LinkedIn InMail Credits by Plan, and How Rollover Works
How many InMail credits each LinkedIn plan includes, the 45 and 150 accumulation caps, the 90-day expiry rule, and when a reply earns your credit back.
How many InMail credits does each LinkedIn plan include?
Premium Career gives you 5 a month. Premium Business gives 15. Sales Navigator Core gives 50, and Recruiter Lite gives 30. Full Recruiter licenses come with 150 each. LinkedIn does not sell an unlimited plan, and its own FAQ says so directly.
Credits also stack month to month up to a cap, which is the part most people miss when they compare plans.
| Plan | Credits per month | Accumulation cap | Worth knowing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Premium Career | 5 | Not published | Built for job seekers, not outbound |
| Premium Business | 15 | 45 | Three months of unsent credits |
| Sales Navigator Core | 50 | 150 | The usual sales choice |
| Recruiter Lite | 30 | Not published | Hiring, not selling |
The 45 and 150 caps are reported by Kondo's breakdown of the plans. Full Recruiter is a separate case. Each license ships with 150 InMails, more can be bought, and LinkedIn allows up to 1,000 InMails per day per seat. That daily ceiling exists nowhere else on the platform, and it is priced for staffing firms rather than a founder selling software.
Do InMail credits expire at the end of the month?
No. A new allotment arrives on the first day of your billing cycle, and unused credits roll forward until you hit your plan's cap. Individual credits expire 90 days after they are issued. So a Business subscriber who sends nothing for three months has 45 credits, and then starts losing the oldest ones.
If you are on Sales Navigator Core and have not sent an InMail since spring, check the balance before you plan around 50. You may have 150 sitting there, with the first 50 about to lapse. The number is under Premium features in the app, where LinkedIn shows InMail message credits available. Two months of deliberate saving on Business turns 15 messages into 45, which is one usable burst at a target account list rather than three thin ones.
Do you get the credit back if someone replies?
Yes. If the recipient responds within 90 days of the InMail being sent, LinkedIn returns the credit to your balance. A response counts whether the answer is yes, no, or not now. Returned credits still sit under the same cap, so a Business account cannot climb past 45 however well you write.
Here is what that does to your real sending volume. On Sales Navigator Core with 50 credits and a 20% response rate, 10 come back inside the quarter. You have sent 60 messages on 50 credits. At a 10% response rate you get 5 back and send 55. The gap between a good message and a weak one is five sends a month.
Why does Premium Career only give 5 InMail credits?
Because Career is priced for someone applying to jobs, not someone running outbound. Five messages a month is one recruiter or hiring manager a week. Subscribers on r/linkedin buy it expecting a sales tool, find the balance at zero by the fifth day, and call the allowance ridiculous.
If you bought Career and wanted to prospect, you bought the wrong plan. Sales Navigator Core is the one with 50 credits and the search filters that make them worth spending. If you bought Career to job hunt, 5 a month is roughly the right number, because sending 30 speculative InMails to hiring managers is not how most people get hired.
Can you buy extra InMail credits?
On Recruiter, yes. Each license ships with 150 and more can be purchased when a team runs out. For Premium Career, Premium Business and Sales Navigator, LinkedIn does not publish a standalone top-up in its help pages. On those plans the route to more credits is the next plan up, or waiting.
The ladder is small. Career to Business buys you 10 extra messages a month. Business to Sales Navigator Core buys you 35 more, and raises the ceiling on saved credits from 45 to 150. Neither step changes what you can do in a week.
The second route is to not send. A Sales Navigator subscriber who skips January and February starts March with 150 credits, enough to work a full target list in one pass. The third is replies, which return credits at whatever rate your messages earn. None of these gets you past 150, and if what you actually need is 400 messages a month, credits are the wrong thing to be buying.
What response rate should you expect from an InMail?
Published figures cluster between 10% and 25%. One benchmark puts InMail at 10-15% against 25-35% for messages to existing connections. Others report an 18% to 25% average against 3% for cold email, with anything over 25% treated as strong. Plan on 15% until your own numbers say otherwise.
Fifty InMails at 15% is 7 or 8 replies a month, and two or three of those are a polite no. Compare that to our own published LinkedIn benchmarks: connection requests accept at 20-30% and first messages to new connections reply at 12-18%. Per message, InMail holds up. The ceiling is the credit count, not the copy.
Your profile does a lot of that work, because an InMail is often the first time someone sees your name. If your headline is a job title and nothing else, the LinkedIn headline rewriter is a fifteen-minute fix that applies to every message you send afterwards.
Are 50 InMail credits enough to run outbound?
Not on their own. Fifty credits across 22 working days is 2.3 messages a day. Connection requests have no credit cost and a warm account can safely send 20 to 25 a day, which is 440 to 550 invites a month. That is roughly ten times the reach for zero credits.
Run our benchmarks across 500 invites. At a 20-30% accept rate you get 100 to 150 new connections. First messages to those people reply at 12-18%, follow-ups at 5-8%, and 3-5% of the original invites end up as meetings. That is 15 to 25 meetings a month.
Now run 50 InMails at 20%. Ten replies, some of them no. The credits are better spent on the twenty accounts you could not reach any other way: the VP with a closed profile, the buyer who ignores invites but reads their inbox, the person who declined a request in March.
Is there a free way to message people who are not connections?
Yes, and it does not touch your credits. LinkedIn's Open Profile setting lets anyone message that member for free, InMail balance untouched. Sales Navigator surfaces which profiles have it switched on, and on a list of 100 targets it is often 15 to 25 of them.
Filter for Open Profiles before you spend anything. On a 100-name list with 20 of them open, you have messaged 20 people for free, which on Premium Business is more than your entire monthly allowance of 15. Do that pass first and the 50 Sales Navigator credits go to the closed profiles that actually need them. We wrote the full method in how to spot a LinkedIn Open Profile and message it for free.
Should you buy Sales Navigator just for the credits?
If InMail is the only reason, no. Fifty messages a month will not fill a pipeline. Buy Sales Navigator for the search filters, the lead lists and the saved-search alerts, and treat the 50 credits as a monthly allowance for accounts you cannot reach any other way.
Two cases where the credits alone justify the spend. Recruiters filling roles, where Recruiter Lite's 30 and full Recruiter's 1,000 a day per seat are the actual job rather than a supplement to it. And anyone selling into a market of 200 companies total, where you will never need 500 invites a month and each message deserves 45 minutes of research.
Who should stop worrying about InMail credits entirely?
Anyone whose bottleneck is the 20 to 30 replies a month that 500 connection requests already generate, not the messages going out. If nobody is answering your inbox by Thursday, 50 more sends makes that worse. Fix the follow-up before you buy credits.
That is the gap Gelee fills. It runs LinkedIn outreach, answers replies in your voice, handles objections from your playbook and books the meeting, with setup taking about 15 minutes. There is no self-serve signup, so if you wanted to put a card in tonight and start at 9am, this is the wrong product and the cheapest LinkedIn automation tools are a better starting point. If you are weighing software against a first hire, AI SDR vs human SDR has the cost arithmetic worked through.