How to export your LinkedIn connections, and what is actually in the file

You have twenty thousand connections and you are about to run the export, because somewhere in that list are the people you should be talking to this quarter. What you are picturing is a spreadsheet with twenty thousand email addresses in it.

You will get seven columns: first name, last name, public profile URL, email address, company, position, and the date you connected. The email column will be mostly empty, because LinkedIn only fills it for connections who allowed it in their privacy settings. And you will wait, since connections are not in LinkedIn's fast export. What the file is genuinely good for is a different thing from what people expect, and it is worth knowing which before you spend an afternoon on it.

The seven fields, from LinkedIn's own documentation

LinkedIn publishes the field list for every category in its data export. This is the Connections entry, verbatim from the Download your data help page:

"Contains the first and last name, public profile URL, email address, company, position, and connection date for all 1st degree connections. An email address for the connection will be included only when authorized by the connection in their privacy settings."

That is the complete file. Everything a lead list normally has is absent from it. There is no seniority, no location, no company size, no industry, no phone number, and no indication of whether the person still holds the position recorded next to their name. The connection date is the only date in the file, and it records when the two of you connected rather than anything about the person now.

Two neighbouring categories in the same export get confused with this one. Contacts is a different file: it holds contacts you imported into LinkedIn, and phone numbers appear there rather than in Connections. Invitations holds invitations sent and received, including the message text.

Why the email column is half empty

LinkedIn states the reason plainly in two places. On the export connections page: "You will only see email addresses for connections who have allowed their connections to see or download their email address." Each of your connections made that choice in their own privacy settings, most of them years ago and without thinking about it, and you have no way to see which of them did before you run the export.

LinkedIn does not publish what share of members allow it, and no credible third party has measured it. So the honest expectation is that the column exists and that you cannot predict how much of it will be filled.

There is a sentence on the same page worth reading alongside that one. LinkedIn states that it "will only provide your own personal data and not that of other members." That sits on the page whose Connections description lists other members' names, employers, positions and, conditionally, their email addresses. LinkedIn is treating your connection list as your data about your own network. Both sentences are LinkedIn's, both are on the same page, and it is worth knowing that before you decide what to do with the file.

How long it takes, and LinkedIn's own two answers

Most guides for this describe the export as a job that takes a few minutes. That is true of the export, and not true of connections.

LinkedIn offers two routes. You can request a specific category of data, or you can request the larger archive. The export connections page directs you to the larger one: "Download larger data archive, including connections, verifications, contacts, account history, and information we infer about you based on your profile and activity." Connections are not available through the fast route.

Then LinkedIn gives two different timings for the slow route on a single page. Its prose says "If you select the larger download, you'll receive an email within 24 hours." Its own table of data categories is headed "Available within 48 hours," and Connections sits in that table rather than the one headed "Available within 10 minutes." Both figures are LinkedIn's. Plan for the longer one.

Once the email arrives, the download link is live for 72 hours and then expires.

The exact path

Click the Me icon at the top of your LinkedIn homepage and select Settings & Privacy. Open Data privacy in the left pane, and under "How LinkedIn uses your data" click Get a copy of your data. Select the larger data archive option, the one that names connections in its description, and click Request archive. The download link goes to your account's primary email address.

The step most guides skip is that middle one. Picking a single category from the list looks faster and does not include your connections.

Three limits nobody mentions

The export does not work on mobile. LinkedIn states this outright, along with a recommendation to run it from a personal rather than a public computer.

The CSV and vCard formats do not support all characters. LinkedIn names Chinese, Japanese and Hebrew specifically. If a meaningful part of your network writes their name in one of those scripts, expect those rows to come through broken.

And you cannot export anyone who is not a first-degree connection. LinkedIn states this as a current product limitation.

One claim that circulates on the pages ranking for this query does not appear anywhere in LinkedIn's documentation: that a restriction applies to networks above 2,500 connections. Neither help page mentions any size threshold. If your network is large, the honest answer is that LinkedIn publishes no limit for this export.

Members in the EU, the EEA and Switzerland have a second route, LinkedIn's Member Portability API, which provides programmatic access to the same data.

What the file is actually good for

Read the field list again with fresh eyes and the value of the file becomes clearer. It is a list of several thousand people who once agreed to be connected to you, with the company and job title they held at the moment of the export, and nothing else.

That is a relationship asset with an information problem. You know these people. Some of them have moved to companies that now need what you sell, some of them have been promoted into budget authority, and some of them left the industry three years ago. The file cannot tell you which is which, because the only dates in it are the day you connected. A CRM with years of history in it has the opposite problem, which is what the Salesforce and Anthropic partnership is aimed at: plenty of context, and until August no model allowed to read it.

One thing the file costs you nothing to use, which is worth knowing before you decide it was a wasted afternoon. Browsing your own first-degree connections does not spend LinkedIn's commercial use limit, while every filtered prospecting search does, as covered in what counts against your LinkedIn search limit. Messaging one of them costs no invitation either, which matters given how tightly LinkedIn's connection limits constrain reaching anyone new.

So the export is worth running. Run it knowing that what you get is a list of names you have a real claim to contact, and that everything you would need to decide which of them to contact is missing from the file. If you intend to send to the addresses that did come through, the bounce rate on a list this old is worth checking before you send at volume.