Buy side · what advertisers pay
Instagram CPM
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith · updated July 2026
Benchmarks reviewed July 2026 · next review October 2026
The short answer
Gupta Media's Instagram tracker shows an $8.96 average CPM, retrieved July 2026, against $13.48 for Facebook on the same tracker. At that average, $1,000 buys about 111,607 impressions. Instagram runs on the same Meta auction; the discount is inventory supply, not a different pricing system.
Feed, Reels, Stories: what is citable
Meta does not publish placement-level rate cards, and we do not reprint third-party placement tables whose methodology we cannot date. What is structural and documented: Reels expanded Instagram's impression supply substantially, and in an auction more supply at steady demand means cheaper impressions. Your own placement breakdown in Ads Manager is the only placement-level number worth trusting for your account.
Cheaper or pricier than Facebook?
On the July 2026 tracker read, Instagram averages about $4.52 less per thousand than Facebook. That spread moves with format demand and season, and inside one Advantage+ campaign Meta allocates across both apps anyway. If you force a single-app test, judge it on cost per result; the cheaper impression is not automatically the better one (the verdict logic).
A starter budget here goes further than almost any major social channel with a published benchmark: the same $1,000 that buys 111,607 Instagram impressions buys about 29,586 on LinkedIn at its aggregated average.
Related: Facebook CPM, Facebook vs TikTok(Reels' direct rival), TikTok CPM, and the full rate table.