Reddit Karma Requirements, and Why the Numbers You've Read Are Probably Wrong

There is no sitewide karma minimum on Reddit. Each subreddit sets its own threshold in a private AutoModerator configuration, and most never publish it. That one fact explains why every "Reddit karma requirements" list you find disagrees with every other one — and why the number you were given for your subreddit is probably wrong.

One subreddit, four published answers

Here is r/Entrepreneur, as described by four different sources that all present their figures as fact:

Those span a factor of 500. At most one can be right. Three of the four sources never say how they arrived at their number, and the one that does — an export of the subreddit's actual AutoModerator configuration — reports the lowest figure by two orders of magnitude.

This is not a quirk of one subreddit. We checked the same sources against r/marketing (200 karma vs 100), r/productivity (200 vs 50), and r/saas (5 vs 100). The pattern holds everywhere the two overlap.

Where the numbers actually come from

The largest of these archives lists 91 subreddits. Seventy-five of those 91 rows are four templates repeated:

Real moderators do not coordinate. There is no mechanism by which 36 unrelated communities would independently land on an identical 25/10/50 split with an identical two-week age gate. The giveaway is internal contradiction: that archive labels r/javascript "Strict" and r/webdev "Moderate" while assigning them the exact same row.

The archive describes itself, in its own footer, as an "Unverified rules archive" and its figures as "unverified, directional estimates that may be incomplete or stale." That is honest of them. The problem is that the label does not survive being copied into a search result.

What can actually be measured

There is exactly one way to get a real threshold without observing an actual removal: export the subreddit's AutoModerator configuration. One tracker does this and refreshes monthly. It covers 31 communities, and of those only 8 publish an explicit minimum. The remaining 23 gate on unpublished heuristics or moderator judgement.

Those eight, with their age gates:

Eight out of thirty-one is the honest ceiling of what published data can tell you. Any list claiming to cover 91 subreddits with precise figures is filling the gap with something other than measurement.

Look up your subreddit

This tool returns every figure that has actually been published for a community, attributed, without averaging them together. Where sources disagree, you will see the disagreement rather than a blended number that matches no source.

The four things every source agrees on

Strip out the contested numbers and a small set of facts holds across all of them. These are the parts worth trusting.

• There is no sitewide minimum. Reddit itself does not gate posting on karma. Every restriction you hit is set per-community.
• Comment karma and post karma are separate counters, and rules name which one they want. A requirement reading "20 comment karma" cannot be satisfied with post karma no matter how much you have. This trips up more people than any other detail here, and it is the most common reason someone with plenty of karma still gets removed.
• Account age is checked independently. A 30-day-old account with 50 karma clears more gates than a 3-day-old account with 500. Age and karma are two separate tests, not one combined score.
• A handful of communities genuinely have no gate. These are consistent across every source we checked:

How to find your subreddit's real number

Since the published figures are unreliable, get the answer from the source. It takes one post attempt and about thirty seconds of reading.

1. Check the sidebar and wiki first. Some communities document their gates in a rules or wiki page. This is the fastest path when it exists, and it saves you the removal.
2. Post normally, then read the removal notice. AutoModerator's removal message usually names the specific requirement you failed — the karma figure, the age figure, or both. That message is authoritative in a way no third-party list can be.
3. If it vanished with no message, that is information too. Silent removal usually means an unpublished threshold or a manual moderator action. Treat that community as requiring a warmer account and come back in a few weeks.

One caution: do not test the same subreddit repeatedly from the same account. Repeated removals from one community read as spam behaviour and can escalate a temporary filter into an actual ban. Test once, then go build karma somewhere that will take you.

Why this page exists

We are building a karma-building tool, so we have an obvious interest in knowing what these gates actually are. We went looking for a reliable dataset and could not find one — every compiled list we checked either published no method or contradicted itself. So we are publishing what we can attribute, marking the rest as unknown, and saying plainly which is which.

That is also why the checker above sometimes tells you it does not know. A confident wrong number costs you a removed post and a strike against your account. An honest "nobody has published this" costs you thirty seconds.

Once you have cleared the gates, the bottleneck changes from permissions to volume. How to get karma on Reddit covers where to comment and what to avoid. If the writing itself is what is slowing you down, Karma Builder drafts replies you can edit before posting.

Nobody can hand you the exact karma number for an arbitrary subreddit, because most moderators never wrote it down publicly. Anyone who claims otherwise is guessing with confidence.