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Mailchimp contact limits: what counts, and what happens when you go over

Every Mailchimp plan has a contact limit. Which contacts count toward it, whether archived and cleaned ones do, and what happens when you pass it.

Ruth WilliamsCEO and Co-founder, acadion · · 4 min read
A contact counter bar nearly full with an alert, and more contacts waiting outside it

Every Mailchimp plan comes with a contact limit, and your price depends on which tier your count falls into. The limit isn't about how many people you email: it's about how many contacts sit in your audiences, including many you can't send to.

What counts toward the limit

  1. Counts: subscribed, unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts (the ones a store or an integration added without opt-in).
  2. Doesn't count: cleaned contacts (bounced addresses) and archived contacts.
  3. Counts more than once: the same email in several audiences, once per audience.

Do archived contacts count?

No. Archiving takes a contact out of your count while keeping its history, tags and purchases. That's why archiving is the standard way to get back under a limit: it's reversible, and an archived contact who signs up again or buys comes back on its own. More on that in archive vs. delete.

The Free plan limit

The Free plan caps both contacts and monthly sends at a small number. Once you pass the contact cap you can't send campaigns until you upgrade or archive enough contacts to get back under it. Mailchimp has changed these caps more than once, so check the current numbers on its pricing page.

Paid plans: what happens when you go over

On a paid plan you can keep sending, but Mailchimp charges for the extra contacts or moves you up to the next tier, depending on the plan. A few hundred contacts over the line can cost the price of a whole tier.

How many contacts can Mailchimp handle?

There's no practical maximum: the higher plans go into the hundreds of thousands of contacts and beyond. The question that matters is how many of them you should be paying for.

How to check your count

Your audience dashboard shows the contacts in each audience, and your account's billing page shows the total Mailchimp bills you for. Compare that number with how many people opened or clicked in the last year: the gap is what you're paying for silence.

Staying under the line

Archive unsubscribed and non-subscribed contacts you don't need, remove duplicate copies across audiences and archive people who haven't clicked or bought in a year. Do it every month, because a list grows back. acadion does exactly that on a schedule; a free audit shows how far under the line you'd land.

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