What is the X (Twitter) DM limit, and when does it reset?

X only put that smaller cap on its help page in the summer of 2026, so most pages that rank for this question are still guessing. If new chats suddenly stop going through while replies still send, you have almost certainly hit it.

Two limits, and only one stops cold DMs

The first limit is the one everyone quotes: 500 DMs a day across your whole account. Replies count, chats with friends count, everything counts. X set it at 500 in December 2022, and before that it was 1,000.

The second is much tighter. X calls a first message to someone who does not follow you a message request, and it caps those per 24 hours. Find your plan in the left column:

Replies do not count toward that cap, so a Premium account can open 35 new conversations a day and still answer everyone who writes back. What X does not do is warn you. There is no counter and no notice as you get close, and the first sign is a message that will not send.

That message usually comes with error 226, which reads like an accusation but mostly means the cap. In our 21 day study, to 1 September 2026, all 23 Premium accounts that stopped at exactly 35 got that error on the next try.

Both limits sit under the same rule. X says "You may not send unsolicited Direct Messages in a bulk or automated manner", and that covers every person and every tool sending cold DMs, ours included.

When does the X DM limit reset?

About 24 and a half hours after your first send. X's own wording is "in a 24-hour period", with no clock time, so the window rolls from your first message rather than from midnight.

On 26 September 2026 we checked 180 refusals and found X still counting a send from up to 30 minutes past 24 hours. In our earlier study of 30 accounts, retrying about once an hour, the next first message got through 24.7 to 27 hours after the batch began. Our DM limit study has the full counts.

So if you send your first cold DM at 9 in the morning, plan the next batch for about 10 the following day. Retrying a send that X already refused rarely helps. In our founder's workspace, in the week before 3 September 2026, 11 of 662 retries of refused leads went through.

Does X Premium raise the DM limit?

Yes, but only the cap on first messages. At $8 a month, Premium takes you from 7 a day to 35, and its blue check opens inboxes that only accept messages from verified users. Premium Plus, at $40 a month, raises the cap to 75.

Premium Business is the outlier. It allows 500 first messages a day and starts at $200 a month. It is also the only plan X says gets "significantly elevated" overall DM limits, though X names no number. X does not list the $3 Premium Basic plan in its cap table at all, so we cannot tell you what it gets. Our page on whether you need X Premium for cold DMs works through the costs.

Numbers you will see elsewhere

These are the guesses we found most often on 5 October 2026, on OpenTweet, XAutoDM, Businessho and Twittrz. Our X cold DM statistics page keeps the current numbers with sources. Compare the guesses with X's own words on the right:

How many X accounts do you need?

Plan around what an account really sends. A Premium account can start 35 chats a day, but on a typical day accounts on Xsender send about 28, roughly 850 a month. Divide your monthly target by 850, and how many X accounts to run for outreach does the rest of the sums.

More accounts do not mean more replies on their own. In Xreacher's study of 43.7 million DMs, solo senders got a 2.24% reply rate, against 0.39% for operations running 11 or more accounts. X's rule applies to every account you add, so read what can get an X account banned for cold DMs before you scale.

Xsender keeps each account under its own cap and times the next batch from that account's first send.

FAQ