Credits per plan
LinkedIn's help page InMail message credits and renewal process lists the monthly allotment for each paid product. These are the only official figures.
| Plan | Credits per month | Maximum you can hold |
|---|---|---|
| Premium Career | 5 | 15 |
| Premium Business | 15 | 45 |
| Recruiter Lite | 30 | 120 |
| Sales Navigator Core | 50 | 150 |
| Hiring Pro | 5 per job | not stated |
Two details from the same page matter more than the headline numbers. First, "You'll receive a new allotment of InMail message credits every month, on the first day of your billing cycle," so the refresh follows your billing date, not the calendar month. Second, "Premium InMail message credits can't be used to send InMail messages on Sales Navigator or LinkedIn Recruiter." If you hold both a Premium and a Sales Navigator subscription, you have two separate pools.
Rollover and the cap
Unused credits carry forward, but only to the maximum in the table, which in every case is three months of allotment. A Sales Navigator Core user who sends nothing for three months holds 150 credits; in the fourth month, no new credits are added until some are spent. The practical consequence is that hoarding has a ceiling, and a seat that goes quiet for a quarter is wasting its allotment from then on.
The refund rule
This is the rule most guides misstate. LinkedIn's wording: "Every InMail message that is accepted/declined or responded to directly within 90 days of it being sent is credited back."
Read it carefully. A decline returns the credit. An accept returns the credit. A direct response of any kind returns the credit. The only outcome that spends a credit permanently is 90 days of silence. That changes the economics: an InMail campaign with a 30% response rate of any kind, including people telling you no, costs 70 credits per 100 sent, not 100. A campaign that gets ignored costs the full amount.
It also means the quality of your targeting sets your real cost. A message that is relevant enough to earn a decline is cheaper than one that earns nothing.
The free alternative: Open Profile
Most people searching for InMail credits do not know that a large share of the people they want to reach can be messaged for free.
LinkedIn's help page Send an Open Profile message on LinkedIn states: "The Open Profile Premium feature allows members to contact a Premium member for free." Any Premium subscriber can turn Open Profile on, and when they have, anyone on LinkedIn can message them without a connection and without spending a credit. LinkedIn labels these messages with the words Free message in the message box, so you can tell before you send.
There is a limit. The same page says "We limit the number of Open Profile messages you can send in a given time period," and, as with invitations, LinkedIn does not publish the number. But for a prospect list heavy with Premium members, which describes most senior B2B audiences, Open Profile is the first thing to check before spending an InMail credit.
Reachium's campaigns can include an InMail step and detect which leads carry the Open Profile flag, so a sequence can route free messages to open profiles and reserve paid credits for the rest.
Three ways to reach someone without a credit
- Connect first. A first-degree connection can be messaged freely with no credit and no cap that LinkedIn publishes. The cost is the invitation, which has its own limits and its own acceptance economics; Reachium's data puts acceptance at 27.1% and shows a connection note raises the reply rate among accepters from 25.5% to 47.8%.
- Open Profile message. Free, no connection needed, labelled in the message box, subject to an unpublished rate limit.
- Shared group. Members of the same LinkedIn group can message each other without connecting. LinkedIn caps group admins at 50 new message requests a day to non-connections in their group, and says of everyone else only that it "may limit your ability to send messages to members you are not connected to."
InMail is the fourth option, and the right one when none of the above applies and the person is worth a credit.
What this page does not cover
Recruiter and Recruiter Lite have their own InMail documentation with separate sending caps per seat per day, published on LinkedIn's Recruiter help centre rather than the general one. Those figures are not repeated here because they apply to a different product with different rules; the link is in the sources if you run a Recruiter seat.