# Topic counts for parent categories in dropdown
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-counts-for-parent-categories-in-dropdown/147061
**Category:** Feature
**Created:** [April 6, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-counts-for-parent-categories-in-dropdown/147061 "2020-04-06T22:50:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 2
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@johncs](https://meta.discourse.org/u/johncs)
#### Post date: [April 6, 2020, 10:50pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-counts-for-parent-categories-in-dropdown/147061/1 "2020-04-06T22:50:52Z")
Take a forum with (at least) these three categories and topic counts:
- `Announcements` (4 topics)
- `Releases` (80 topics)
- `Roadmaps` (7 topics)
You might then see this in the category filter dropdown:
The `x 4` here is referring to just the topics in the `Announcements` category but not in its children categories.
I think the purpose for these `x #` labels must be to give users a sense of how many topics they’ll see when they filter by that category. But when you filter by a parent category, you _also_ see the children categories in the resulting topic list.
I think it would be better to show the count of topics in the category and all sub-categories in this dropdown.
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### Author:  [@JimPas](https://meta.discourse.org/u/JimPas)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2020, 9:36am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/topic-counts-for-parent-categories-in-dropdown/147061/2 "2020-04-07T09:36:41Z")
> [@johncs](#):
>
> I think it would be better to show the count of topics in the category and all sub-categories in this dropdown.
When you click on Categories from the hamburger menu this is what you’ll get: a list of categories with their subcategories _and_ the total number of topics for each category with all the subcategories combined.
