What's a good LinkedIn acceptance rate? Benchmarks from 10,000+ B2B decision makers
If you run LinkedIn outreach, you've asked what a good LinkedIn acceptance rate is. Is 20% good? Is a 10% reply rate a problem or normal?
The honest answer is that it depends on who you contact and why. But averages help, so here are two sets of numbers side by side: the industry average, and what our team's intent-led programs produced over the last three months.
The industry average
The largest public dataset comes from Expandi, which analysed 13.2 million connection requests sent from 13,302 LinkedIn accounts between May 2025 and April 2026. Their averages:
- 28.5% connection acceptance rate
- 3.0% reply rate on the connection request itself
- 10.4% reply rate on follow-up messages
Top industries ran higher. Staffing and recruiting averaged 36.5% acceptance. Consumer electronics sat at the bottom with 17.5%.
What intent-led outreach produced
Across the B2B programs our team ran over the last three months:
| Metric | Combined | Program A (AI SaaS, 12 weeks) | Program B (B2B SaaS, 30 days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Decision makers reached | 10,251 | 8,656 | 1,595 |
| Connection acceptance | 33% | 34.9% | 23% |
| Reply rate (per conversation) | 34% | 33.2% | 40.4% |
| Replies that were interested | 45% | 46.5% | 37.3% |
A note on definitions, because benchmark posts often skip this. Our reply rate counts replies per conversation started with an accepted connection. That's closest to Expandi's 10.4% message reply rate, though the two aren't measured identically.
Why the gap?
Not better copywriting alone. The difference starts before the first message.
Most outreach starts with a list built from job titles and headcount. That tells you who could buy. It says nothing about who is ready now. Intent-led outreach flips the order: find the people already showing buying signals, then build the list from them, then write the message.
When someone has a reason to talk, three things change:
- More people accept. The request looks relevant, not random.
- More people reply. The message connects to something already on their mind.
- More replies are positive. Nearly half of all replies in our programs were interested, not "please remove me".
What a "good" number looks like
Use these ranges as a rough guide for B2B outreach to decision makers:
| Metric | Needs work | Average | Strong |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connection acceptance | Under 20% | 20 to 30% | Over 30% |
| Message reply rate | Under 8% | 8 to 15% | Over 20% |
| Interested share of replies | Under 15% | 15 to 30% | Over 35% |
If your acceptance is low, look at targeting and your profile first. If acceptance is fine but replies are low, look at the first message. If replies are fine but few are interested, you're reaching the right titles at the wrong time.
Week one is not the verdict
One more lesson from Program B. Acceptance in week one was around 10%. From week two it held near 25%, and weekly replies grew from 8 to 48 by week four. Targeting and messaging get sharper on live data, so judge a program on its first month, not its first week.