What a subreddit member count tells you
A subreddit’s member count is the number of Reddit accounts that have joined that community. Joining puts the community’s posts in your home feed, but you don’t need to be a member to read, post or comment in most subreddits, so the count has always been a rough measure. Reddit itself says member totals “never fully reflected true engagement” and were often a measure of how old a subreddit was rather than how busy it is now [1].
That matters when you compare communities. A subreddit that was a default community in Reddit’s early years will have collected tens of millions of members who signed up once and never came back, while a newer subreddit with a fraction of the members can be far more active. Counts also include deleted and abandoned accounts, and one person can belong to as many communities as they like, so adding member counts together tells you nothing about how many people actually use them.
Which state subreddit has the most members?
When James Ellows gathered the figures for his map on 12 August 2024, r/texas was the largest state subreddit with about 630,000 members, followed by California (515,000), New Jersey (450,000), Michigan (411,000) and Ohio and North Carolina (410,000 each). Wyoming had the smallest, at about 35,000, with North Dakota (40,000) and Nebraska (55,000) just above it.
Across all 50 states, 12 state subreddits had more than 300,000 members and 17 had fewer than 100,000. Together they added up to about 9.8 million memberships (our sum of the map’s figures), though as above that is not the number of different people.
The map prints South Carolina’s figure as “185” without a unit. Its shading puts it between 114,000 and 200,000, so it means 185,000.
State subreddits relative to population
The raw numbers mostly follow population, with some clear exceptions. Dividing each count by the state’s 2024 population from the US Census Bureau [4] gives a better idea of how much each state’s subreddit is used, although members don’t have to live in the state and many are former residents, visitors or people planning a move.
| State | Members, Aug 2024 | Population, 2024 | Members per 100 residents |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vermont | 99,000 | 648,000 | 15.3 |
| Alaska | 98,000 | 740,000 | 13.2 |
| Hawaii | 137,000 | 1.45 million | 9.5 |
| Delaware | 97,000 | 1.05 million | 9.2 |
| Connecticut | 326,000 | 3.68 million | 8.9 |
| Texas | 630,000 | 31.3 million | 2.0 |
| Florida | 350,000 | 23.4 million | 1.5 |
| California | 515,000 | 39.4 million | 1.3 |
| New York | 80,000 | 19.9 million | 0.4 |
Member counts from the map by James Ellows; populations from Census Bureau Vintage 2024 estimates [4]; per 100 residents is our arithmetic.
Small states with a strong local identity punch well above their weight. Vermont’s subreddit had roughly one member for every seven residents, and Connecticut’s 326,000 members put it in the top ten by raw size despite the state having fewer people than Oklahoma or Kentucky. Texas, the biggest by count, sits in the middle once population is taken into account.
Why the New York subreddit is so small
New York is the obvious outlier. The fourth most populous state had only about 80,000 members in its state subreddit, fewer than Vermont or Alaska and less than a fifth of neighbouring New Jersey. The likely reason is that most New Yorkers who use Reddit go to city communities such as r/nyc instead, and upstate cities have their own subreddits too. The same thing happens elsewhere to a lesser degree: big cities like Chicago, Los Angeles and Houston have busy subreddits of their own, which takes some activity away from the state community.
So a state subreddit’s size reflects how people in that state organise themselves online as much as how many of them use Reddit. In states without one dominant city, the state subreddit tends to be the main local community.
Which subreddit has the most members overall?
The biggest subreddits are general interest communities that were once Reddit defaults, the set of subreddits new accounts were automatically subscribed to in the site’s earlier years. As of November 2026, a third-party counter reading Reddit’s data puts r/funny first with about 67.6 million members, followed by r/AskReddit (about 60.0 million), r/worldnews (47.7 million), r/gaming (47.4 million) and r/todayilearned (41.7 million) [3]. r/Music, r/aww, r/movies, r/memes and r/science complete the top ten, each with between 34 and 39 million members [3].
Those totals dwarf any state community. r/texas at its 2024 size was less than 1% of r/funny. They also show the problem with member counts: several of the largest subreddits get far less activity than smaller, newer communities, because so many of their members were added automatically years ago.
Can you still see a subreddit’s member count?
Not on Reddit’s own pages. On 9 September 2025 Reddit started replacing the member count on every subreddit with two new figures [1]:
- Visitors: how many different users visited the subreddit in the past seven days, based on a rolling 28-day average.
- Contributions: the number of posts and comments made in the past seven days that weren’t removed.
Member counts still exist behind the scenes, but only a community’s moderators can see them, and a Reddit admin has said the plan is to hide them altogether eventually [2]. Some third-party sites still read the member figure from Reddit’s data, which is where current numbers for the biggest subreddits come from [3]. That also means the state figures from August 2024 can’t be checked against Reddit’s public pages any more, and they will have grown since.
If you’re deciding whether a community is worth joining or posting in, the Visitors and Contributions figures are more useful than the old member count. A subreddit with a modest membership but thousands of weekly contributions is a better bet than a huge one where little gets posted.
Questions about subreddit member counts
What subreddit has the most members?
r/funny, with about 67.6 million members as of November 2026, followed by r/AskReddit with about 60 million [3].
How many subreddits are there?
Reddit doesn’t publish a running total. In its 2024 stock market filing it described having more than 100,000 active communities [5]. Far more have been created over the years, but most are small or inactive: in 2018 there were about 138,000 active subreddits out of roughly 1.2 million in total [6].
How do I see how many members a subreddit has?
Since September 2025 Reddit shows weekly Visitors and Contributions instead of a member count, and only moderators can see the member figure [1][2]. Third-party tracking sites still show member counts for many subreddits [3].
Which state subreddit has the fewest members?
r/wyoming, with about 35,000 members in August 2024, followed by North Dakota (40,000) and Nebraska (55,000). Relative to population, New York’s state subreddit was the smallest by a wide margin.
Why did Reddit remove member counts?
Reddit said member counts reflected a subreddit’s age more than its current activity, since you don’t need to join to post or comment. It wanted to show active participation instead [1].
Sources
- Reddit Inc, New Ways to See Community Activity on Reddit, 9 September 2025.
- PCMag, Reddit Swaps Subreddit Member Counts for Active Users, updated 10 September 2025.
- Livecounts.nl, Biggest subreddits by members, read 4 November 2026.
- US Census Bureau, State Population Totals, Vintage 2024.
- Reddit Inc, Form S-1 registration statement, February 2024.
- Wikipedia, Reddit.
Last reviewed 4 November 2026
