I can’t tell you how long your podcast episodes should be.

But I can tell you how long most podcasts are.

Recently, I grabbed the metadata from more than 10 million podcast episodes. I focused exclusively on audio (no video podcasts) with release dates after June 2005.

Then I crunched the numbers.

Overall average length

43 minutes and 24 seconds.

That’s the mean average episode length across my sample of 10 million podcast episodes. Of course, mean averages are sensitive to outliers like this eleven-hour episode, or these one-second episodes. Considering these extreme outliers, I decided to look at the median average:

Based on a sample of 10 million episodes, the median podcast duration is 38 minutes and 42 seconds.

In other words, half of all currently published podcast episodes are longer than 38:42. The other half are shorter.

Average length by category

The average length of a podcast episode varies a lot depending on the category. Gaming and music-related categories tend to have the longest episodes. Business and education-focused categories have the shortest episodes.

Here’s a breakdown of median episode length, by podcast category: