How much karma do you need to post on Reddit?

There is no site-wide minimum — Reddit itself imposes none, and every threshold you hit is set by an individual subreddit. Of the 29 business subreddits we audited, only 3 publish a number: r/marketing wants 300 combined karma plus a 30-day-old account, r/shopify wants 20 post karma AND 20 comment karma separately, and r/sales wants 10 karma earned inside that subreddit specifically.

Does overall Reddit karma count?

Often not, and this is the most expensive misunderstanding. r/shopify requires post karma and comment karma to clear separate thresholds and states that these differ from your overall karma. r/sales counts only karma earned in r/sales. An account with tens of thousands of karma earned elsewhere fails both.

How do I know if my post was silently removed?

Open it in a private window while logged out, or check reddit.com/r/subreddit/new for your own post. Reddit shows removed content normally to its author, so a post can look live to you and be invisible to everyone else. This is how most people discover a karma gate — by not being told.

How long does it take to get enough karma?

For a genuine account, two to four weeks of ordinary commenting clears most published thresholds. r/marketing's 300 combined karma is the highest we found and is reachable in that window if you comment where you actually have expertise. Subreddit-specific requirements like r/sales are faster but only count in one place.

Is buying or farming Reddit karma worth it?

No, on both practical and rule grounds. Karma-farming is explicitly watched for — r/indiehackers names it in its rules — and purchased accounts fail the check that matters more than any threshold, which is a human reading your post history and seeing nothing relevant in it. The gate is not really the obstacle; the credibility it stands in for is.

Which subreddits have karma requirements?

We could only find 6 of 29 that publish one. That number is a floor rather than a total: most gates are enforced by AutoModerator and are not written in any rule, so the honest answer is that you cannot know in advance and should assume any active business subreddit has one.

Reddit Karma Requirements for Posting in Business Subreddits

By the RedditScout Team · Updated August 5, 2026 · 8 min read

The standard advice is "build up some karma first", which is useless because it implies there is a number. There is not. We read the published rules of 29 business subreddits: only 6 state a requirement at all, and the 3 that give figures want three completely different things — one of which your existing karma cannot satisfy no matter how much of it you have.

What we measured: the published rule list of 29 business subreddits, read in 5 August 2026. This counts only gates a subreddit chose to write down. Most karma and account-age thresholds are enforced silently by AutoModerator and appear in no rule anywhere — so treat 6 as a floor, not a total. That gap is the most useful thing on this page.

There is no site-wide number

Reddit imposes no minimum karma to post or comment. Every threshold you have ever hit was set by a subreddit's moderators and enforced by AutoModerator, which means the answer to "how much karma do I need" is genuinely different in every community — and in most of them, unpublished.

This matters because the failure is silent. You do not get an error. Your comment appears normally when you look at it, because Reddit shows removed content to its author, and it is invisible to everyone else. People spend weeks concluding their posts are being ignored.

The gates that are written down

Published karma and account-age gates in business subreddits
Subreddit	Type	Requirement	Detail
r/marketing	Stated threshold	30 days old + 300 combined karma	Applies to commenting as well as posting, so you cannot even build in-community history until you have cleared it elsewhere. Contributions below the threshold are removed automatically.
r/shopify	Stated threshold	30 days old + 20 post karma AND 20 comment karma	The important detail: it wants both types separately, and states plainly that these "are different than your overall karma". A 5,000-karma account with no post karma fails this.
r/sales	Stated threshold	10 karma earned inside r/sales	Subreddit-specific karma — ten upvotes on comments in that community. Karma earned anywhere else on Reddit counts for nothing, which is the rule most people are surprised by.
r/Entrepreneur	Participation gate	Must comment on others' posts first	No number at all — you must participate in other people's threads before posting your own. A gate on behaviour rather than score, and harder to game.
r/ecommerce	Discretionary	Low karma raises your risk	Not a gate on posting, but low-karma accounts with little history in the sub face bans at moderator discretion for content that a established account might survive.
r/indiehackers	Discretionary	Karma farming is watched for	The inverse concern — the rule exists to catch people building karma through the subreddit rather than to keep low-karma accounts out.

Rules read 5 August 2026. Full profiles for all 29 communities are in the subreddit directory; check any other with the free Subreddit Checker.

Three published numbers across 29 communities, and no two of them measure the same thing. That is the real state of it — not a ladder you climb once, but a set of unrelated local rules.

Why your karma may not count

Reddit tracks post karma and comment karma separately, and subreddits can require either, both, or karma earned only within themselves. Two of the three published gates exploit this, and it defeats the usual advice completely.

r/shopify wants 20 post karma and 20 comment karma, and its rule says explicitly that these "are different than your overall karma". Almost everyone building an account does it by commenting, because commenting is easier and safer. Those people arrive with plenty of comment karma and near-zero post karma, and fail.

r/sales wants 10 karma earned inside r/sales — ten upvotes on comments in that community. Karma from anywhere else on Reddit is worth nothing there. This is the cleanest version of what these gates are really for: not proving you are established somewhere, but proving you are established here.

Which gives the practical rule. Global karma is close to meaningless; in-community history is what counts. Ten thoughtful comments over two weeks in the subreddit you care about will do more than fifty thousand karma earned in r/aww, both for the automated filters and for the humans who check your profile before taking your recommendation seriously.

The gates nobody publishes

Only 6 of 29 subreddits publish anything. Far more enforce something.

AutoModerator rules are configured privately and are not visible in the public rule list, so a community can silently remove everything from accounts under 30 days, or under some karma figure, or with no prior comments in the subreddit, and publish nothing about it. There is no way to read this in advance. There is no API for it. You discover it by being removed.

So the correct assumption is the pessimistic one: assume every active business subreddit has a gate, and clear the strictest one you know about before you need any of them. An account over 30 days old with a few hundred comment karma and genuine history in three or four relevant communities clears essentially everything we have seen, published or not. That is a few weeks of ordinary participation, and the only way to have it on the day you need it is to have started weeks earlier.

This is the same conclusion the agency and indie hacker playbooks reach from different directions, and it is the least popular advice on this site because it cannot be shortcut.

How to tell you have been silently removed

Because removal is invisible to you, checking has to be deliberate. Three ways, in order of speed:

Open your post or comment in a private window, logged out. If it is not there, it has been removed. This is the fastest check and the one to run the first time you post in a new community.
Look at the subreddit's new feed rather than your profile. Your profile shows your content regardless of removal; the community feed shows what actually exists.
Check your comment's context link. A removed comment often shows as [removed] to anyone but you, and viewing it in the thread from a logged-out session makes that visible.

If you have been removed, the response is not to repost. Repeated attempts from a gated account read as evasion to the same filter that removed you. Comment normally in the community for a couple of weeks and try again.

Worth distinguishing from a shadowban, which is an account-level Reddit action rather than a subreddit filter — that, and how to check for it, is covered in Reddit marketing without getting banned.

Building karma that actually helps

The efficient version is not the fast version, but it is genuinely quick:

Comment where you already know things. Karma follows usefulness, and an expert answer in a small technical community reliably out-earns a generic one in a large subreddit.
Answer new posts, not popular ones. A thread with forty comments has had your answer written already. A thirty-minute-old question with none is where a good reply gets seen and upvoted.
Get some post karma deliberately. Given r/shopify's split requirement, a couple of genuinely useful non-promotional posts early on is worth more than the same effort spent commenting.
Concentrate on three or four communities rather than spreading thin. Subreddit-specific gates like r/sales only reward depth, and so do the humans.

Two to four weeks of this clears every published threshold in the table above. Start it while you are still building whatever you plan to talk about, not the week you want to launch.

Why farming and buying fail

Karma farming — reposting popular content, comment-fishing, asking for upvotes — is watched for. r/indiehackers names it in its rules; r/sales defines it and asks members to report it. It also produces exactly the profile that makes a human dismiss you: high karma, nothing relevant.

Buying an aged account fails for the same reason plus a worse one. The threshold was never the real gate. The real gate is the four seconds a reader spends on your profile deciding whether your recommendation is worth anything, and a purchased history is visibly not yours — wrong subreddits, wrong subjects, a gap where the account changed hands.

Reddit's spam enforcement also looks at account-level patterns, so a bought account carrying someone else's behaviour is a liability you cannot audit.

The honest summary: the karma requirement is a proxy for participation, and there is no way to satisfy the proxy that does not also satisfy the thing it stands for. Which is inconvenient, and is why the advice is always the same.

Spend the participation where it pays

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