Podcastquery

Home / Research / Average podcast length is 34 minutes. The US top 100 runs 55.

Average podcast length is 34 minutes. The US top 100 runs 55.

Podcastquery, 2026-10-26 · Full lists as CSV, $29

The median podcast episode is 34.2 minutes long. The mean is 41.7 minutes, pulled up by a tail of shows that run two hours and more. Half of all active shows sit between 16.6 and 55.9 minutes.

We took the Podcast Index feed dump of 16 August 2026 and kept the 437,693 feeds that published an episode in the 90 days before it. Each feed declares a duration for its newest episode, so every show counts once, with its latest episode. We dropped 12,106 feeds that declare no duration or zero, 4,039 that declare more than six hours, and 51 with a value that is not a number. That leaves 421,497 shows.

Length of newest episode Shows Share
Under 5 minutes 34,935 8.3%
5 to 15 minutes 60,994 14.5%
15 to 30 minutes 88,684 21.0%
30 to 45 minutes 83,153 19.7%
45 to 60 minutes 66,398 15.8%
60 to 90 minutes 56,167 13.3%
90 to 120 minutes 16,515 3.9%
2 to 6 hours 14,651 3.5%

One show in five (20.7%) runs an hour or longer. Almost a quarter run under 15 minutes.

The charts run longer

We expected popular shows to look like the rest. They do not. We joined the top 100 of 18 Apple Podcasts country charts, read on 6 September 2026, to the dump by iTunes ID. Of the 1,249 chart shows that published in the same window and declare a duration, the median newest episode is 43.7 minutes. For the US top 100 (94 shows with a usable duration) it is 55.0 minutes, and 42.6% of them run an hour or more, twice the share across all active shows.

By category

Category is the first category the feed lists. Only categories with 2,000 active shows or more are shown.

Category Shows Median minutes Mean minutes
TV 12,583 59.5 64.3
Music 17,400 57.2 58.1
Leisure 16,553 51.3 57.5
Comedy 14,063 50.5 53.8
Sports 25,209 48.3 52.1
Arts 25,564 39.8 56.6
Fiction 6,235 37.4 76.3
History 6,873 37.2 60.2
True Crime 2,265 36.3 40.7
Religion 56,052 34.5 37.8
Technology 9,676 32.3 36.9
Science 7,061 31.9 38.1
Government 2,757 31.5 39.6
Health 29,565 30.1 34.8
Society 55,389 30.1 35.9
Business 56,037 29.5 32.6
News 28,168 28.9 35.8
Education 37,493 25.6 31.3
Kids 8,290 24.8 33.8

TV and film shows and music shows run close to an hour. Education and kids shows run under 26 minutes. Fiction has the widest gap between median and mean, 37.4 against 76.3 minutes: 1,315 of the 6,235 fiction feeds (21.1%) have a newest episode longer than two hours.

By hosting platform and language

Host Shows Median minutes
anchor.fm 100,351 35.4
buzzsprout.com 48,614 33.4
spreaker.com 42,203 18.8
podbean.com 23,329 37.7
rss.com 17,041 33.9
libsyn.com 15,865 36.6
acast.com 11,358 40.9
megaphone.fm 9,058 39.5
ivoox.com 5,292 54.0

Spreaker stands out at 18.8 minutes. The Spanish host iVoox runs longest at 54.0. By language, English shows have a median of 36.4 minutes, German 34.4, French 26.4, Spanish 23.0 and Italian 19.5.

The duration is what the feed declares for its newest episode, usually the itunes:duration tag. We did not download audio to check it. The full tables, including hosts and languages not shown here, are in the dataset files.

Full lists as CSV

ListRows
Religion & Spirituality podcasts 40,093
Society & Culture podcasts 36,736
Business podcasts 36,099
Education podcasts 33,523
Health & Fitness podcasts 22,270

Podcasts with a contact email. Author, website, Apple Podcasts link, feed, language, episode count and latest episode date. $29 one-time per list.

Dataset

by_category.csv, by_host.csv, by_language.csv, README.md, METHOD.md

Cite this

Podcastquery, Average podcast length is 34 minutes. The US top 100 runs 55., 2026-10-26, https://podcastquery.com/research/average-podcast-length.