You have ninety seconds of screen time and a script that feels too long. The working answer for e-learning narration is about 140 words a minute, which makes ninety seconds roughly 210 words. That is close enough to plan with and wrong enough to check, and this page is about both halves of that.
The rates worth planning with
| 120 wpm | Measured | Technical or compliance content, or a second-language audience | 120 words |
| 140 wpm | Standard | Typical corporate e-learning narration | 140 words |
| 160 wpm | Conversational | Lighter delivery, a familiar subject | 160 words |
| 180 wpm | Brisk | Fast-paced, experienced audience | 180 words |
Everyday conversation runs faster than all of these, which is why narration recorded at a natural speaking pace often sounds rushed once it is sitting under something a learner is also trying to read.
Why the script always runs longer than the arithmetic
Word counts measure words. A recording also contains everything that is not a word:
- Pauses. A beat at the end of each sentence, a longer one between sections. Across a five-minute track that is comfortably half a minute.
- Numbers and abbreviations. “2026” is one word on the page and four syllables out loud. “OSHA 1910.132” is a sentence.
- The bits that must land. A safety instruction gets read slower than the sentence introducing it, and should.
- Room at the start and end. Most slides need a moment before the voice begins and after it stops, or the audio feels clipped against the animation.
In practice, add ten to fifteen percent to whatever the arithmetic says and you will be close. If the estimate has to be exact, record thirty seconds and measure.
Measuring the rate you actually get
Take a real script, not a test sentence: two hundred words of the actual course. Record it the way it will be delivered, time it, and divide. A narrator reading 200 words in 80 seconds is working at 150 words a minute, and that is the number to plan the rest of the course with, rather than any figure on this page.
Do the same for a text-to-speech voice, which is worth measuring separately: synthetic voices tend to keep a steadier pace than a person, so their arithmetic is more reliable, and their pauses are shorter than most people expect.
Where the number gets used
- Seat time. Narration is the spine of a course’s runtime, so the script length is the honest answer to “how long is this course?” long before it is built.
- Recording quotes. Voice work is usually priced by finished minute, so the runtime estimate is the quote. The Course Word Count gives you the narration total for a whole project in one go.
- Captions. Whatever the narrator says becomes caption text, and captions have their own ceiling of about 21 characters a second. A script that reads fine at 180 words a minute produces captions that flash past. The Caption Reading Speed Checker finds those cues.
- Translation. Other languages run longer. A track that fits in English can overrun the animation in German by a fifth.