The free route to an Instagram badge still exists, and Meta documents exactly four requirements for it. What qualifies, what does not, and what no guide can promise.
By Jules CarmauxMarketing tips
Quick answer
Yes, the free route still exists. You apply in the Instagram app and Meta reviews the account against four requirements: authentic, unique, complete and notable.
Notable stops most people. It means a well-known, highly searched-for person or brand, judged on multiple news sources, and Meta says paid or sponsored coverage does not count.
Meta Verified is the paid subscription: separate eligibility, an identity check and a review. Paying is not the same as being verified, and there is no free version of it.
Two routes to the badge, and only one of them is free
Meta documents exactly two ways to get a verified badge. They are different products with different rules.
Free application
Meta Verified
Cost
Free
Paid subscription, renews automatically
Who can apply
Public figures, celebrities and brands meeting four requirements
Anyone eligible: 18 or over, in an available country, with a government photo ID
Decides it
Meta's review of notability
Eligibility check, identity confirmation and review
If you are searching for a free version of Meta Verified, there is not one. The free badge and the subscription are separate things that happen to produce the same tick.
Click Analytic, from Instagram Help Centre, September 2026.
The four requirements Meta actually publishes
Not five, and not a checklist of growth tactics. Meta's requirements page lists four, on top of following the Terms of Use and Community Standards.
Requirement
What Meta says it means
Authentic
Represents a real person, registered business or entity
Unique
One account per person or business, with exceptions for language-specific accounts. General interest accounts are not verified
Complete
Public, with a bio and a profile photo, and active when you apply
Notable
A well-known, highly searched-for person, brand or entity, reviewed through multiple news sources
Click Analytic, from Instagram Help Centre, September 2026.
Three details inside those four decide most applications:
Paid coverage does not count. Meta states it does not consider paid or sponsored media content as sources for review. A placement you bought, a sponsored feature, a press release pushed through a wire: none of it is evidence of notability.
General interest accounts are excluded. Meta's own example is a meme account, @puppymemes. A page about a topic is not a person or a brand.
Set your username first. Once verified, you may not change it. That is a one-way door most guides do not mention.
There is no follower requirement. Meta publishes no threshold for either route, and an account with ten million followers and no press coverage does not satisfy notable.
The badge stopped meaning what most articles still say it means
This is the part that dates almost every guide on the subject, including the version of this page we are replacing.
Meta's own wording, on what a verified badge means: an account with a verified badge "now means that Instagram has confirmed that it is the authentic presence for that person or brand. Previously, the verified badge also required the person or brand to be notable and unique."
So the badge now certifies authenticity, not importance. Meta says plainly that it "is not a symbol to show importance, authority or subject matter expertise" and that it does not use it to endorse anyone.
The free application route still asks for notability. The badge itself no longer promises it, because subscribers get the same tick. Both things are true at once, and confusing them is why so much advice about "earning" a badge reads as out of date.
How to apply, and why you cannot do it from a computer
Meta's help page for requesting a badge says the feature "isn't available on computers". The application lives in the mobile app, which is worth knowing before you set aside an afternoon at a desk.
The steps are short. Open your profile, go to settings, find the account settings section and choose to request verification, then supply the name, the category and a photo of a government-issued ID. Meta asks for the ID to confirm the account represents who it claims to.
You can also add links to articles about you. This is where the notability requirement is actually decided, and where paid coverage is worth nothing.
What happens after you apply
You get a notification in Activity up to 30 days after applying, telling you whether the account was verified. Meta documents the rest of it too.
Two documented rules matter more than anything a guide can advise:
If the request is denied, you can submit a new one in 30 days. That interval is real, and it is Meta's, not a superstition.
Applying again before you get a decision cancels the application. Sending a second request while the first is under review does not increase your chances. It removes them.
What gets a badge taken away
Meta publishes the list, and it is the most useful scam warning on the subject because it is written by the company that removes the badges.
An account may lose its badge, or be disabled, for:
Advertising, transferring or selling the verified badge
Using the profile picture, bio or name section to promote services that violate the Community Standards or Terms of Use
Attempting to verify the account through a third party
Switching the account between public and private too many times
That third line is the whole answer to every message offering verification for a fee. Paying an agency or a "Meta insider" is not a shortcut with some risk attached. It is one of the documented reasons Meta takes the badge away, and a badge obtained with false or misleading information gets removed with the account potentially disabled alongside it.
Click Analytic, from Instagram Help Centre, September 2026.
What Meta Verified costs, and why nobody can quote you a price
Meta does not publish one. Its help pages say plans, benefits and availability "may vary by region, by app and by account" and direct you to start the subscription process to see what applies to you.
Any article giving you a firm monthly figure is quoting a number from one country at one moment. This page will not do that.
What Meta does document about the subscription:
It renews automatically until cancelled.
Subscribing starts an application with identity confirmation, so paying does not by itself produce a badge.
Benefits by plan include the badge, impersonation protection, enhanced support, links in Reels, and on the Premium plan personalised content strategy advice.
Eligibility: at least 18 or the age of majority where you live, located in a country where it is available, an eligible Instagram or Facebook account, and a government-issued photo ID.
Advanced Protection has to be turned on, and cannot be turned off while the subscription is active.
Recent changes to your profile name, picture, username, location or account type can make you ineligible. Meta caps how many you can make before applying and does not publish the number.
You can verify up to two profiles in the same Accounts Centre, one Instagram and one Facebook, sometimes at a discount.
Advice that is everywhere and is not in Meta's documentation
Every item below appears in guides on this subject, and none of it is a documented requirement. Some of it is actively harmful.
Common advice
What the documentation says
Reach 10,000 followers first
No follower threshold exists for either route
Get featured through a press outreach service
Paid and sponsored coverage is explicitly not considered
Create a Google Business Profile or a Wikipedia entry
Not a criterion
Post 3 to 5 times a week before applying
Not a criterion
Keep your settings unchanged for 30 days
Real in shape, invented in detail: Meta caps profile changes before applying but publishes no number
Remove purchased followers before you apply
Not a criterion, and no tool can remove another account's followers anyway
Use a service that gets you verified
A documented reason to have the badge removed
That sixth line was on this page until today, and it was wrong twice: Meta documents no follower criterion, and our own checker measures audience quality. It cannot delete anyone's followers, and neither can anything else you will be sold.
What people actually do, and what it cost them
Instagram granted the badge itself until August 2018, when it opened requests to everyone. Meta Verified arrived in February 2023, first in Australia and New Zealand. Between those two dates a market grew for getting the badge without meeting the bar, and it is documented well enough to learn from.
When
What happened
Before 2018
Instagram grants the badge itself, to public figures, celebrities and brands. There is no way to ask for it
August 2018
Requests open to everyone. The form asks for a government ID
2021
A paid operation is running that verifies clients by turning them into musicians
Our own reading: 41% of verified accounts sit below the 0.70 audience-credibility line, against 47% of unverified ones
Three of those eight moments are the badge losing meaning, and none of them are the reader's fault.
How many accounts actually carry one? Nobody outside Meta knows, and Meta does not publish it. The figure still quoted everywhere, 3.26%, comes from a HypeAuditor study of 6.5 million accounts above 1,000 followers, and it was published in 2020. That is three years before Meta Verified existed, so it counts a badge that meant something else and was obtainable another way. Any percentage older than February 2023 describes a different product. This page will not repeat one as if it were current, and the previous version of this page did.
In August 2022 ProPublica published an investigation into one operation that verified hundreds of people by turning them into musicians. Clients were jewellers, crypto entrepreneurs, OnlyFans models, reality television people. They typically paid $25,000, some over $100,000. The manufacturing kit was:
Looping-beat tracks uploaded to Spotify and Apple Music, with nonsense composer credits
Bought streams on those tracks
Paid articles placed in music publications
A fabricated Google Knowledge Panel identifying them as a musician
Bought likes and comments on Instagram
Meta removed fraudulently applied badges from more than 300 profiles.
Read that list again, because every line of it is still sold as legitimate advice. Buy the press. Build the Knowledge Panel. Warm up the engagement. The version of this page we replaced today recommended two of them. These are not clever shortcuts that quietly stopped working. They are the reason Meta's requirements page now says in writing that paid and sponsored media is not considered, and the reason "attempting to verify the account through a third party" sits on the removal list.
The badge did not survive that market intact. In April 2026 the Spanish fact-checking outlet Maldita published an investigation finding 170 blue-checkmark profiles that ran more than 67,000 fraudulent ads across Facebook and Instagram in Europe in the first quarter of 2026 alone, pushing unauthorised investment platforms. The accounts were hacked from their owners or impersonating athletes, politicians and actors. The tick was doing exactly the job the scammers needed it to do.
Our own read: the badge tells you almost nothing about the audience
We can measure this part rather than argue about it.
On 3 September 2026 we read a slice of our own database: Instagram accounts in three follower bands from 30,000 to one million, all active in the last 90 days, split on whether the account carries a badge.
Verified
Not verified
Median audience credibility
0.742
0.713
Median engagement rate
0.45%
0.29%
Below 0.70 audience credibility
41%
47%
Verified accounts come out very slightly ahead and nowhere near ahead enough to use as a filter. Two in five verified accounts sit below the 0.70 credibility line, against nearly half of unverified ones. A badge moves your odds by a few points. It does not tell you the audience is real.
This is a slice of our own database in fixed follower bands, not a random sample of Instagram. It describes what it describes. The direction is clear enough to act on: if you are paying a creator, the tick is not the check.
So what actually works
There is no method. There is a threshold.
The free route measures one thing that you do not control: whether independent journalists have written about you, in outlets Meta would review, without being paid to. Everything sold as a technique is an attempt to fake that measurement, and the documented attempts ended with the badges removed.
What you do control is short:
The links you submit. Real coverage, gathered before you open the form, not after.
The category you choose. The scheme above worked by picking a category that was easy to manufacture evidence for. Pick the one that is actually true.
Applying once. A second request before a decision cancels the first.
The username. It locks the moment you are verified.
Whether you want it at all. If the reason is credibility with brands, the numbers above say the badge is not what they should be reading.
If you are not notable yet
This is the most searched version of the question, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a workaround.
The free route requires notability. If nobody is writing about you in sources Meta would review, the free application is not open to you yet, and no amount of profile optimisation changes that. Meta reviews coverage, not effort.
That leaves three honest positions:
Earn coverage that Meta would count. Real editorial mentions in multiple outlets, not paid placements, not sponsored features, not a wire release. This is slow and it is the only thing the free route measures.
Use Meta Verified. It has no notability requirement. It costs money, it renews automatically, and it gives the same badge with impersonation protection attached. For most working creators this is the realistic route, and it is worth saying so.
Decide the badge is not the goal. It certifies that you are who you say you are. It does not tell a brand your audience is real, your engagement is genuine or your rate is fair, and those are the things that get a campaign signed.
What does not work: buying followers to look bigger, since there is no follower criterion; buying coverage, since paid media is excluded by name; and paying anyone who offers verification, since that is a documented reason to lose the badge.
The number that actually gets checked
A badge tells a brand the account is who it says it is. It says nothing about whether the audience is real, which is the thing a brand checks before it pays.
Our Instagram creator statistics say the same thing from the commercial end. 28.8% of the creators in that dataset already have a brand-deal history, and the highest concentration of those deals sits in the nano tier: the tier that will never clear Meta's notability bar. Meanwhile 862,200 creators clear the screen brands actually run, 90% or more real followers with at least 2% engagement. Neither number has anything to do with a badge.
Verified accounts sit on both sides of that line. If you are a creator, the audience quality is the number worth improving while you wait for notability to arrive, and you can read it on any public account with the free fake follower checker. If you are a brand, checking the audience matters more than checking the tick.
Yes. The free application route is open and separate from Meta Verified. You apply in the Instagram app and Meta reviews the account against four requirements: authentic, unique, complete and notable. There is no fee at any point.
None. Meta publishes no follower threshold for either route. Notability is judged on coverage in multiple news sources, and an account with millions of followers and no press coverage does not meet it.
Not through the free route, which requires the account to be a well-known, highly searched-for person or brand. Meta Verified has no notability requirement, but it is a paid subscription with its own eligibility rules, not a free alternative.
You get a notification in Activity up to 30 days after applying. If the request is denied you can submit a new one after 30 days, and applying again before a decision arrives cancels the application.
No. Meta Verified is a paid subscription that renews automatically. The free badge is a different route with different requirements, and it is not a trial or a discounted tier of the subscription.
No, and trying is dangerous. Attempting to verify an account through a third party is on Meta's published list of reasons a badge is removed, and a badge obtained with false or misleading information is removed with the account potentially disabled.
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