How does accept rate work? [duplicate]

Question

• What is accept rate?
• Why doesn't accept rate always appear?
• How is the accept rate calculated?
• What does "accepting an answer" mean? How do I do it?

Related: How does accepting an answer work?

Answer 1

Taken from the blog entry:

• The accept rate is the percentage of answers accepted based on the questions asked by the user.
• The accept rate is calculated on questions that are older than 3 days.
• The accept rate is heavily cached and can take 24hrs or more to update. (See below.)
• The accept rate is only calculated when the user has 4 or more questions.

Which questions do not affect the accept rate?

The following questions are not included in the accept rate calculation:

• Community Wiki Questions
• Closed Questions
• Questions with no answers

If a question has no upvoted answers, it is still included by design.

What does the accept rate mean?

• If the stat doesn’t appear at all, it’s a new user, or someone who rarely asks questions.
• If you see a low percentage, it’s a user who asks a lot of questions but accepts almost no answers.
• If you see a middle of the road percentage, it’s an experienced user who understands what accepted answers are for.
• If you see a high percentage, it’s an engaged user, someone who frequently goes back and interacts with their questions after asking.

It is considered good manners to accept answers on your questions, eventually, but accepting answers is not required. In general, an accept rate of 70% or better is quite good, meaning you accept answers on 7 out of 10 questions that you ask.

When is the accept rate updated?

Taken from this answer:

• When the user accepts or unaccepts an answer.
• When user accounts are merged or unmerged.
• Once a day for all users.

Answer 2

What does "accepting an answer" mean? How do I do it?

When you have decided which answer is the most helpful to you, mark it as the accepted answer by clicking on the check box outline to the left of the answer.

This lets other people know that you have received a good answer to your question. Doing this is helpful because it shows other people that you're getting value from the community. (If you don't do this, people will often politely ask you to go back and accept answers for more of your questions!)