How the acceptance rate is calculated
Acceptance rate = invitations accepted ÷ invitations sent in the same month × 100. It is the rate from how to calculate your LinkedIn acceptance rate, worked out for every month in your file.
Sent is every row of Invitations.csv with Direction OUTGOING, grouped by the month in Sent At. Accepted means the person's profile URL from the inviteeProfileUrl column is also in the URL column of Connections.csv. If you invited someone twice, only the later invitation can count as accepted.
Pending, ignored, withdrawn and expired invitations all count as not accepted. Invitations.csv has no outcome column, so the page can't tell them apart. That makes each month's number a floor: a later acceptance can only raise it.
Why recent months read low
Invitations you sent last week mostly have no answer yet, so counting them pulls the rate down. A month is marked still settling while some of its invitations are younger than the number of weeks you pick, 4 by default. The headline rate counts only the months that have settled.
The page counts back from the latest date in your two files, because it can't know the day you downloaded them. Pick 2, 4, 8 or 12 weeks and the list next to the table shows every invitation not accepted after that long, newest first, with a link to the profile. LinkedIn says invitations expire after six months and then no longer show as pending.
Still-pending invitations are listed in your Sent tab on LinkedIn. The guide to your sent LinkedIn invitations covers that page.
What's in Invitations.csv and Connections.csv
In an export from October 2026, Invitations.csv had seven columns: From, To, Sent At, Message, Direction, inviterProfileUrl and inviteeProfileUrl. It kept accepted invitations, had no column for the outcome, and its oldest row was just under six months old. Check the earliest month in the table before you compare it with older numbers.
Connections.csv opens with a short Notes block, then First Name, Last Name, URL, Email Address, Company, Position and Connected On. The page skips the Notes lines and reads both date formats: Sent At like 9/16/26, 12:19 PM and Connected On like 01 Oct 2026.
LinkedIn says it emails a single category such as Invitations within minutes, and the larger archive, which holds Connections, within 24 hours. The larger archive holds both files, so one ZIP is enough. What the LinkedIn data export gives you covers the rest of the archive.