The most common subreddit rules, and a subreddit rules template built from them

The rules page is often used to repeat two rules: no spam, and respect and civility. Some communities use that stock pair, while others use a different list. I’m interested in what rules communities really settle on.

The rules were then categorized by type, which included categories like civility, spam, flair, and AI. The guiding question for this analysis was: what are the most commonly written rules across all subreddits?

What are the most common subreddit rules?

These are the main numbers, for the busier half of communities, meaning those with at least 43 posts per year to the subreddit. This is a median cutoff; it splits active subreddits into two groups of the same size.

The quieter half will be looked at later, and it looks very different.

Screenshot of reddit.com, captured Nov 15, 2026

What percentage of busier communities have each type of rule?

Civility rules lead these communities by a wide margin. Among subreddits with at least one rule and 43 or more posts per year to the subreddit, 76.3% have a civility rule, meaning that about three out of four such subreddits ask users to be civil and respectful to one another.

Spam and self-promotion bans are next most common, 66.0%, or about two out of three. On-topic rules follow closely behind at 62.3%. The order is a bit shaky here, as the two intervals overlap, and using a different way of counting would flip their order.

Try itYou can read any subreddit's rules word for word before you post there: Subreddits

Two of the top rules look like stock text

The two most common names for rules, by how many subreddits use them, are:

“No spam” appears in 79,065 subreddits, and “Respect others and be civil” appears in 70,165. These are probably not written individually by moderators, so the ranking of these two rules should be treated with suspicion.

I’ve called these “stock rules”, but I couldn’t find anything in the Reddit documentation to suggest that Reddit itself seeds new communities with them. However, I can say that the text and name of “No spam” are identical in 68,068 subreddits. Likewise, the civility rule is identical in 68,482. Each of these counts is about a third of all subreddits with rules. The rest of the same-named rules elsewhere have different descriptions.

The civility and spam figures are partially inflated because those rules are repeated word for word across tens of thousands of subreddits. They’re also rare in busier communities. In the “busier half” of communities only about 10.1% contain either stock rule verbatim.

It’s the clear winner for first place (68.0% of busier communities have a non-stock version of that rule). On-topic rules come in second (62.3%), narrowly ahead of spam rules (57.3%). The two intervals are so close together that they’re almost touching; I didn’t check the on-topic labels separately.

Which rules are more common in larger communities?

In the busier half, I divided communities into five equally sized groups based on the number of posts they had in a year. Then I compared the rules written by the busiest communities to the ones written by the quietest communities. Here’s how the quietest fifth compares to the busiest fifth, showing ten of the nineteen types:

You can see all of the nineteen types in the Method section.

Most kinds of rules are more common in the busiest fifth than the quietest.

After adjusting for the fact that there are many tests here, fourteen of the nineteen types still have a gap between the busiest and the quietest.

Buying and selling rules show some of the largest jumps from quietest to busiest. Repost bans are present in 15.3% of the quietest fifth but 39.0% of the busiest. The AI content rule shows up in 28.3% of the busiest fifth but only 12.0% of the quietest.

There are five types that show no gap after correcting for multiple comparisons, including civility. Civility is present in 80.3% of the quietest fifth and 75.7% of the busiest, making it indistinguishable between the two.

Flair needs to be taken with a grain of salt. There is a gap in the main count, but not under two of the other counting methods.

How many rules does a typical subreddit with rules have?

The typical subreddit with rules has 4, across all 215,251 with at least one rule and at least one post during the year, not just a sample. Busier communities tend to have more rules, and quieter ones fewer. The median number of rules is 5 in the busier half, and 2 in the quieter half.

Minimum karma and minimum account age are counted separately. They are considered requirements. They are counted under subreddit karma requirements.

Caution should be taken when interpreting the quieter half. It’s more likely that larger subreddits would be captured in a snapshot of rules, so the smaller ones that do show up here are simply those that happen to have had their rules collected. How often do both stock rules appear in each half?

In the quieter communities, around half have the default rule (55.7%), and the floor of the interval is a half. 45.7%, nearly half, have only the two defaults. Excluding those, the typical quiet community has just one rule.

The above makes small subreddits look strict, at least on civility and spam. Among subreddits that have a usable set of rules (at least one rule, fewer than 43 posts per year), 90.3% have a civility rule. If you exclude both stock texts, it falls to 38.3%.

Subreddit rules template: the wording Reddit communities use most

If you’re anyone drafting rules for a fresh community, or just trying to find out how to add subreddit rules, the most helpful offering I can give is the wording that other communities have already chosen. This isn’t a prescription about what rules ought to say, but if you’re looking for ideas, here’s the most frequent phrasing used across every community; the full list is available as a CSV.

After the top two, the entries are short and blunt. Here are some examples: Be respectful, Stay on topic, No NSFW, Be kind. I was surprised to learn that the exact name No AI spans more subreddits than the exact name No reposts, which I found unexpected.

The repost rules are more common in the busier half of subreddits, when grouped by wording.

Here are the commonest names for each type of rule, ordered by their appearance in the busier half of subreddits.

It’s also interesting to note that most of these rule names don’t have a single corresponding description; in fact, there are two particularly clear-cut cases where the same description is used verbatim:

There are rules in play on the busier subreddits, with at least 43 posts per year and civility requested by roughly three in four. Roughly two in three also ban spam or self-promotion. A similar share keep users on topic.

The busiest fifth of this group of sites (at least 43 posts per year) is much more likely than the quietest fifth to have rules about reposting content, selling things, and artificial intelligence. The small ones (fewer than 43 posts per year), however, still have some rules in place.

What rules should I look for next?

What this data can't tell you

Method

Planned before looking, and found while analysing

Conflict of interest: KissMyPost makes Reddit research tools. Funding: none.

Corrections: contact me; each fix gets a dated note on this page.

Questions people ask (FAQ)

The data

• CSVShare of subreddits by rule typeFor each of 19 rule types, the share of all subreddits with rules in the data (with 95% interval), of the busier half and of the quieter half.
• CSV30 most common rule namesNormalised rule names, the number of subreddits that use each, the share of all subreddits with rules, and the type.
• CSVMost common names by rule typeUp to three names for each type, taken from the 100 most common rule names overall, with the number of subreddits.
• CSVShared descriptionsThe description text that most subreddits with the same rule name share, for the most common rule names.
• CSVBusiest against quietest fifthShare with each rule type in the quietest and busiest fifth of the busier half, the difference and the Holm-adjusted p-value.
• CSVCoverage by sizeSubreddits with posts and the share whose rules were collected, by posts in the year.
• CSVOther ways of countingShare of all active subreddits with rules that have each of the top four rule types, under four ways of counting.
• PNGMain chart, 1600 × 1000The most common subreddit rules by type, as an image.

Zenodo DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24142081