Market
June 19, 2026 · Cifratar editorial team
Category: Market · Cifratar editorial team
Start with the subtraction. Of the three niches in the title, exactly two appear in any engagement-rate benchmark with a published method. There is no “Science” category — not in the vendor report everyone quotes, not in its competitors, not anywhere we could find. What circulates as a science or education benchmark is a Higher Education row measured on university brand accounts, and the specific number most often attached to it — 7.36% on TikTok — is one vendor’s figure from a report posted in February 2025, republished without its edition date on pages published in 2026 (Sprout Social’s April 2026 guide carries the February-2025 table under a bare “Source: RivalIQ”).
So this article does three things. It reproduces the niche numbers that do exist, cell by cell, from the one dataset whose method you can read. It shows why the same niche carries three different “engagement rates” depending on who measured it — because Instagram’s, TikTok’s and each vendor’s formula share a name and share neither numerator nor denominator. And it ends with the protocol for producing the only benchmark that will ever be true for your brand: your own.
Short answer for a marketer. On brand accounts, Food & Beverage runs slightly above the platform median, Financial Services below it, and Higher Ed several times above it — on both Instagram and TikTok. Those are ratios of interactions to followers, on corporate accounts, from a report dated February 2025. They are not creator rates, they are not 2026 rates, and they do not transfer between platforms. Anyone quoting you a niche ER without naming the platform, the account type, the denominator and the year is quoting a decoration.
New to the category? Start with the selection framework and what AI creators are; for the AI-versus-human version of this argument, see the comparison minus the numbers nobody can source.
The benchmark market is smaller than its output suggests. Three vendors publish cross-industry engagement data on public pages with a stated method; of those, exactly one measures the industry split itself; the second reprints it, the third does not publish one. The rest of the “2026 niche benchmark” corpus is that one table, relayed.
| Published, with a method you can read | Not published anywhere we could verify |
|---|---|
| Median ER per post by industry on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X — brand accounts (Rival IQ, 2025 edition) | Any ER benchmark for a Science or STEM niche, on any platform |
| Cross-platform ER averages with per-platform formulas (Socialinsider, January 2026) | Any niche-by-tier cut — “Food nano”, “Finance micro” — from a vendor that publishes its method |
| ER by creator tier, cross-niche (eMarketer, June 2025, relaying vendor studies) | Any creator-versus-brand ER gap measured inside a single niche |
| Each platform’s own definition of engagement and its denominator (TikTok Ads Manager, YouTube Analytics API) | Any official YouTube engagement rate — the metric does not exist in YouTube’s own analytics |
| Formula variants and their trade-offs (Sprout Social, April 2026) | Any 2026-dated niche ER measured on 2026 data |
The right-hand column is not a gap in our reading. It is what a category looks like when demand for benchmarks outruns the supply of measurement. Treat every confident niche figure — including from vendors we cite here, and including from us — as a claim with a page behind it or a claim without one.
Rival IQ’s benchmark report is the source almost every niche ER table traces back to. Its method is on the page: “We define engagement as measurable interaction on social media posts, including likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, and reactions. Engagement rate is calculated based on all these interactions divided by total follower count.” The sample: “a representative sample of organic and paid posts from national and international companies in each industry by selecting 150 companies at random from each industry in our database of over 200,000 companies”, aggregated as “median performance from the companies selected” (Rival IQ, 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, posted 25 February 2025, read 18.08.2026).
Editorial note — three things that method fixes, and one it does not. It fixes the denominator (followers), the statistic (median, not mean) and the population (companies, not creators). What it does not fix is the vintage: the same methodology paragraph states the selection criteria applied “as of January 2023”, and the report has carried the 2025 date since February 2025 without a successor edition appearing at that URL. Every “2026 niche benchmark” built on it is a 2025 publication quoting a 2023 selection date.
Our reading of the source charts, not a vendor summary. The report publishes its per-industry numbers as labelled charts rather than as text, so the table below was read off those charts directly — the all-industry Instagram, Facebook and TikTok engagement charts and each industry’s Overview card. Every cell is a median engagement rate per post, by follower, on brand accounts.
| Niche (as the report labels it) | Instagram, per post | TikTok, per video | Facebook, per post |
|---|---|---|---|
| Food & Beverage | 0.40% | 2.04% | 0.032% |
| Financial Services | 0.26% | 1.33% | 0.040% |
| Higher Ed | 2.10% | 7.36% | 0.126% |
| All-industry median | 0.36% | 1.73% | 0.046% |
All figures: Rival IQ 2025 Social Media Industry Benchmark Report, brand accounts, interactions divided by followers, read 18.08.2026. Instagram and TikTok values are from the all-industry engagement charts; the Facebook cells are from each industry’s Overview card, which carries three decimals.
On X, the same Overview cards give Food & Beverage 0.003% per tweet, Financial Services 0.025% and Higher Ed 0.036%. On X the all-industry median is 0.015%, so Food & Beverage sits below it while Financial Services and Higher Ed sit above — but the X sample is the one the report itself calls the year’s biggest faller (−48%), so we would not build a target on it (Rival IQ, X/Twitter engagement chart, “Engagement rate per tweet (by follower)”, read 18.08.2026).
The report’s own headline is direction, not level: “Every platform saw engagement rates fall—Facebook dropped 36%, Instagram 16%, TikTok 34%, but X took the biggest hit at 48%.” A niche sitting above the median in a year when the median fell has not necessarily grown.
Food & Beverage clears the all-industry median on both platforms that matter: 2.04% against 1.73% on TikTok, 0.40% against 0.36% on Instagram. Both gaps are real and both are small — on Instagram the niche beats the median by four hundredths of a percentage point.
Editorial opinion. That is the whole of what the benchmark tells you, and it is close to useless as a campaign KPI. Food is the category where the account type does the work: the sample brands the report names for this industry are mostly packaged-goods companies, and a packaged-goods Instagram account and a person filming a recipe in their kitchen are not the same product with different budgets. The report does not measure the second one, so the honest sentence is “Food brand accounts run marginally above the all-industry median for brand accounts” — which is not a sentence anyone puts in a deck.
Editorial opinion — what to measure instead. In Food, the interactions that predict a commercial outcome are the ones the benchmark’s numerator lumps together or ignores: saves (the reliable proxy for “I intend to cook this”), completion on Reels and TikTok, and the volume of user videos featuring the product. None of those appear in an interactions-over-followers ratio. If you are buying food content on ER per post alone, you are buying the metric that correlates least with the shelf.
Financial Services sits below the all-industry median on both platforms that carry the spend: 1.33% against 1.73% on TikTok, 0.26% against 0.36% on Instagram. On Facebook it is 0.040% against a 0.046% median — a gap of six thousandths of a percentage point, which is a difference we would not act on in either direction.
Editorial opinion. A finance audience that likes and comments less is a category trait, not a defect in the creator. Public interaction with a financial product carries a social cost that public interaction with a snack does not; a person researching a brokerage account has reasons not to announce it in a comment thread. The mechanism is plausible and we are marking it as reasoning, because we could not find a measurement of it.
Editorial note — the trap in this row. Because the finance number is low, it is the niche where an inflated one is easiest to sell. A media kit offering you a mid-single-digit percentage “for finance on TikTok” is quoting something — a per-view rate, a small-account rate, a single campaign, or nothing at all. Against the only published brand-account benchmark, that is several times the niche median, and the question that resolves it is not “is that good?” but “over what denominator, on what account size, in what month?”
Editorial opinion. For a regulated product the leading indicator is not engagement at all. It is the share of clicks that reach a completed application, and the share of applications that clear KYC. Those numbers live in your funnel, not in a vendor’s chart, and they are the reason a 1.33% niche can outbid a 7% one for the same slot.
(a negative one). We looked for a Science or STEM engagement benchmark in every source in this article. Rival IQ’s fourteen industries are Alcohol, Fashion, Financial Services, Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, Higher Education, Home Decor, Influencers, Media, Nonprofits, Retail, Sports Teams, Tech & Software and Travel — no science category. Socialinsider’s January 2026 report publishes no industry breakdown at all. Sprout Social’s public industry page gives Food & Beverage a posting-frequency figure and no engagement rate, and routes its financial-services data into a gated report. There is no science row to quote, and we are not going to invent a proxy corridor to fill the hole.
Editorial note — what “Higher Ed” actually is. The number that stands in for science content everywhere is Higher Ed’s, and it is genuinely striking: 7.36% on TikTok against a 1.73% median, 2.10% on Instagram against 0.36%. Read the sample, though. The brands the report names in this industry are universities and colleges — the accounts are institutional marketing for degree programmes, run for an audience of applicants, students and alumni. That is a community with a stake in the institution, which is a very good reason for the engagement to be high and a very poor reason to expect the same rate from a science creator explaining fluid dynamics to strangers.
On Instagram, Higher Ed and Sports Teams are the only two of the fourteen industries above 1% in that chart, at 2.10% and 1.30%; the next-highest row is Influencers at 0.58%. Whatever Higher Ed is measuring, it is not a property that generalises across the report.
Editorial opinion. So the useful statement about science content is a mechanism, not a rate: explanatory content promises a resolved question, which holds attention to the end and produces the expensive kind of comment — the clarifying one. That is an argument for the format. It is not a number, and a science creator who tells you their niche benchmark is 5–8% is quoting a corridor with no published source behind it.
“Engagement rate” is not one metric. Here are three definitions, all current, all authoritative in their own context, all incompatible.
| Source | Numerator | Denominator | What that makes it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rival IQ, 2025 report | likes, comments, favorites, retweets, shares, reactions | total follower count | Median per post across a company sample |
| Socialinsider, Instagram | “the sum of likes and comments on the post” | “the total number of followers that page has” | No saves, no shares in the numerator |
| Socialinsider, TikTok | “the sum of likes, comments, shares, and saves on the post” | “the total number of followers that page has” | Four interaction types, follower base |
| TikTok Ads Manager | “the number of interactions (likes, comments and shares)” | “the total number of video views” | Per view — no saves, and a denominator that grows with reach |
| YouTube Analytics | — | — | No engagement-rate metric exists |
Sources: Rival IQ; Socialinsider, 16 January 2026; TikTok Ads Manager help; YouTube Analytics API metrics. All read 18.08.2026.
The YouTube row is not an omission. The official metrics list documents views, likes, comments, shares, engagedViews, estimatedMinutesWatched, averageViewDuration and averageViewPercentage, among others — and no metric named engagementRate or anything equivalent. Every YouTube niche engagement rate you have ever been quoted was constructed by whoever quoted it, from a denominator they chose and did not state.
Editorial opinion — the practical consequence. Compare Socialinsider’s TikTok figure with Socialinsider’s Instagram figure and you are comparing a four-interaction numerator to a two-interaction one. Compare either with TikTok’s own engagement rate and you have also swapped the denominator from followers to views, which on a platform that routinely serves videos far beyond the follower base is not a rescale — it can invert the ranking. “TikTok gets 7× Instagram” is, in large part, this artefact wearing a headline.
Socialinsider’s own cross-platform averages, from 70 million posts published between January 2024 and December 2025: TikTok 2.50% → 3.70%, Instagram 0.50% → 0.48%, Facebook 0.15% → 0.15%, X 0.15% → 0.12% (2024 value → 2025 value, engagement by followers). Its live quarterly section, on the same page, reports TikTok at 2.70% and Instagram at 0.45% through the middle of 2026.
Editorial note. Rival IQ puts the TikTok median at 1.73%; Socialinsider reports a 3.70% average for an overlapping period. Neither is wrong — and they are not even the same statistic. Rival IQ measures 150 randomly selected companies per industry; Socialinsider measures an international brand sample of 70 million posts and counts saves in the TikTok numerator. Two defensible methods, a 2× spread, and a single sentence — “the TikTok benchmark is X%” — that is false in both directions depending on which one you meant.
Editorial note. This is not a hypothetical chain. Every step below is on a live page we read on 18 August 2026.
Editorial opinion. Step 4 is the one that costs money, because a re-dated benchmark is how a 2025 number ends up as the floor in a 2026 rate negotiation. The defence is mechanical and takes under a minute: open the cited page, find the number, read the date printed on the page rather than in the citation. In our own audit of this corpus, most quoted benchmarks failed the first part of that check: the number was not on the cited page at all.
Editorial opinion / our practice. Since the niche benchmark you need does not exist at the resolution you need it, the useful move is to produce a private one. It is cheap, it runs in a quarter, and it yields a number nobody can argue with — because it was measured on your audience, in your category, against your own baseline.
| Metric | Basis to fix before the test | Why it matters in these niches |
|---|---|---|
| Engagement rate | Per post, on your chosen denominator | The comparable, once the basis is fixed |
| Save rate | Per post, per format | The intent proxy in Food; ignored by every benchmark here |
| Completion / average view percentage | By format and length | The only quality signal on a views-denominator platform |
| Comment quality, hand-read on a sample | Fixed sample size per arm | Clarifying questions are the signal in Science and Finance |
| Downstream action (click, code, application) | Attributed the same way in both arms | The number that decides budget in Finance |
| Cost per published asset | All-in: fee, rights, production, internal hours | Makes the ratio comparable to money |
Editorial opinion. One quarter, two arms, one fixed denominator. That will beat every sourced number in this article for your specific decision, and it is the only version you will be able to defend when someone asks where it came from.
Editorial note. Earlier versions of this piece carried a thirty-row consolidated table spanning fourteen niches, four platforms and five creator tiers, with per-tier percentage pairs, YouTube long-form rates by follower band, a campaign case with a retail-velocity lift, and a virtual-influencer engagement figure. All of it is gone — from the body, the tables, the FAQ, the meta description, the social cards and the structured data.
The reason is uniform: we opened the pages those figures were attributed to and the figures were not there. Not different numbers — no such measurement on the page. A majority of the cited domains have since been marked in our own source registry as vendor pages presented as research, which is why this rewrite quotes five sources instead of twenty-five. Where a removed figure was our own — channel results, portfolio engagement, campaign economics — it stays out until the owner of those numbers signs the exact wording, because a first-party figure is the most checkable and most expensive kind of error a portfolio company of a listed group can publish.
There is no such thing as the engagement rate for a niche. There is one dataset that publishes niche medians for brand accounts with a readable method, dated February 2025: Food & Beverage slightly above the all-industry median, Financial Services slightly below it, Higher Ed several times above it, on Instagram and TikTok, measured as interactions over followers. There is no science benchmark we could locate. There is no niche-by-tier benchmark from anyone who states their method. And there are at least three incompatible definitions of the metric itself, one of which belongs to the platform whose data everyone is quoting.
That is a short list, and knowing exactly how short it is happens to be the most valuable thing you can carry into a negotiation — because the person quoting you a 6% niche benchmark is working from the same short list, plus a re-dated screenshot.
Next reads: how to choose a creator and a niche · the ER cases that survive a source check · AI creator vs human influencer · what an integration costs, line by line.
→ Browse the AI-creator catalogue · Discuss a campaign: advertise@cifratar.ai
There is no 2026 figure. The most recent benchmark with a published method puts Food & Beverage brand accounts at 0.40% per post on Instagram and 2.04% per video on TikTok, measured as interactions divided by followers, in a report posted in February 2025 — slightly above the all-industry medians of 0.36% and 1.73%. Those are corporate-account rates, not creator rates, and they say nothing about a specific tier.
Financial Services runs below the all-industry median on both platforms in Rival IQ’s February 2025 benchmark report (interactions over followers, brand accounts): 1.33% on TikTok against 1.73%, and 0.26% on Instagram against 0.36%. A plausible reading is that public interaction with a financial product carries a social cost that public interaction with a snack does not — we mark that as reasoning, because we could not find a measurement of it. Either way, the metric that decides budget in a regulated category is the share of clicks that reach a completed application, not the like count.
No. We checked every source in this article: the fourteen industries in the Rival IQ report contain no science or STEM category, Socialinsider’s 2026 report publishes no industry breakdown at all, and Sprout Social’s public industry page gives no engagement rate for it. Any science ER corridor you are quoted has no published source we could locate.
From Rival IQ’s report posted in February 2025, where it is the Higher Ed median engagement rate per TikTok video on brand accounts, against an all-industry median of 1.73%. The sample is universities and colleges — institutional accounts addressing applicants, students and alumni. It is republished without its edition date on pages published in 2026: Sprout Social’s April 2026 guide carries the February-2025 table under a bare “Source: RivalIQ”.
Not without converting them first, and usually not at all. Socialinsider’s Instagram rate counts likes and comments over followers; its TikTok rate counts likes, comments, shares and saves over followers; TikTok’s own engagement rate counts likes, comments and shares over video views. Different numerators and, in the platform’s case, a different denominator — so a cross-platform ratio is measuring the formula as much as the audience.
No. YouTube’s official analytics metrics list documents views, likes, comments, shares, engaged views, estimated minutes watched, average view duration and average view percentage, among others, and contains no metric named engagement rate. Every YouTube niche ER in circulation was constructed by whoever quoted it, from a denominator they chose and generally did not state.
Not visibly, in the one dataset that measures both. Rival IQ’s Influencers row (February 2025, engagement per post by follower) sits at 0.58% on Instagram — above the 0.36% median — and at 1.11% on TikTok, which is below the 1.73% median and below Food & Beverage. That row is not split by niche, so it cannot answer the question for food, finance or science specifically; nobody with a published method has.
Run two arms for a quarter against your own previous content, having fixed the denominator and the numerator in writing before you start, matching brief, format, window and posting slot across arms, and logging a downstream action attributed the same way in both. That produces a number that is defensible in your category, which no published niche benchmark currently is.
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