A follower count is the first number anyone looks at on an Instagram profile, and the assumption behind it is that it only goes up. We wanted to know whether that holds, so we read the public follower count of every account IGDataHub tracks, about once a day, for a month.
Between September 8 and October 8, 2026 we collected 131,982 exact readings for 4,467 accounts, a median of 30 readings each. More than half of the accounts (54.4%) had fewer followers at the end of the month than at the start. Among accounts with a million or more followers, it was more than two in three.
The bigger the account, the more likely it shrank
| Followers at the start | Accounts | Shrank | Grew | Lost more than 1% | Gained more than 1% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1M and up | 1,082 | 68.8% | 31.2% | 5.0% | 5.3% |
| 100K to 1M | 807 | 60.3% | 39.7% | 3.0% | 10.2% |
| 10K to 100K | 918 | 60.5% | 38.6% | 7.3% | 13.4% |
| Under 10K | 1,660 | 38.7% | 39.0% | 6.0% | 15.2% |
| All accounts | 4,467 | 54.4% | 37.1% | 5.5% | 11.5% |
For accounts over 100,000 followers, shrinking was the normal result, and the losses were small. The median million-plus account lost 0.12% of its followers over the month, and the middle half of them ended somewhere between 0.26% down and 0.07% up. Big swings in either direction were rare: about one big account in twenty lost more than 1%, and about one in twenty gained more than 1%.
Smaller accounts were more likely to grow, and also more likely to sit still. Of the accounts under 10,000 followers, 22.3% ended the month with exactly the follower count they started with, which often means an account nobody is finding and nobody is leaving.
Seven of the ten biggest accounts lost followers
The largest accounts on Instagram show the same pattern. These are the ten biggest that we track, with their first and last exact reading of the month:
| Account | First reading | Last reading | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Instagram (@instagram) | 686,462,460 | 686,569,340 | +106,880 |
| Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano) | 679,721,682 | 679,902,811 | +181,129 |
| Lionel Messi (@leomessi) | 517,089,337 | 517,299,299 | +209,962 |
| Selena Gomez (@selenagomez) | 403,541,015 | 402,848,801 | -692,214 |
| Dwayne Johnson (@therock) | 381,532,135 | 380,898,329 | -633,806 |
| Kylie Jenner (@kyliejenner) | 381,145,986 | 380,661,827 | -484,159 |
| Ariana Grande (@arianagrande) | 362,855,721 | 362,459,385 | -396,336 |
| Kim Kardashian (@kimkardashian) | 344,128,166 | 343,779,426 | -348,740 |
| Beyoncé (@beyonce) | 299,261,513 | 298,843,019 | -418,494 |
| Khloé Kardashian (@khloekardashian) | 291,823,710 | 291,447,471 | -376,239 |
Together the seven that shrank lost 3,349,988 followers in a month. That sounds dramatic, and in absolute terms it is: Selena Gomez alone lost more people than live in many cities. As a share of their audiences it is tiny, between 0.10% and 0.17% each. The three that grew, Instagram's own account and the two football players, grew by even less, about 0.02% to 0.04%.
A slow leak, not a purge
When an account loses followers, the usual suspicion is a clean-out: Instagram deleting fake or inactive accounts in one go. That would show up in our data as a single day on which many big accounts dropped at once.
We didn't see one. We compared each million-plus account's reading with its previous reading taken up to two days earlier and counted the accounts that fell by more than 0.3%. On a typical day that was 3 accounts out of roughly a thousand. The worst day of the month, September 29, had 27. Nothing in the month looked like a platform-wide removal.
The large accounts in the table above lost followers the way a tyre loses air. Kylie Jenner's count went from 381.15 million on September 8 to 381.08 million on September 13, 381.02 million on September 18, 380.94 million on September 24, and so on down to 380.66 million on October 8. Selena Gomez and Dwayne Johnson followed the same steady slope.
Sudden drops do happen to individual accounts. Of the 244 accounts that lost more than 1% during the month, 78 lost at least four-fifths of it between two consecutive readings. The other 166 lost it gradually.
Who grew fastest
Among accounts with a million or more followers, the two fastest growers were both Brazilian politicians: Flávio Bolsonaro (@flaviobolsonaro), up 2,042,190 or 17.7%, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (@lulaoficial), up 1,315,076 or 8.75%. This was the month of Brazil's general election, whose first round was held on Sunday, October 4. Lula's count shows how the growth bunched up around the vote: 15.44 million on September 29, 15.76 million on October 4 and 16.35 million on October 8.
Outside politics, the biggest gains in percentage terms were between 4% and 6.5%, for example Celine Dion (@celinedion, up 473,912, 4.1%) and the footballer Arda Güler (@ardaguler, up 729,105, 4.0%). Growth like that is the exception for an established account. Only 5.3% of million-plus accounts gained more than 1% in the month.
How to read an account's follower count
- Look at a month, not a day. Day-to-day changes on a big account are a few hundredths of a percent and mostly noise.
- Compare against the typical drift. For a million-plus account, losing about 0.1% a month is normal. Losing more than 1% in a month puts an account in the bottom 5% of its size group, and that is worth a question before you pay for a post.
- Check the shape. A single overnight drop can mean a clean-out of fake followers on that account. A steady slide usually means the audience is drifting away.
- Be careful with rounded counts. An Instagram profile shows "77.8M", not the exact figure, so a change smaller than 100,000 followers is invisible on the profile page.
- For small accounts, no movement at all can be a warning sign too. More than a fifth of the accounts under 10,000 followers didn't gain or lose a single follower in a month.
IGDataHub profile pages show the follower history we have recorded for each account, so you can check the trend yourself.
How we measured this
- Who: the 4,467 accounts IGDataHub tracks that had at least three exact readings spanning 21 days or more between September 8 and October 8, 2026. They are accounts people look up, so famous and large accounts are over-represented. This is not a random sample of Instagram.
- Why September 8: before that date our collector stored rounded counts for many large accounts, so we left the earlier period out rather than mix rounded and exact numbers.
- Exact readings only: we dropped 678 readings of 100,000 or more that were an exact multiple of 1,000, because they are rounded, not counted.
- Bad readings: we dropped 115 readings, across 18 accounts, that were more than 25% away from that account's median for the month. One we checked by hand turned out to be another account's data recorded under the wrong name.
- Change: each account's last exact reading compared with its first. Size groups use the first reading.
- Daily drops: a million-plus account counts as dropping on a day when its reading is more than 0.3% below its previous reading, taken no more than two days earlier.
Data: IGDataHub, public Instagram profile data collected September 8 to October 8, 2026. How every number on IGDataHub is calculated: methodology. Related: what is a normal Instagram engagement rate?