Kick Emotes: How to Add Them, the File Rules, and What Kick Chat Actually Uses

The Most Used Kick Emotes: One Day of Real Chat

On September 14, 2026, a Monday, we counted every chat message containing an emote across the Kick channels tracked by Streams Charts. Kick stores a native emote inside a message as an ID tag rather than as typed text, so these are exact message counts, not word matches. A message with two different emotes counts once for each.

Source: Streams Charts chat data, Kick channels tracked by Streams Charts, September 14, 2026 (UTC). Counts Kick's own emote tags; 7TV emotes travel as plain words and are not included. The biggest channels behind these chats are ranked monthly on KickRanker.

Every emote on the list is one Kick provides. 26 come from Kick's global set, 10 from its emoji set and 4 are collectibles. Not one channel or subscriber emote made the top 40. Streamers upload their own, but the vocabulary the whole platform shares is the one Kick hands out.

KEKW is the language of Kick chat. It accounts for 37% of the combined count for the whole top 40 and is about 3.4 times the next emote, HYPERCLAP. Add KEKLEO and the collectible KEKW variants and the KEK family reaches 47%. What it means and where the face comes from is in our KEKW explainer.

The global set is Twitch chat culture with the extensions built in. KEKW, LULW, PogU, Prayge, gachiGASM, OOOO, WeirdChamp and GIGACHAD are third-party emotes on Twitch: there you need BetterTTV or 7TV to see them (the Twitch emotes guide explains that layer). On Kick they are native, so every viewer sees them with nothing installed. Kick's public emote list held 64 global emotes on September 27, 2026, including Kick-born ones such as HYPERCLAP, POLICE and kickclassic.

The emoji set is Kick's own drawings, not phone emoji. The 66 emotes named emojiAngel, emojiDead, emojiLol and so on sit in everyone's picker. Because they are Kick emotes, they are not the same thing as standard Unicode emoji, which Kick treats as text: in emote-only mode the Unicode ones are blocked.

Collectible Emotes: What collectiblesGoldenKEKW Is

Names that start with collectibles are rewards from Daily Rewards, a viewer feature Kick launched at the end of June 2026. Watch at least one hour of streams in a day (it adds up across channels) and the Daily Rewards button in the top bar turns green and becomes Claim Reward. Claiming plays a roulette-style reveal, and the prize is a collectible: an emote to use in chat or a badge. The pool is listed at kick.com/collectibles, and the cycle resets every day.

Kick has not documented the individual items, how rare the golden versions are, or whether a reward expires, so treat those names simply as collectible variants of the global emotes. What the data does show: collectiblesGoldenKEKW was No. 5 on the day, in 229,891 messages across 3,186 channels, so a collectible is not locked to the channel where you earned it. It also came from 9,766 senders, against 151,329 for plain KEKW — which is what you would expect from an emote only some accounts own. The wide KEKW and golden LULW and KEKLEO variants made the top 40 as well.

How to Add Emotes on Kick

1. 1Open the emote page in your Streamer Dashboard. Go to your Streamer Dashboard and select Community under Channel. The direct link is dashboard.kick.com/channel/community/emotes.
2. 2Pick channel or subscriber emotes. Click the + icon under Channel Emotes for an emote your own chat can use, or under Subscriber-only Emotes for one your subscribers can use in any chat on Kick. The subscriber section needs a channel that can take subscriptions.
3. 3Upload the file. Choose a PNG or GIF at 500 × 500 pixels and under 1 MB. A transparent background keeps it clean on both light and dark chat.
4. 4Name it. The name is exactly what viewers type to send it. Keep it short, and put your channel name in front of it so people know whose emote it is.
5. 5Save. Click Save. Kick's help center describes no approval queue: the emote is added to your channel when you save. To remove one, hover over it on the same page and click the trash can.

The steps come from Kick's How to add or edit KICK emotes article. Your emotes are part of the same channel identity as your banner, panels and About section, which our channel branding guide covers size by size.

Kick Emote Size and File Requirements

The one design rule that matters: chat shows emotes at a tiny fraction of 500 pixels. Draw at full size, then shrink it to a thumbnail and check it still reads. Thin outlines, small text and busy backgrounds disappear first.

Subscriber Emotes on Kick

Subscriber emotes unlock once your channel can take paid subscriptions. Kick's emote article calls that Affiliate status and also allows Verified channels; Kick's June 2026 rewrite of its requirements page calls the same step Partner status, and the headline requirement is 5 cumulative hours streamed. After that you enable subscriptions and set up Stripe payouts. The whole money side, including the separate KICK Partner Program, is in our guide to streaming on Kick.

You get up to 24 subscriber-only emotes. Kick's article gives one cap and does not split them by tier or unlock them gradually. Subscribers can use them in any Kick chat for as long as they stay subscribed, while your 60 channel emotes work only in your own chat. That split is the practical way to plan them: channel emotes for your chat's in-jokes, subscriber emotes as the perk people pay for because it travels with them.

How Viewers Use Emotes (and Emote-Only Mode)

• The picker: click the smiley button in the chat box, browse, click an emote, send. Global emotes work in every channel; channel and subscriber emotes show up based on the channel and your subscriptions.
• Typing: if you know the name, type it straight into chat. Kick's chat guide for viewers gives :smile: as the example format.
• Emote-only mode: type /emoteonly on and /emoteonly off, or toggle it in the dashboard sidebar. Channel owners and moderators can use it, and moderators themselves are not restricted by chat modes. Only messages made entirely of emotes get through; Unicode emoji count as text and are blocked. Full command list: Kick chat commands.

Does 7TV Work on Kick?

Yes. The 7TV extension describes itself as improving “your viewing experience on Twitch & Kick”, and version 3.1.25 shipped on July 30, 2026. 7TV says its library holds more than 1,000,000 public emotes and that every channel gets 1,000 customizable emote slots for free. For streamers, the channel's 7TV account is linked to its Kick account and emotes are added to the channel's set on 7tv.app; 7TV's public API still returned Kick-linked channel sets when we checked on September 27, 2026.

Two limits decide how far to lean on it. First, 7TV is viewer-side: only people running the extension, or a Kick extension that reads 7TV emotes such as NipahTV, see the image. Everyone else sees the name as plain text. Second, it depends on 7TV keeping pace with Kick's site: Kick support has broken after Kick updates before and come back in later releases, so update the extension first if the emotes vanish. Keep anything you advertise as a perk on native Kick emotes.

Kick vs Twitch Emotes

The chat data shows the same thing from the other side. The shape is similar: a laugh emote leads on both platforms by a wide margin. LUL tops the Twitch words we tracked at about 3.9 times the runner-up; KEKW tops Kick at about 3.4 times. The difference is who supplies the words. On Twitch KEKW ranked No. 2 among the words we tracked, in 10,116 channels over a week, while needing an extension to render; on Kick it is native and No. 1.

Different windows and units, so compare order, not totals. Kick: exact messages containing each emote, all emotes, September 14, 2026. Twitch: approximate word counts for a pre-selected list of 63 known emote words, September 14–20, 2026; capture can count some channels twice. Source: Streams Charts, channels tracked by Streams Charts. The platforms themselves are compared in Kick vs Twitch.