By kodewright · Published: 2026-04-21 · Updated: 2026-11-02
How Many Words Per Page? Double-Spaced, APA & MLA
Exactly how many words fit on one page? Get the definitive breakdown for double-spaced, APA, MLA, and more — plus free tools to hit your targets.
One double-spaced page holds about 250 words. Single-spaced, it's about 500. Both numbers assume 12pt Times New Roman and 1-inch margins, which is what APA, MLA and Chicago all ask for, so they're the right defaults for most essays.
Font, size and paper size move the count by a few dozen words either way. The rest of this page covers how much.
Words per page by format
All rows assume Letter (8.5 × 11 inch) paper with 1-inch margins on every side.
| Format | Font | Size | Spacing | Words per page |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| APA 7th Edition | Times New Roman | 12pt | Double | ~250 |
| MLA 9th Edition | Times New Roman | 12pt | Double | ~250 |
| Chicago / Turabian | Times New Roman | 12pt | Double | ~250 |
| Standard academic | Arial | 11pt | Double | ~270 |
| Standard academic | Calibri | 11pt | Double | ~280 |
| Standard academic | Courier New | 12pt | Double | ~200 |
| Professional report | Times New Roman | 12pt | Single | ~500 |
| Professional report | Arial | 11pt | Single | ~540 |
APA, MLA and Chicago land on the same number because they ask for the same core formatting. Font is where the figures actually diverge. To check your own draft, paste it into the Word Counter. I built it so the text is processed in your browser and never sent to a server, so it's fine for unpublished work.
Where 250 comes from
Words per page is lines per page times words per line. With 1-inch margins on Letter paper you have a 6.5 × 9 inch text block. Double spacing at 12pt gives you about 24 lines in it, and single spacing about twice that, which is why the single-spaced figure is double the other.
I wanted to see how full a page really gets, so I laid out continuous prose in Liberation Serif, which has the same character widths as Times New Roman. At 12pt it fit about 15 words on a line, and 24 double-spaced lines came to roughly 365 words. That's the ceiling for a page with no headings, no paragraph breaks and no indents. Real essays have all three, and a short last line on every paragraph adds up, so 250 is a safe planning number rather than a measurement of a full page. I did the same for the other fonts in the table. Arial 11pt and Calibri 11pt came out higher than Times New Roman and Courier New 12pt came out lowest, the same order as the table.
What APA says
APA 7 (published in 2020) allows several fonts: 12pt Times New Roman, 11pt Calibri, 11pt Arial, 11pt Georgia, or 10pt Lucida Sans Unicode. It wants double spacing everywhere, including the abstract, references and block quotes, 1-inch margins, and a 0.5 inch first-line indent on each paragraph.
All of those fonts land between 250 and 290 words per page, with Times New Roman at the low end and Calibri at the high end. The running head or page number doesn't change the word count, but a missing one is easy for a reviewer to notice, so do it in a separate formatting pass once the text is final.
What MLA says
MLA 9 (2021) asks for a readable 12pt font, with Times New Roman as the usual choice, double spacing, 1-inch margins, and your last name plus the page number in the top right. Word density matches APA at about 250 per page. The differences are in the Works Cited list and the in-text citation format.
If you switch between APA and MLA for different classes, your page math stays the same. A 3,000-word essay is 12 pages in either.
How much the font matters
The style guide barely changes the count. The font changes it more.
Courier New is monospaced, so every character takes the same width and "ill" takes as much room as "www". At 12pt double-spaced you get around 200 words per page, which turns a 1,000-word essay into 5 pages instead of 4. Some instructors ask for it on creative writing submissions because it looks typewritten, so check before you assume.
Calibri is narrower than Times New Roman at the same point size. At 11pt double-spaced it fits about 280 words per page, and APA 7 explicitly allows it. Your paper will simply come out shorter than a classmate's in Times New Roman.
I'll admit that at university, when an assignment was set in pages and not words, I changed the font, spacing or margins to make the text look longer. It's a known trick and instructors know it too, so I wouldn't count on it. If you're short, add content, or check the assignment for a word count, which is usually the real requirement.
If you're the one building a template, for a thesis, a report or a book interior, you need to see how a font flows across a page before the real text exists. Placeholder text of a known length does that. How to generate lorem ipsum online explains how to get an exact word count instead of a vague block, so you can check whether 500 words fill two pages in your font.
Pages to words
If your assignment is in pages, this is the reverse lookup:
| Pages | Double-spaced (~250 per page) | Single-spaced (~500 per page) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 page | 250 words | 500 words |
| 2 pages | 500 words | 1,000 words |
| 3 pages | 750 words | 1,500 words |
| 5 pages | 1,250 words | 2,500 words |
| 10 pages | 2,500 words | 5,000 words |
| 15 pages | 3,750 words | 7,500 words |
| 20 pages | 5,000 words | 10,000 words |
For the specific case of 1,000 words, with every font, both paper sizes and both spacings, see 1,000 words to pages. This page is the general reference and that one is the worked example.
A4 and Letter paper
Outside the United States, and for many international journals, the standard paper is A4 (210 × 297 mm). It's slightly narrower and slightly taller than Letter. In the same layout test, A4 fit two more double-spaced lines per page but each line was a little shorter, and for Times New Roman the net result was about 4% more words per page. On a 3,000-word essay that is about half a page. On a 30-page thesis it adds up to a page or more.
I write on A4, and I'd set the paper size first thing. Changing it at the end shifts every page break. Most American universities expect Letter and most European ones expect A4, so check which yours wants.
Copy-paste leftovers
Text copied from a PDF, a website or another document can bring along characters you can't see: non-breaking spaces (U+00A0), zero-width joiners (U+200D) or curly quotes. I've seen text pasted from a PDF arrive with stray line breaks and odd spaces that broke the formatting and the count.
Different tools treat those characters differently, which is one reason Google Docs and Word can disagree on the same text. If your paste looks wrong or the counts don't match, run it through Remove Spaces. It strips non-breaking spaces, fixes PDF line break artifacts and normalizes whitespace.
Before you submit
- Spacing: the whole document is double-spaced, reference list included.
- Font: 12pt Times New Roman, or whatever your style guide approves.
- Margins: 1 inch on all sides.
- Paper: Letter or A4, as required.
- Hidden characters: pasted text cleaned with Remove Spaces.
- Final count: checked in the Word Counter.
The number in your writing app isn't always the number your instructor's app shows. Word includes footnotes in its count by default. Google Docs leaves them out unless you tick the option. Notion has a word count too, but it's in the ••• menu under Page statistics, doesn't update live, and is desktop only. If you're close to a hard limit, how to check word count in Google Docs, Word and Notion gives the menu path for each and explains where the counts split. It takes two minutes, and being 10% over can cost marks.