How to build karma on Reddit, and what CQS actually does

Karma is the gate a subreddit's moderators set. CQS is the gate Reddit sets above it, and it can override the first one in both directions. Neither number is published, and on 2026-09-21 Reddit says so in writing: specific karma and account-age thresholds "aren't disclosed at this time to deter potential misuse." What Reddit does publish is the full list of criteria and the five tiers, which is enough to plan against. The plan is not a karma target. It is a verified email, comments in communities you actually belong in, and reading the eligibility check before you write a post.

6 hours

between eligibility re-evaluations of your account

Poster Eligibility Guide

5 tiers

of CQS, Highest down to Lowest

Reddit, What is the CQS

7

criteria the eligibility check reads

Poster Eligibility Guide

403

for logged-out script reads of rules and profiles

probed 2026-09-21

Gate one belongs to the subreddit, not to Reddit

The Poster Eligibility Guide (retrieved 2026-09-21) is the modal you get when you tap Create a post in a community you do not yet qualify for. Reddit describes how it works in one sentence: it "uses automod configs to derive user eligibility", and "the evaluation updates every six hours". Communities cannot opt out of it. The criteria it reads, in Reddit's own list:

Two consequences, and both of them break the advice you normally read.

"Karma" is not one number. A community can gate on comment karma and ignore post karma. It can require karma earned inside itself, which no amount of karma from anywhere else satisfies. Reddit's own karma page puts the purpose plainly: "some communities require a certain amount of karma before allowing you to post there... This measure is taken to prevent spamming within the community."

The guide only blocks some of the rules. Reddit: "Posts are evaluated based on automod rules set to immediately remove the post... The Poster Eligibility Guide won't act on automod criteria with the action set to filter." So a moderator who chose filter over remove gets the quieter outcome: you submit, you see your post on your own profile, and the community never does.

The karma tables you find are guesses, and Reddit made them unverifiable

There are a lot of pages listing exact floors for r/SaaS, r/startups, r/Entrepreneur. They are someone's removal logs, or an account vendor's inventory pitch. None of them is a published rule, because no such rule is published.

We tried to read those rules the way a program would, today. https://www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/about/rules.json returns 403. So does the same path on api.reddit.com. old.reddit.com answers with a 302 to /login. This is not an accident or a rate limit: the Reddit Data API wiki (retrieved 2026-09-21) states the rule twice. "Clients must authenticate with a registered OAuth token. We can and will freely throttle or block unidentified Data API users." And: "Traffic not using OAuth or login credentials will be blocked, and the default rate limit will not apply."

So the check that works is the one Reddit built. Open the composer in the community you want, from the account you intend to post with, and read the eligibility panel. It names the criterion you fail, it reflects the moderators' current config within six hours, and it costs nothing. For a rough sense of scale while you build: helpers in r/NewToReddit, the community Reddit's own karma page points new users to, report typical floors of 10 to 200 karma and account-age minimums of 1, 3, 7 or 30 days. Practitioners report that; Reddit does not confirm it.

Gate two: the score nobody can see

Reddit's CQS page (retrieved 2026-09-21) is short enough to quote almost whole:

"CQS is a user classification that was established to identify potential spammers or redditors less likely to contribute positively on Reddit. Every account is assigned a CQS based on a host of signals including past actions taken on a redditor's account, network and location signals, and steps a redditor has taken to secure their account (e.g. email verification)."

Five tiers: Highest, High, Moderate, Low, Lowest. "Scores are updated regularly, and redditors have the ability to move up or down tiers based on their activity and/or behavior."

Then Reddit publishes the part that matters, as worked AutoMod examples moderators can copy. This one ignores karma entirely:

#Filter all posts posted by a user with "lowest" CQS, regardless of karma.
type: submission
author:
    contributor_quality: "= lowest"
action: filter
action_reason: "lowest CQS user"

And this one runs CQS as an exemption from a karma floor:

#Exclude "high" and "highest" CQS users from existing karma or account age minimums.
type: comment
author:
    combined_karma: "< 20"
    contributor_quality: "< high"
action: filter
action_reason: "karma minimum"

Read together, those two rules are the whole point. CQS is not one more check in the stack. It sits above the stack. A Lowest account is filtered whatever its karma; a High account walks through a floor that would stop a newer one. And unlike karma, you cannot watch it move: Reddit exposes it to moderators through AutoMod, and to you nowhere.

One thing we could not verify, and will not state: which tier a new account starts in. No Reddit-owned page says, and the third-party guides that give a number disagree with each other. Treat any confident answer to that question as a tell.

What moves it, on the record

And what pulls it down. Reddit's spam policy names "mass-posting repetitive content for the purpose of exposure or financial gain", "repeatedly posting or sharing old content for the purpose of rapidly gaining karma", and "link-masking or redirecting to harmful domains" - which is why practitioners treat every URL shortener as radioactive, and why we never put one in a Reddit post. Disrupting Communities covers the rest: "creating and employing multiple accounts, voting services, or any automation to manipulate vote counts", coordinated voting, "automated means to manipulate karma", and ban evasion. Those are sitewide-suspension behaviours, not tier adjustments.

The content policy compresses all of it into Rule 2: "Participate authentically in communities where you have a personal interest, and do not spam or engage in disruptive behaviors (including content manipulation)."

How to tell whether you are already filtered

Reddit publishes the symptom and the remedy in one article, "My account was flagged for spam or inauthentic activity": "If your posts, comments, chat messages, and profile page aren't showing up as expected, your account might've been flagged for spam or inauthentic activity." The instruction is to log in to the affected account and go to the appeals page.

For the tier itself, the one self-check is r/WhatIsMyCQS: you post, a bot replies with your tier. We loaded it on 2026-09-21 and the front page was ordinary accounts getting back "Low" and "Lowest", hours apart.

What does not work is any checker that promises to read your public profile from a server. Every one of those is describing an HTTP request that returns 403 today, and we measured it across three hosts and three user agents. A logged-out browser session still sees the truth; a script does not. That distinction is the whole of Reddit's answer in 2026, and we go through it platform by platform in what a shadowban actually is.

If you have one real account

This is the founder case, and it is a short list.

1. Verify the email today. One minute, named by Reddit, gates some communities on its own.
2. Spend the first week or two commenting, not posting. Pick three or four communities you would read anyway. Comment karma is the kind most commonly gated, and "past actions" is the CQS input you can actually influence.
3. Open the composer before you write anything. The eligibility panel tells you which criterion you fail in that specific community. Guessing costs you a removal, and removals compound.
4. One piece of content, one community. Repetition across communities is the shape Reddit's spam policy is written against, and our own publishing rule is one post to one subreddit for exactly that reason.
5. Keep the network boring. Same device, same connection. A rotating VPN is a signal the score is explicitly built to read.
6. Never put a shortened link in a post. Your domain is a reputation asset that takes months to build and one bad week to burn.

Nothing here is fast, and the seven-to-fourteen-day plans you read elsewhere are picking a number Reddit has never published. What is true is that the levers are slow by design: karma accrues, CQS updates "regularly", and eligibility re-evaluates every six hours.

If you are running many accounts

Say the quiet part: almost all the famous advice in this space - residential proxies, browser fingerprints, spaced actions, drip schedules - is written for an operator running fifty accounts, usually by someone selling proxies or accounts. For a founder with one brand account it is inert, and the automation half of it is the risk rather than the remedy.

For the operator, two things are worth knowing accurately. First, CQS reads "network and location signals", so an estate built on rotating addresses is being evaluated by a classifier designed to notice exactly that. Second, the account itself is not transferable: Reddit's user agreement says "You will not license, sell, or transfer your Account without our prior written approval." Aged Reddit accounts were on sale at a $2.41 median on 2026-09-21, and karma-boosted ones at a $37 median. What a warmed account market actually costs covers what you receive, what it survives, and who carries the liability.

What to do this week

Verify the email. Pick three communities. Comment for ten days. Open the composer and read the panel before the first post. Put the link in the post body only where the community's rules allow it, never shortened. Then judge the account by whether its posts survive, which is the only Reddit signal you can actually observe.

Shapeless is an AI content team that researches, writes and publishes across nine platforms, and account standing is the part we spend the most time getting right. shapelessai.com