Data study · TikTok · June 20, 2026
We measured the engagement rate — likes + comments + shares + saves over views — on 4,509 TikTok videos across 13 niches. Education leads at 16.5%; Tech trails at 5.9% — 2.8× lower. The median video lands at 10.6%.
16.5%
mean engagement for Education — the highest of any niche, 2.8× Tech.
10.6%
median ER
13
niches
4,509
videos
Snapshot June 20, 2026 · videos with ≥10k views.
16.5%
Education posts the highest engagement of any niche — how-to content gets saved, and saves count.
2.8×
higher than Tech (5.9%), the lowest niche — even though tech clips rack up huge view counts.
10.6%
is the median rate across all 4,509videos — a quick “is my video doing OK?” benchmark.
4,509
videos measured across 13 niches (≥306each) — a far larger sample than most creator-tool charts.
Mean engagement rate per niche, ranked. The pattern isn't views — it's saves and replies: how-to, motivational and relationship content gets bookmarked and argued about, while tech, food and gaming clips get watched and scrolled past.
The same data as the chart, in plain HTML — copy-friendly and machine-readable for search engines and AI answer engines that can't parse a chart.
| Niche | Videos | Mean ER | Median ER |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education | 314 | 16.5% | 16.5% |
| Motivation | 368 | 15.5% | 15.5% |
| Comedy | 327 | 13.7% | 13.4% |
| Travel | 374 | 13.5% | 12.8% |
| Pets | 398 | 13.3% | 11.8% |
| Relationships | 344 | 13.2% | 12.9% |
| Fashion | 377 | 12.7% | 12.0% |
| Beauty | 386 | 10.5% | 9.4% |
| Fitness | 335 | 9.8% | 8.9% |
| Finance | 319 | 9.7% | 8.3% |
| Gaming | 306 | 9.1% | 8.1% |
| Food | 351 | 8.3% | 7.2% |
| Tech | 310 | 5.9% | 4.5% |
For each niche we sampled TikTok videos via Crawlora’s TikTok video-search API (three keywords per niche), kept those with ≥10,000 views, deduplicated each video to count once, and computed engagement rate = (likes + comments + shares + saves) / views per video. The figures above are the mean and median of those per-video rates within each niche, over 4,509 videos total.
Two honest caveats. This is a sample of videos that already perform (search-surfaced, 10k+ views), so read it as a benchmark for content that gets traction, not a random slice of all of TikTok. And because saves count toward engagement, save-heavy niches (education, motivation) rank higher than a likes-only metric would show.
Cite this
Crawlora (2026). TikTok Engagement Index. 4,509 videos across 13 niches; Education 16.47% to Tech 5.87% mean engagement. https://crawlora.net/tiktok-engagement-index.
Across this sample of videos with 10,000+ views, the median engagement rate is 10.6%, ranging from 16.5% (Education) down to 5.9% (Tech). Because every video here already cleared 10k views, treat it as a benchmark for content that's performing, not an average of every upload.
Education leads with a 16.5% mean engagement rate, ahead of Motivation (15.5%) and Comedy (13.7%). Save-heavy, how-to and emotional content engages hardest.
Tech has the lowest mean engagement rate at 5.9%, below Food (8.3%). These are niches people tend to watch passively rather than save or reply to.
Engagement rate = (likes + comments + shares + saves) / views, computed for each individual video, then averaged (mean and median) within each niche.
4,509 TikTok videos with at least 10,000 views, across 13 content niches (at least 306 videos per niche). All data was pulled from TikTok via Crawlora's TikTok API and is published as an open dataset under CC BY 4.0.
Yes. Crawlora's TikTok endpoints return video, profile, hashtag, search and trend data as structured JSON. This study was built entirely on those endpoints, and the full per-video dataset is open under CC BY 4.0.
Pull TikTok video, profile, hashtag, search and trend data as clean JSON through one REST API — no parsing, pay on success. This entire study runs on those endpoints.