. Industries with fewer than 10,000 connection requests in the period are aggregated into “All others” so totals reconcile to the platform headline.

Industry	Accounts	Conn. requests	Accept.	Conn-reply	Msg-reply
Computer Software	1,851	1,831,933	27.5%	2.8%	8.8%
Information Technology & Services	1,825	1,731,259	28.4%	2.6%	10.5%
Marketing & Advertising	1,115	1,038,187	29.4%	2.4%	10.6%
Management Consulting	976	1,029,342	28.0%	3.1%	9.2%
Professional Training & Coaching	471	806,144	27.4%	4.2%	8.6%
Unknown	1,054	791,741	28.9%	3.4%	10.5%
Financial Services	767	732,855	26.0%	2.2%	10.3%
Staffing & Recruiting	462	423,792	36.5%	6.6%	18.9%
Real Estate	253	277,414	28.4%	2.7%	11.8%
Human Resources	213	260,081	30.5%	4.2%	9.7%
Internet	330	248,164	28.2%	2.6%	10.0%
Design	118	148,589	31.3%	3.0%	10.5%
Accounting	113	138,854	29.5%	2.6%	12.0%
Hospital & Health Care	159	135,687	27.7%	3.4%	10.6%
Venture Capital & Private Equity	107	135,376	34.9%	5.5%	11.0%
Media Production	78	127,799	23.4%	1.9%	7.2%
Health, Wellness & Fitness	107	118,110	25.1%	2.5%	9.9%
Construction	119	117,715	26.9%	2.5%	11.4%
E-learning	98	110,003	28.4%	2.8%	7.4%
Computer & Network Security	140	107,864	26.0%	1.9%	10.7%
Transportation / Trucking / Railroad	83	103,286	28.6%	3.6%	10.9%
Logistics & Supply Chain	72	93,652	32.3%	3.4%	11.8%
Insurance	119	93,274	28.1%	2.4%	8.8%
Events Services	107	87,027	31.5%	2.3%	13.8%
Mechanical / Industrial Engineering	87	86,407	29.5%	2.3%	10.9%
Information Services	76	75,671	31.6%	2.7%	11.2%
Biotechnology	68	74,913	25.8%	2.9%	8.3%
Non-profit Organization Mgmt	83	73,905	29.7%	5.0%	8.0%
Facilities Services	46	72,265	23.2%	2.1%	9.6%
Retail	59	70,483	34.3%	3.2%	16.9%
Education Management	44	67,059	25.2%	5.3%	11.1%
Telecommunications	61	66,663	21.8%	1.8%	11.2%
Outsourcing / Offshoring	109	66,034	26.1%	2.2%	9.2%
Consumer Services	43	65,393	31.2%	4.2%	10.6%
Medical Device	55	63,946	26.3%	2.5%	8.9%
Electrical / Electronic Manufacturing	51	60,334	29.0%	2.9%	12.1%
Food & Beverages	63	60,269	27.5%	2.0%	13.9%
Renewables & Environment	64	53,569	26.3%	2.2%	12.5%
Machinery	56	52,233	26.8%	2.3%	9.0%
Writing & Editing	22	50,862	35.1%	7.1%	6.7%
Industrial Automation	42	48,800	31.2%	3.2%	9.6%
Sports	34	45,367	34.5%	3.2%	15.0%
Higher Education	57	44,617	26.4%	2.6%	11.6%
Consumer Goods	50	43,878	27.3%	2.5%	11.6%
Semiconductors	25	43,608	30.3%	0.7%	15.2%
Mental Health Care	43	42,252	26.9%	2.5%	15.7%
Oil & Energy	30	41,529	28.1%	4.1%	12.0%
Automotive	60	40,896	26.4%	2.9%	11.0%
Hospitality	42	40,474	28.0%	3.7%	14.5%
Environmental Services	44	39,158	25.0%	1.8%	11.3%
Apparel & Fashion	28	39,083	19.9%	1.5%	7.1%
Security & Investigations	42	35,992	31.4%	2.2%	15.0%
Entertainment	28	35,618	27.7%	2.4%	8.2%
Research	31	32,848	26.7%	2.9%	7.0%
Business Supplies & Equipment	36	31,784	28.9%	2.7%	12.6%
Packaging & Containers	34	31,599	25.7%	1.8%	16.8%
Law Practice	37	30,645	35.4%	2.4%	14.4%
Public Relations & Communications	29	30,271	34.3%	4.1%	11.0%
Investment Banking	35	29,296	29.9%	3.1%	10.2%
Government Administration	44	27,164	30.2%	4.8%	10.4%
Consumer Electronics	16	27,078	17.5%	2.5%	6.0%
Publishing	21	23,834	29.9%	4.0%	8.0%
Printing	24	23,596	31.2%	1.5%	10.9%
Architecture & Planning	27	23,540	23.9%	1.2%	14.4%
Online Media	24	23,111	34.4%	2.6%	11.1%
Market Research	34	23,018	26.9%	3.3%	11.1%
Wholesale	26	21,163	25.8%	2.9%	13.7%
International Trade & Development	23	20,491	27.3%	2.0%	12.5%
Legal Services	22	19,970	30.0%	2.7%	12.3%
Commercial Real Estate	26	19,431	23.0%	1.3%	12.6%
Chemicals	16	18,631	31.4%	3.0%	9.5%
Pharmaceuticals	30	18,243	31.1%	2.6%	17.4%
Public Safety	10	18,018	31.4%	2.7%	13.8%
Leisure, Travel & Tourism	22	17,855	30.4%	1.0%	19.1%
Think Tanks	19	16,894	32.7%	4.6%	10.5%
Investment Management	27	16,295	32.9%	4.6%	17.1%
Defense & Space	12	16,208	19.4%	1.7%	12.6%
Program Development	13	16,162	24.9%	0.7%	8.8%
Building Materials	13	16,028	23.9%	2.3%	15.6%
Food Production	12	15,358	27.4%	2.7%	15.1%
Fundraising	9	14,944	29.0%	0.9%	7.2%
Banking	24	14,516	27.1%	3.0%	15.6%
Utilities	20	13,916	27.5%	3.9%	12.5%
Medical Practice	8	12,461	20.3%	0.3%	18.5%
Computer Games	13	12,221	23.1%	1.6%	13.9%
Civil Engineering ⚠	13	12,108	39.9%	7.4%	25.5%
Maritime	7	11,168	24.6%	2.3%	7.6%
Cosmetics	8	10,447	24.7%	0.9%	17.1%
Broadcast Media ⚠	14	10,415	40.1%	4.2%	7.9%
All others (51 industries, <10K requests each)	274	208,716	29.9%	2.9%	10.8%
TOTAL	13,302	13,218,869	28.5%	3.0%	10.4%

⚠ Sample size too small (≤15 accounts) for the figures to be reliable; treat as directional.