How many subreddits are there?

Three numbers, three questions

"How many subreddits are there" has more than one answer, and most numbers you'll find online don't say which one they mean. Here are the three we can measure:

• Ever had a post: 7,844,766. Every community with at least one post since Reddit opened in 2005, including the ones that are banned, private or abandoned today.
• Active in a month: 388,172 in September 2026. A community counts if anyone posted or commented in it that month.
• Used regularly: 122,833 had 10 or more posts by people that month, and 44,374 had 100 or more. Posts by known bots don't count toward these.

For comparison, Reddit's own IPO filing (Form S-1, February 2024) spoke of "over 100,000 active communities" without saying what counts as active. Our closest measure, communities with 10 or more posts by people, was 110,339 in January 2024. For the largest and most active subreddits by name, see our top subreddits lists.

How many subreddits are active each month

Before 2008 only Reddit's staff could create subreddits, and there were 35 active in December 2007. In January 2008 Reddit started letting users create their own, and the count went to 211 that month. It grew almost every year after that, to a peak of 489,161 communities with a post or comment in July 2023.

Not all of that growth was people. The count went from 85,583 in September 2015 to 155,881 in February 2016 and back to 96,813 by April. Most of the extra communities had a few posts each, and many had names made of random letters or advertising live streams of sports games, which looks like spam. Over the same months, communities with 10 or more posts by people went from 24,889 to 29,700. Shorter jumps of the same kind came in August 2017, November 2019 and June 2021, which is why the line has spikes: many more communities with a few posts, while those with 10 or more posts by people barely changed.

Since that peak the number of active communities has gone down, to 388,172 in September 2026 (21% fewer). The busy ones held up. Communities with 100 or more posts by people went from 33,284 in July 2023 to 44,374 (33% more), and those with 10 or more from 126,991 to 122,833 (3% fewer). What shrank is the long tail: communities with a post but fewer than 10 posts by people went from 309,054 to 223,090.

The Reddit blackout of June 2023, when thousands of subreddits went private for a few days to protest Reddit's new charges for third-party apps, doesn't show up in monthly counts: most of those communities were posting again within the month. The highest month for communities with 10+ posts by people was May 2026 (130,381), and for 100+ posts August 2026 (45,661).

Is Reddit dying? People have said so for years

"Reddit is dead" is one of the oldest things people say on Reddit. We counted posts and comments with phrases like "Reddit is dead", "Reddit is dying", "this site is dying" and "RIP Reddit": 31,026 from January 2008 to September 2026, not counting known bots. Relative to how much people post, it has become rarer: 16.3 per 10 million posts and comments in 2012, 7.5 in 2025.

It comes in waves. The two biggest were July 2015 (111.8 per 10 million), when moderators took many large subreddits private after the firing of Reddit's AMA coordinator, and June 2023 (99.6), the blackout over Reddit's new charges for third-party apps. June 2023 also had the most such posts and comments of any month, 2,692. The next month, July 2023, Reddit had more active subreddits than in any month before or since: 489,161.

Over the years, how often people say it and how many subreddits are active have moved together slightly, not apart. Since 2012, months with more "Reddit is dead" posts had slightly more active subreddits, not fewer (correlation 0.38). Both grow with Reddit, so that says nothing about cause. It does say the prediction hasn't come true yet.

How many new subreddits appear each year

We count a subreddit as new in the year of its first post. By that measure 153,915 subreddits started in 2015, 586,638 in 2020 and 1,333,723 in 2023, the most of any year. In 2025 it was 833,732.

Most of them don't last. Of all 7,844,766 subreddits that ever had a post, 2,345,544 (30%) had exactly one, and only 1,858,998 ever reached 10. Of the 1,333,723 that started in 2023, 60,049 had a post between October 2025 and September 2026.

How many subreddits have 1 million members

In October 2026, 1,403 subreddits had a million members or more, 11,594 had between 100,000 and a million, and 42,949 between 10,000 and 100,000. Members are Reddit's own subscriber count, the number shown on each subreddit's page.

Only about 56,000 subreddits have 10,000 members or more, and about 142,000 have 1,000 or more. A subreddit with a few thousand members is already in the top few percent of those that have ever had a post.

How many subreddits are NSFW

Of the 388,172 communities active in September 2026, 64,606 were marked 18+ by their moderators (17%). All the counts in this article include them.

Why other numbers are different

• User profiles. Reddit accounts have a profile page they can post to, which works like a small subreddit named u_ plus the username. 597,151 of them had a post in September 2026, more than the communities. A count that includes them looks much bigger.
• Existing versus used. Abandoned subreddits stay on Reddit, so a count of every subreddit ever made keeps growing even while the number in use goes down.
• Empty subreddits. Some subreddits are created and never get a post. We can't see those, so our "ever had a post" number is lower than the number ever created.
• Old numbers. Many figures you'll find online are several years old, from before 2023, the year the most new subreddits appeared.

What this data can't tell you

• How many people read a subreddit. Activity here means posts and comments, and many people only read.
• Subreddits with no post at all, as above, and private subreddits after they went private: their posts aren't public.
• Bots. We leave out posts by accounts on our list of known bots when counting 10+ and 100+ posts. The list doesn't catch every bot, so a few automated communities still count.

Method

What counts as a subreddit

Every community on Reddit that had at least one public post, from June 2005 to September 2026, whatever its state today: public, restricted, private, banned or abandoned. User profile pages (u_ plus a username) are counted separately and left out of the totals.

Active, 10+ and 100+

A subreddit is active in a month if it got at least one post or comment that month (UTC). For "10+" and "100+" we count only posts, and only by accounts that aren't on our list of known bots. On the line chart each value sits at the end of its month.

"Reddit is dead"

Posts (title or text) and comments that say Reddit, "this site" or "this website" is dead or dying, or "RIP Reddit" and "the death of Reddit", by month. We leave out the phrase when "Reddit" names something smaller, such as one subreddit ("the rust reddit is dead"), an app ("Reddit is Fun") or a feature ("RIP Reddit DMs"). Two AI models read a random sample of 200 matches on their own: they agreed that 188 were about Reddit dying, and at least one of them said so for 192. Matches from known bot accounts (24,669, nearly all copies of one protest message in 2023) are left out. The rate divides by all posts and comments that month.

Members

The subscriber count Reddit shows on each subreddit's page, the latest value we recorded in October 2026 (through October 28). We record it regularly for the larger subreddits and less often for small ones.

Source

Public Reddit posts and comments back to 2005. All counts come from one set of queries run on October 28, 2026. We'll update this page as new months come in. If you spot a mistake, tell us and we'll fix it here with a dated note.

Questions people ask

The data

The monthly, yearly and size counts behind this article are in these files. They're free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; please credit KissMyPost and link to this page.

• CSVSubreddits active by month, June 2005 to September 2026Communities with a post or comment, with a post, with 10+ and 100+ posts by people, and user profile pages with a post, by month.
• CSVNew subreddits by year, 2005 to 2026Communities with a post each year, new communities (first post that year), and how many of those had a post in the last 12 months.
• CSVSubreddits by number of members, October 2026Count of subreddits in each member range, with how complete the count is for the large ranges.
• CSV"Reddit is dead" posts and comments by month, January 2008 to September 2026Posts and comments saying Reddit is dead or dying, and the rate per 10 million posts and comments, by month. Known bots excluded.
• PNG"Reddit is dead" chart, 1600 × 1000How often people say Reddit is dead, next to how many subreddits are active, as an image.
• PNGMain chart, 1600 × 1000The monthly chart on this page as an image.

This study uses the same data as KissMyPost, a Reddit analytics tool. It shows who writes in a subreddit, what kind of posts do well there and when, and lets you search posts back to 2005. The top subreddits lists rank the largest, fastest growing and most active ones every month.