How many words fit in 30 seconds? Timing a voiceover script

By James Jones, founder of Granary Digital · 20 October 2026

For a 30-second advert, write about 75 words and you will probably be fine. At 90 you need a brisk read. At 110 something has to go, and it is better if you choose what.

The rates, by kind of script

These are rules of thumb from people who time scripts for a living. They are not standards, and a particular voice will sit a little above or below them.

• Adverts run fastest, at around 160 to 180 words a minute, so 70 to 90 words per 30 seconds. Voices.com tells agencies to keep a 30-second ad to 80 words or fewer, working from a speaking rate of about three words a second.
• Brand films, explainers and corporate narration sit at about 150 to 160 words a minute. The word-count calculator published by UK voice artist Guy Harris puts a natural, conversational read at 150, which is 75 words per 30 seconds.
• E-learning runs at 120 to 150 words a minute. Voice artist Kim Handysides uses 150 as a standard rate and slows to about 120 for international or non-native audiences.
• Audiobooks work in hours rather than seconds. ACX says most narrators manage about 9,300 words per finished hour, which is roughly 155 words a minute once the pauses are counted.

Notice where they cluster. Around 150 words a minute is how people talk when they want to be understood. Adverts go faster because every second is paid for. Learning goes slower because the listener is trying to hold on to what they hear.

Word count is only a proxy

What matters is how long a line takes to say, and some things are far longer spoken than written.

Our own phone number is two words on the page and eleven out loud: oh-one-two-four-three, eight-eight-four, nine-nine-three. A date written as 31/12 becomes "the thirty-first of December". A web address costs the same way, and anyone who still reads out the three Ws has spent nine syllables on something nobody types any more.

Other things that stretch a read:

• names the listener has to catch, especially a brand name said for the first time
• the legal line at the end of a financial or promotional ad, which still has to be understood, so it cannot simply be read at double speed
• pauses. The beat after a question, or before the product name, is part of the performance and takes real time.

Time it out loud, twice

Silent reading runs much faster than speech, so the only honest test is your own voice and a stopwatch.

1. Read the script aloud at the pace you would want to hear it, not the pace that makes it fit. Time it.
2. Read it again. The second pass shows where the first one rushed or stumbled, and it is usually the fairer number.
3. Take off the time the voice will not have. If the spot opens on music and closes on an end frame with the logo, those seconds are not available for words.
4. Compare the two numbers. If the script is over, cut it now, at your desk, where it costs nothing.

When the picture already exists

If the edit is cut before the voice is recorded, the script has to fit the pictures as well as the total length. Mark the sync points on the script: the line that has to land as the product appears, the name that must finish before the cut to the logo. A read can be exactly thirty seconds long and still be wrong in every shot.

We record corporate narration to picture when the edit exists, with the cut playing on the 55-inch screen in front of the microphone, so the voice can see where each line needs to land instead of guessing from a list of timecodes.

What to cut when it runs long

The tempting fix is to ask the voice to go faster. A good voice can find a little pace, but past that point a read starts to sound like the terms and conditions, and the listener hears the hurry instead of the message.

Cut words instead. In roughly this order:

• adjectives doing the same job as another adjective
• the second benefit, which is nearly always weaker than the first
• the brand name's third mention in thirty seconds, if the end frame shows it anyway
• anything the picture is already saying

What is left is usually a better script as well as a shorter one.

Recording it in our room

Our voiceover studio is a treated, double-insulated room with Shure broadcast microphones and an engineer on every session. If a script is still a few words over on the day, time it and trim it in the room, before the best takes are spent on a version that was never going to fit.

Directors and clients can listen and give notes from anywhere over Source-Connect Pro, or over Cleanfeed, Riverside or Zoom if nobody wants to install anything. Directing a voiceover session remotely is the producer's checklist for that.

Commercial voiceover is quoted per production, not by the hour: the script length, the usage and the deadline, then one number for recording, edit and delivery.

The same room has three 4K cameras and an autocue, so one script can come out as audio and as a film to camera in a single visit. The presenter's version of this problem is in how to read an autocue. For a whole book, the arithmetic changes scale, and the finished-hour maths turns a word count into studio hours.

Send us the script and the length it has to hit, and we will tell you whether it fits.

Sources

• Voices.com, Radio ad scriptwriting considerations, 18 April 2018, updated 16 September 2024
• VoiceoverGuy (Guy Harris), Voice over word count calculator, undated, checked 28 September 2026
• Kim Handysides, Timing in eLearning videos, 16 August 2022
• ACX, Narrate an audiobook, 19 August 2025

More from the Journal

• Recording your audiobook for ACX: the specs, the maths and the room
• Voice cloning has reached Downing Street. What performers, and the people who hire them, can do now
• Source-Connect Pro and EdiPrompt are in: directed ADR from a barn near Chichester
• All Journal articles

The picture at the top of this article is an illustration generated to show the set-up. It is not a photograph of a client or of a real job.