LinkedIn Recruiter has a published price and a real price, and they live in different buildings. Recruiter Lite is listed at $170 a month, if you know which help page to open. Corporate, the tier that reaches the full network, shows no public number at all. We walked every rung from LinkedIn's own pages and did the math in the open, checked August 2026.
Recruiter Lite is the only LinkedIn Recruiter tier with a published price: $170 a month or $1,680 a year for one license, with licenses two through five at $270 a month or $2,670 a year each, capped at five seats online (checked August 2026). Those numbers sit on a help-center page; the marketing pages show "Try now for $0" and no price at all. Everything above Lite is quote-only. RPS, RPS+, and Recruiter Corporate each list "Contact our Sales team" where the price would go, and Corporate is the only rung that reaches the full network, on top of the bulk InMail and ATS integrations it shares with RPS and RPS+. This article walks the ladder from LinkedIn's own pages, derives the annual math openly, and flags every number that is ours. Disclosure: Metix AI publishes this page and sells against LinkedIn Recruiter, so hold our figures to the standard we hold theirs.
Go shopping for LinkedIn Recruiter and you can tour three official pages without meeting a dollar sign. The Recruiter Lite product page lists features and closes with "Try now for $0." The Recruiter page, the Corporate tier, explains that "LinkedIn Recruiter pricing varies based on your organization's needs, such as company size, number of Recruiter seats, and more," then routes you to a product consultant. The staffing page for RPS and RPS+ offers one call to action, "Contact sales." None of the three shows a number (all checked August 2026).
The numbers exist. They live on a help-center comparison page that prices Recruiter Lite in plain text and writes "Contact our Sales team" for the three tiers above it. That placement is a choice. A price on a marketing page anchors every negotiation that follows. A price on a support page answers a question from someone who already bought. When this article says checked August 2026, that help page and LinkedIn's other official pages are what we checked.
One method note before the figures. One of LinkedIn's own premium comparison pages renders with no prices until its scripts run, so every number below comes from a page that states it in plain text, and each section names its source. LinkedIn lists these as USD prices that vary by region. Where we derive a figure, say by multiplying a monthly rate by twelve, we label it derived, because a derivation is our arithmetic and not LinkedIn's price.
Recruiter Lite costs $170 a month for a single license, or $1,680 a year billed annually (checked August 2026). Adding recruiters costs more, not less. Licenses two through five run $270 a month each, or $2,670 a year each, so the first seat is the cheap one. An online subscription stops at five licenses total, one included and up to four purchased, and you can cancel at any time. Past five licenses the online store has nothing to sell you; every rung above Lite is sales-quoted.
What the seat buys is search and messaging inside your extended network. Lite reaches up to your third-degree connections with 20 or more search filters, and includes 30 InMail messages per month per license, with what the help center calls "the option to purchase up to 70." Search alerts cap at 10 per seat. Profile browsing caps at 2,000 unique profile views a day, a figure from LinkedIn's own Lite-versus-Recruiter comparison page, which reserves unlimited viewing for the full Recruiter tier. Two absences matter most at this rung: no bulk InMail, and no ATS integrations. Lite is a hand tool. LinkedIn is explicit that the power features live upstairs.
There is a message in the seat ladder worth decoding before you budget. Most software prices fall as seats are added; Lite's rise. The $170 first seat is the acquisition offer, and $270 is the running rate, so a team of three pays $710 a month rather than $510, a derivation from the published rates. If you expect the team to grow, budget from the $270 figure. That is the price every seat after the first actually carries.
The trial deserves its own paragraph, because it is built to convert. First-time subscribers may be eligible for one month of Recruiter Lite free. A credit card is required up front, and the trial converts into a paid subscription automatically unless you cancel at least one day before it expires. LinkedIn emails a reminder seven days ahead of expiry. Put your own reminder two days out. At $170 a month, a forgotten trial is the most expensive email you did not read.
LinkedIn publishes monthly and annual rates side by side and leaves the subtraction to you. Everything in this section is a derivation from those published rates, so treat the arithmetic as ours. A single Lite license billed monthly costs $2,040 over a year, twelve months at $170. The published annual price is $1,680. Annual billing saves $360 on the first seat, roughly 18 percent.
The gap widens on added seats. An add-on license billed monthly comes to $3,240 a year, against $2,670 billed annually, so the annual rate beats monthly by $570 per seat. At the five-license cap the numbers compound: one first license plus four add-ons is $1,250 a month, which is $15,000 a year billed monthly, against $12,360 billed annually. That is $2,640 a year for the convenience of paying monthly. A five-seat Lite subscription is a five-figure line item either way, and it still cannot send a bulk InMail or sync an ATS.
Two more derivations belong in a budget spreadsheet. A single annual Lite seat works out to about $4.60 a day across the year, $1,680 spread over 365 days. Per InMail, the monthly rate is about $5.70 an attempt if all 30 go out. Neither of those is a price. Both are what the price means at full utilization, and utilization is the variable LinkedIn does not bill for.
| License | Billed monthly | Billed annually | A year billed monthly (derived) | Annual saving (derived) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First license | $170/mo | $1,680/yr | $2,040 | $360 |
| Licenses 2-5, each | $270/mo | $2,670/yr | $3,240 | $570 |
| All five licenses | $1,250/mo | $12,360/yr | $15,000 | $2,640 |
Monthly and annual rates are LinkedIn's published prices from its help center, checked August 2026, USD, varying by region. The five-license row and the two right-hand columns are our arithmetic from those rates: twelve times the monthly price, and the difference against the annual price.
The next three rungs publish features and no prices. On LinkedIn's help-center grid, Recruiter Professional Services (RPS), RPS+, and Recruiter, the tier buyers call Corporate, each show "Contact our Sales team" in the row where a price would sit (checked August 2026). The Corporate product page says why: "LinkedIn Recruiter pricing varies based on your organization's needs, such as company size, number of Recruiter seats, and more." A price that varies by conversation is a price you negotiate. The Corporate page also offers no trial.
Quote-only pricing follows you past the first purchase. A published rate renews at a number anyone can check. A quoted rate renews at whatever the next conversation produces, and that conversation happens after your team has built its whole workflow inside the product, which is not the strongest chair to sit in. Buyers who know this negotiate multi-year terms at the start, while the leverage still points their way.
What the sales call sells is real. Corporate includes 150 InMail credits per seat per month and visibility across the full LinkedIn network instead of your third-degree connections. The rest of the upgrade is shared by all three quote-only rungs: 40 or more search filters, search alerts up to 50, bulk InMail to 25 recipients at once, and ATS integrations with 28 or more partners. RPS, aimed at staffing firms, includes 100 InMails a month and 30 out-of-network profile unlocks. RPS+ raises those to 140 and 50 and adds AI-assisted bulk personalization. Note that the ATS on the other end of those 28 integrations carries its own bill, and that market splits into published and quoted tiers the same way; our ATS pricing comparison walks it vendor by vendor.
Even LinkedIn's copy disagrees with itself about what the full network means. Its comparison page says Recruiter reaches 930 million or more professionals, while its main Recruiter page says more than a billion members, and both sentences are LinkedIn's own. As for what Corporate actually costs, buyers do talk. Our three-way comparison of Metix AI, LinkedIn Recruiter, and Juicebox discusses the quotes buyers report and treats them as reports, not prices. We will not repeat those figures here. They appear nowhere LinkedIn controls, and a number you cannot check against the vendor is a rumor with confident formatting.
| Lite | RPS | RPS+ | Corporate | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Published price | $170/mo or $1,680/yr | Contact sales | Contact sales | Contact sales |
| InMails per seat, monthly | 30, top-up to 70 | 100 | 140 | 150 |
| Network visibility | Up to 3rd degree | 3rd degree, plus 30 unlocks/mo | 3rd degree, plus 50 unlocks/mo | Full network |
| Search filters | 20+ | 40+ | 40+ | 40+ |
| Search alerts | Max 10 per seat | Max 50 | Max 50 | Max 50 |
| Bulk InMail | None | Up to 25 recipients | Up to 25, AI-assisted personalization | Up to 25 recipients |
| ATS integrations | None | 28+ partners | 28+ partners | 28+ partners |
Every cell from LinkedIn's help-center comparison page, checked August 2026. The three quote-only tiers publish features and no prices; "Contact sales" condenses LinkedIn's wording, "Contact our Sales team."
One more LinkedIn price is public, and it matters as a floor. Premium Business, the small-business tier, costs US$69.99 a month or US$539.88 a year, which LinkedIn labels "36% savings with annual billing" (checked August 2026). It includes 15 InMail credits a month, half of Lite's 30, plus unlimited people browsing and up to 365 days of who's-viewed-your-profile data. It is sold as a small-business tier, not a recruiting seat. But a founder whose entire recruiting motion is messaging a handful of candidates each month is buying InMail either way, and this is the cheapest official rate it comes at.
The line between the two published tiers is easy to draw. Premium Business buys presence plus a small messaging allowance. Lite buys a sourcing workflow: the 20-plus filters, the saved-search alerts, the 2,000-a-day viewing ceiling, and double the InMail. The roughly $100 a month between them, a derivation from the two published rates, is the price of turning browsing into recruiting. It cuts the other way too: if the 15 InMails sit unused every month, you are overpaying on whichever rung you hold.
Premium Business is also where LinkedIn attaches its most honest sentence about prices: "Prices listed above are estimates and may exclude Value-Added Tax (VAT), Goods & Services Tax (GST), and/or promotional discounts." Read every figure on this page with that disclaimer in mind. LinkedIn publishes regional rates for Premium Business too, £49.99 a month in the UK and €52.49 in the euro area for a single subscription, so the invoice depends on where you sit and what your tax authority adds on top.
Now walk the ladder again and read the meters instead of the prices. A seat meters access: it bills the same whether the recruiter sources daily or logs in twice. InMail meters attempts: 30, 100, 140, and 150 a month are counts of messages you may send, not replies you will get. The daily view cap meters browsing, and alerts meter saved searches. From Premium Business to Corporate, no meter on any rung moves when an interview gets booked or a role closes. The outcome is unmetered because the outcome is yours.
The number your finance team tracks lives outside all of these meters. SHRM's 2022 benchmarking research, the Talent Access report built on 2021 data, put average cost per hire at nearly $4,700, with a median of $1,244 in the same table, a spread that says a few expensive hires drag the average far above the typical one. A LinkedIn seat is one input to that figure, and the recruiter's time to work the seat is another. Our cost-per-hire breakdown assembles the full number component by component.
Our own meter runs the other way, and this is the paragraph where the publisher talks about itself, so read it that way. Metix AI plans cost $49, $89, $159, and $299 a month for 3, 12, 30, and 75 credits, where a credit is spent only on an interested, hire-ready candidate booked on your calendar. Annual billing takes 10 percent off. A month where nobody clears your bar spends nothing. The honest trade: per attempt, a Lite InMail is far cheaper than a credit, and a skilled sourcer can stretch one seat across many roles at once, so a staffed team may waste less of a seat than of a credit plan. What the credit removes is the distance between attempts and outcomes, the sourcing, outreach, and screening a seat hands back to you. The general argument between those two units is in per-candidate vs per-seat pricing, and the plan details live on our pricing page. Our delivery figures, first interviews inside 24 hours on 95 percent of roles and roles filling in about a week, are early numbers from the roles we have run, company-reported, the same label we put on LinkedIn's member counts. The more than 860 million profiles Mira searches are our own count, same label again.
At the entry rungs, the derivations line up like this. A year of Lite billed monthly is $2,040, a year of Lite billed annually is $1,680, and a year of Metix AI Starter billed monthly is $588. The first and third are derived from list prices; the middle one is LinkedIn's published annual rate. They buy different things: the first two buy a seat and 360 InMail attempts (also derived, twelve months of 30), the third buys up to 36 interview-ready candidates (derived the same way, twelve months of 3). Which purchase is cheaper depends entirely on which unit your team wastes less of.
If a recruiter works LinkedIn search every day, Lite at $170 is a defensible tool, and the annual rate is the right one the moment you know the seat will survive the year: $360 back on seat one, $570 on each seat after, both derived above. The failure mode is paying $2,040 across a year for a seat one quarter of hiring needed. Calendar the trial before it converts, and check the 30-InMail allowance against your real outreach volume before paying for the top-up.
If you need what Corporate meters, full-network reach, bulk InMail, ATS sync, you are in a sales conversation by design. Go in holding the help-center grid and the Lite arithmetic, because a quote lands differently when the buyer knows the only published rung is $170. Price the alternatives beside it too. Our round-up of LinkedIn Recruiter alternatives covers what startups move to when the seat stops fitting, and our 2026 pricing guide to AI recruiting tools puts LinkedIn's rates next to the rest of the market's published pages.
And if nobody on the team has hours to run a seat, a seat is the wrong purchase at any price. That includes ours, if what you actually want is an agency running the whole search by hand; agency fee vs software cost runs that comparison honestly. The rule that survives every rung is short. Know what the meter counts before you argue about the number on it.
The cheapest way to test any of this is a live role. Metix AI runs one as a free 14-day trial: 3 New Roles and 12 Credits, no card, and a credit is spent only when an interested, hire-ready candidate lands on your calendar. Compare what arrives against what a month of any seat produced. Then pay for whichever meter moved.
Recruiter Lite costs $170 a month or $1,680 a year for a single license, checked August 2026 on LinkedIn's help center. Licenses two through five cost $270 a month or $2,670 a year each, and an online subscription caps at five licenses. The marketing page itself shows no price, only "Try now for $0"; the numbers live on LinkedIn's help-center comparison page.
LinkedIn publishes no price for Recruiter Corporate, RPS, or RPS+. Its help-center grid lists "Contact our Sales team" for all three, and the Corporate product page says pricing varies with company size and the number of Recruiter seats, checked August 2026. Corporate includes 150 InMail credits per seat per month and full-network visibility, plus the 40 or more search filters, bulk InMail to 25 recipients, and integrations with 28 or more ATS partners that it shares with RPS and RPS+.
Recruiter Lite offers first-time subscribers a one-month free trial that requires a credit card and converts into a paid subscription automatically unless cancelled at least one day before it expires; LinkedIn emails a reminder seven days ahead. The Recruiter Corporate page offers no trial, checked August 2026.
Derived from LinkedIn's published rates, annual billing saves $360 a year on the first license ($1,680 against $2,040 billed monthly) and $570 a year on each additional license ($2,670 against $3,240). A full five-license subscription saves $2,640 a year on annual billing. The saving only lands if the seat is actually used all year.