How many words is a page?

"How many words is a page?" doesn't have one fixed answer — it depends on font size, spacing, margins and even which word processor you're using. But there are standard conventions most software and style guides settle on, and they're accurate enough to plan a document by. Here's the practical version, plus what's normal for the documents people actually ask about most: essays, cover letters and blog posts.

How many words per page?

The baseline nearly everyone uses: 12pt font, standard one-inch margins, Times New Roman or a similar font. At that setting:

Double-spacing is the default for most academic essays and manuscripts specifically because it's easier to read and annotate — not because it changes the actual content, just how much white space surrounds it. A font like Arial or Calibri will fit slightly more or fewer words per page than Times New Roman at the same point size, but the difference is usually small enough to ignore unless a strict page limit is on the line.

How long should different documents actually be?

A page count is a rough proxy — what most of these documents are really governed by is a word count convention, page limits included. Here's what's typical:

Blog posts are the widest range on purpose — a post meant to answer one specific question quickly shouldn't be padded out to 2,000 words just to look thorough, and a competitive, broad topic usually needs real depth to rank or to actually help the reader. Length should follow how much the topic genuinely needs, not a target pulled from a general rule.

Why the estimate can be off

A handful of things push the real number away from the table above, sometimes by a lot: narrower or wider margins than the standard one inch, a font that's naturally more compact or spread out (Verdana and Georgia both run wider than Times New Roman at the same point size), a title page or headers eating into the count, and bullet points or block quotes which use more vertical space per word than plain paragraphs. Software also disagrees on the small stuff — some word processors count a hyphenated phrase as one word, others as two, and page count in particular can shift the moment you change a margin or font mid-document.

None of that makes the table wrong — it's still the right starting point for planning a document before you've written it. It's just not a substitute for checking the real number once you have actual text.

A faster way than counting on your fingers

The only way to know your actual word count is to count it, and doing that by hand (or trusting your word processor's own counter, which can lag or count differently depending on version) is slower than it needs to be. Altto's Word Counter gives you an exact word count, character count, and estimated reading and speaking time the instant you paste or type your text — live, with nothing uploaded, so it works just as well for something you haven't finished writing yet as for a finished draft.

Common questions