How Many Pages Is a Screenplay? Length by Format and Genre

Screenplay length is one of the few writing formats where the answer isn't really about word count at all. Novels, essays, and articles get measured in words; scripts get measured in pages, and the reason is baked into the format itself — a properly formatted screenplay page is built to represent a fixed, predictable amount of screen time, which makes the page count a production planning number as much as a writing one.

Tracking a draft's rough word count alongside its page count? Clear Count gives you the exact number as you write, with nothing uploaded anywhere.

The Core Rule: One Page Equals One Minute

The industry convention is that one page of properly formatted screenplay equals approximately one minute of screen time. This isn't a loose guideline treated as optional — it's the entire reason screenplay formatting is as rigid as it is. Standard format uses 12-point Courier (a monospaced font, chosen specifically because every character takes identical horizontal space, which is what makes the page-to-minute conversion reliable), with a roughly 1.5-inch left margin for binding and 1-inch margins on the other three sides. Producers, directors, and department heads use page count alone to estimate a shoot's length and budget before a single scene is broken down — which is why deviating from the format quietly breaks the tool everyone downstream is relying on.

Feature Film Length by Genre

90 to 120 pages is the commonly cited range for a feature, but the honest target varies by genre — a comedy that runs long starts to drag in a way an action epic often doesn't:

For a first-time or spec script, most working screenwriters and consultants advise staying closer to the 90–110 page range regardless of genre. A shorter, tighter script reads as more disciplined to the people evaluating it, and it keeps implied production costs lower — two things that matter more for a script trying to get attention than for one that's already greenlit.

TV Pilots Follow a Completely Different Standard

Television page counts map to episode runtime rather than feature-length convention, and the format itself changes between single-camera and multi-camera shows:

The multi-camera sitcom format looks like an outlier — nearly double the page count of a single-camera comedy for the same runtime — but it isn't a contradiction of the one-page-one-minute rule. Multi-camera scripts are traditionally double-spaced, which roughly halves how much story fits per page; the screen-time math still checks out once that formatting difference is accounted for.

Short Films Follow the Same Rule at a Smaller Scale

Short scripts still follow one-page-per-minute, which makes their target page count a direct function of runtime rather than a separate convention. Most competitive short film festival slots run 5 to 15 minutes, putting a typical submission script at roughly 5 to 15 pages — short enough that even a page or two of unnecessary padding is proportionally a much bigger problem than it would be in a feature.

The page count isn't really measuring the writing — it's measuring the format doing its job correctly. A script that hits its target page range in 12-point Courier and standard margins is making an implicit promise about runtime; a script padded with tighter margins or smaller type to look shorter is breaking that promise before anyone reads a single scene.

Converting Between Pages and Words

Because a screenplay page mixes sparse dialogue, white space, and short action lines rather than dense prose, it holds far fewer words than a standard double-spaced manuscript page. A reasonable estimate is 150 to 200 words per screenplay page — noticeably less than the 250 words typically cited for a double-spaced academic or manuscript page — though this figure swings more than most page-to-word conversions, since a dialogue-heavy page and an action-heavy page can look wildly different in word count while still representing the same one minute of screen time. That variability is exactly why page count, not word count, is the number the industry actually tracks.

Checking a Draft Against These Numbers

Screenwriting software (Final Draft, WriterDuet, Fade In, and others) handles the actual pagination and format enforcement, since getting Courier spacing and scene-heading placement exactly right by hand in a general word processor is its own separate problem. What's useful to check independently while drafting is the rough word count of a scene or act, as a sanity check that dialogue isn't quietly bloating — Clear Count gives an instant word count for any pasted text, which is a fast way to spot a scene that's grown unusually long before it shows up as an unexpected jump in page count later.

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The honest answer to "how many pages is a screenplay" depends on what's being written: 90–120 pages for a feature (tighter toward 90–110 for a spec script), 55–65 for a one-hour drama pilot, 28–55 for a half-hour comedy depending on camera format, and roughly one page per minute for anything shorter. The number that ties all of it together isn't a word count at all — it's the minute of screen time each properly formatted page is built to represent.