The short answer.
LinkedIn invitations expire after six months. Before they expire, LinkedIn sends the recipient up to two reminders. Neither of you is notified when the invitation finally lapses, it simply stops appearing as pending, and you are free to send a new one. That is the answer to the question you asked. Here is the question you should have asked: is that pile of pending invitations doing anything to my account? It is. LinkedIn says so on its own restrictions page.
See how Occura paces outreach so the pile never buildsThe short answer, in LinkedIn's own words.
LinkedIn's help article Expiration of Invitations states that invitations sent to both existing members and non-members expire after six months, and that before expiry LinkedIn sends up to two reminders to the recipient. Expired invitations no longer appear as pending, and a new invitation can be sent.
At the time of writing, that help page returns a 404. The article ID is a546712. Its text is still quoted consistently across the web and still sits in Google's index, so the six-month figure is genuinely LinkedIn's own language, but the canonical page is currently unreachable. We would rather tell you that than link you to a dead page and pretend otherwise.
Everything else in this article comes from LinkedIn help pages that are live and that we loaded directly. They are linked at the bottom.
What happens across those six months.
| Stage | What happens | Documented by LinkedIn? |
|---|---|---|
| Day 0 | Invitation sent, appears in the recipient's invitations and your Sent tab | Yes |
| Between send and expiry | LinkedIn sends the recipient up to two reminders | Yes |
| Exact reminder timing | Unknown | No. LinkedIn does not say when. |
| Six months | Invitation expires, disappears from pending | Yes |
| On expiry | Neither party is notified | Not addressed by LinkedIn. Universally asserted, nowhere sourced. |
| After expiry | You may send a new invitation immediately | Yes |
Two of those pages go further and give different numbers entirely: one says invitations never expire, another says six to twelve months. Both are wrong.
Expired, withdrawn, ignored: three different outcomes.
From your Sent tab these look identical. Operationally they are not.
| Expired | Withdrawn by you | Still pending | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Who ended it | LinkedIn, at six months | You | Nobody yet |
| Recipient notified | No | No | n/a |
| Can you send again | Immediately | Not for up to three weeks | n/a |
| Reminders | Both already sent | Cancelled | Still scheduled |
| Counts toward your outstanding pile | No longer | No longer | Yes |
That third row is the one that catches people. Withdrawing an invitation locks you out of re-sending to that person for up to three weeks. Letting it expire does not. If your instinct is to tidy your Sent tab before starting a new campaign on the same list, you are about to lock yourself out of your own prospects.
“You cannot withdraw after three weeks.”
This claim is everywhere, including on several pages currently ranking for this exact query. It is not on LinkedIn's current documentation.
LinkedIn's Withdraw an invitation page says you can withdraw an invitation any time before it is accepted. No three-week window. What does exist, on the same page, is a three-week cooldown on re-sending after you withdraw.
Two different rules, three weeks apiece, opposite consequences. Somewhere along the way the internet fused them. If you have been leaving stale invitations up because you believed the withdrawal window had closed, it has not.
Also on that page, and worth knowing before you plan an afternoon of cleanup: LinkedIn does not support bulk withdrawal. One at a time.
Why a large pending pile is a genuine risk.
Here is the part that is missing from every page we found on this subject, and it comes straight from LinkedIn's own restrictions documentation.
Among the reasons LinkedIn gives for restricting an account's ability to send invitations:
Many of your invitations have been ignored, left pending, or marked as spam by the recipients.
Left pending. Not declined. Not reported. Simply sitting there. A pending invitation is not a neutral placeholder waiting patiently for six months, it is a data point LinkedIn is counting.
And in the remedies section, the penalty for this specific cause is the heaviest one on the list:
If you're restricted for having too many outstanding invitations, wait for up to one month before attempting to send another invitation.
A month. Compare that with a first-time restriction, where LinkedIn's guidance is to wait a few hours.
Withdrawing does not lift a restriction.
If you are already restricted, the standard advice you will find is to withdraw your pending invitations to fix it. LinkedIn addresses this directly and says the opposite:
Withdrawing pending invitations will not remove the restriction.
Clearing the pile is prevention. It is not a cure. Once the restriction has fired, the only thing that resolves it is time.
Withdrawing kills the reminders.
From LinkedIn's withdrawal page:
Withdrawing an invitation stops reminder emails to the recipient.
Read that against the six-month timeline. An invitation sitting at month four still has reminders in its future. Withdraw it and you have thrown away a free, LinkedIn-delivered touchpoint that would have landed in that person's inbox at no cost to you and no risk to your account.
So the common advice, withdraw anything older than 30 days, is not obviously right. It trades a free future touchpoint for a marginally smaller pending pile. Whether that trade is good depends entirely on how many of your acceptances actually arrive late. There is published data on exactly that.
How long is an invitation actually worth anything?
Six months is the platform rule. It is not the useful number.
Botdog's published dataset, drawn from 16,492 connection requests, found that 99% of acceptances arrive within 30 days of sending. Reachium applies the same finding as a methodology rule in its own benchmark study, excluding any request sent fewer than 30 days before the data pull because acceptances keep trickling in until roughly that point and no further.
So the practical answer is that an invitation does its work in the first month. The remaining five months of its life are almost entirely dead weight, sitting in the pending pile that LinkedIn counts against your account.
That reframes the withdraw decision. An invitation at day 45 is not a live prospect any more, it is a liability with a reminder still scheduled. An invitation at day 10 is neither.
How to see your sent invitations.
- Desktop: My Network → Invitations → Show all → Manage invitations → Sent tab.
- Mobile: My Network → Manage → Sent.
The Sent tab shows how long ago each invitation went out. There is no bulk action, no filter by age, and no export. If you want to track this properly you will end up keeping your own record outside LinkedIn, which is what any team running volume already does.
When to withdraw, when to let it run.
A decision rule, rather than “review your invitations regularly”, which is what every other page on this topic offers.
Let it run to expiry when: the prospect is still in your ICP, the pile is small relative to your sending volume, and you have not been restricted. The reminders are free and the invitation costs you nothing while it sits there.
Withdraw when: you have been warned or restricted, or your pending pile has grown large enough relative to your weekly sending that it is plausibly the thing LinkedIn is counting. Prevention only. It will not undo a live restriction.
Never withdraw when: you intend to re-approach that person in the next three weeks. The cooldown will block you.
Re-send after expiry when: something has actually changed. A new role, a funding round, a trigger event, a mutual connection you did not have before. Sending the same message to the same person six months later, with nothing new, is spending a scarce invitation on an experiment you already ran.
Frequently asked questions.
How long does a LinkedIn connection request last?
Six months, per LinkedIn's own help documentation. After that it expires and disappears from pending.
Does the recipient know when a request expires?
LinkedIn does not document any notification on expiry, and we have found no source for the claim that either party is told. It appears to be silent.
Does the recipient know if I withdraw a request?
No. LinkedIn states plainly that the recipient is not notified when you withdraw.
Can I withdraw an invitation after three weeks?
Yes. LinkedIn's current page says you can withdraw any time before it is accepted. The three-week rule that people remember applies to re-sending after a withdrawal, not to withdrawing itself.
Can I withdraw invitations in bulk?
No. LinkedIn does not support bulk withdrawal.
Does the personalised note survive if I re-send after expiry?
A new invitation is a new invitation, so you write a new note. Note that free accounts are limited to five personalised invitation notes per month; Premium is unlimited.
How many invitations can I send per week?
LinkedIn publishes no number. Any article giving you 100 or 200 is repeating an observation, not a documented limit.
Do InMails expire the same way?
No. InMail is a different mechanism with its own credit system.
The short version.
Six months, two reminders, silent expiry, re-send whenever you like. That is the trivia.
The thing that actually matters is that LinkedIn treats a pending invitation as evidence about you, names “left pending” as a restriction trigger, and applies its longest penalty to accounts with too many outstanding. Clear the pile as prevention, not as a cure, and do not clear it for anyone you plan to approach again inside three weeks.
Where this fits in the wider motion is covered in our complete guide to LinkedIn outreach.
Sources
LinkedIn Help: Withdraw an invitation · Types of restrictions for sending invitations · Invitation limit reached · Expiration of Invitations (article a546712, quoted text; page returning 404 at time of writing).