Instagram Wrapped 2026: your chats, year in review

Every December, your feeds fill with year-in-review cards: songs played, kilometres run, matches watched. Your group chat has a year worth recapping too — the late-night spirals, the meme wars, the one friend who carried every conversation. Instagram Wrapped on Stats Insta builds that recap from your own messages, in about a minute, without your chat data ever leaving your device.

What is Instagram Wrapped?

Unlike Spotify, Meta does not publish a Wrapped for your direct messages. Instagram shows creators follower analytics, but there is no official recap of your conversations: no message totals, no "your top chat this year", no story-ready card. If you have seen people post DM wrapped cards, they made them with a third-party tool — usually from the same data export described below.

That export is the key. Meta lets every account holder download their information, including every message they have sent or received, as JSON files with a sender name and a timestamp on each message. That is everything a year-in-review needs. Stats Insta reads those files locally in your browser, calculates the statistics, and renders the highlights as Instagram Story cards you can download and share. Your Wrapped is built from the conversations you choose to upload — nothing more, nothing less.

What is inside your Wrapped

• Total messages — every text message across the conversations you upload, counted exactly, with the date range they cover.
• Your #1 chat — the person or group at the top of your year: the sender with the most messages and their share of the total, with the runner-up named on the card.
• Busiest month and peak hours — monthly totals across your history show which month your chat peaked, and the activity heatmap shows the days and hours it reliably comes alive.
• Night-owl score — messages sent between midnight and 5 AM, and who sent them. The card names your chat's night owl and exactly how many late texts they are responsible for.
• Top emojis and reactions — the emoji your conversation uses most, and the reaction emoji your chat reaches for again and again.
• Conversation starter — who restarts the chat after more than 12 hours of silence, and how many times. The friend who keeps the chat alive gets the credit.
• Group chat champion — upload a group conversation and the member with the highest message count leads the leaderboard, with per-member share for everyone else.

A note on honesty: there is no calendar-year filter, because your export is your full history. Upload the conversations that defined your 2026 and your cards summarize those chats; upload everything and you get an all-time edition instead. Either way, the numbers are calculated from the real files — nothing is estimated or made up.

How to get your Instagram Wrapped

1. Request your data. In Instagram, open your profile, tap the menu, and go to Accounts Center, then Your information and permissions, then Download your information. Choose "Some of your information", select Messages, set the format to JSON and the date range to All time. The DM export guide walks through this step by step.
2. Download and unzip. Meta emails you when the file is ready — anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Download the ZIP and extract it, then open the messages/inbox folder.
3. Open the analyzer and upload. Go to the chat analyzer, pick a conversation folder, and select its message_1.json file — plus message_2.json and any other numbered parts of the same chat. You can add several conversations at once.
4. Open your Wrapped. Your report appears in seconds. Click the Instagram Story Card button to generate your Wrapped cards, preview them, and download or share them straight to your story.

When should you make it?

December and the first days of January are the classic moment, when Wrapped cards are everywhere and your friends will actually compare numbers. But because your Wrapped is built from your uploaded chats rather than from the calendar, it works whenever a recap makes sense: a friendship anniversary, the end of a school year, a birthday roast for the group's night owl, or the end of a trip you planned entirely in one chaotic group chat.

Instagram Wrapped questions