The short answer
These are standard estimates for 12-point type with 1-inch margins on all sides. They are rounded on purpose; real documents vary, and the next sections explain exactly why.
| Format | Words per page (approx.) |
|---|---|
| Single-spaced (12pt) | 500 |
| Double-spaced (12pt) | 250 |
| 1.5-spaced (12pt) | 320 |
| Manuscript: Courier 12pt, double-spaced | 250 |
| Printed trade paperback page | 300–350 |
| Handwritten page | 250 |
Where 500 and 250 come from
Take a US Letter page with 1-inch margins. The printable area is 6.5 inches wide by 9 inches tall. Twelve-point Times New Roman set single-spaced has a line height of about 14.4 points, so the page fits 9 × 72 ÷ 14.4 = 45 lines. A full line holds roughly 65 characters, and the average English word is about 5 characters plus a space, so each line carries around 10.6 words. Multiply: 45 × 10.6 ≈ 480, which everyone rounds to 500.
Double-spacing halves the line count to about 22.5, and the same arithmetic lands near 240, rounded to 250. A4 paper is a little taller, so the same setup fits about 48 lines and comes out near 516 words single-spaced — close enough that nobody uses a separate rule for it. The two headline numbers are not decreed by any authority. They are just what the geometry works out to, which is why they have survived for decades.
What moves the number
Font matters more than most people expect. A narrow font like Times New Roman packs about 65 characters per line; a wider font like Arial fits noticeably fewer, so a page of Arial holds fewer words at the same size. Courier New is the predictable one: 12-point Courier is exactly 10 characters per inch, so 6.5 inches of line width is exactly 65 characters every line. Double-spaced, that is 22.5 × 10.6 ≈ 240 words — which is where the manuscript world's 250-word page comes from, as you will see below.
Margins move it too. Shrink the margins from 1 inch to half an inch on a Letter page and the text block becomes 7.5 by 10 inches: 50 lines × about 12.3 words per line ≈ 615 words, roughly 30% more than the standard page. Line spacing does the opposite by definition: 1.5-spacing gives 45 ÷ 1.5 = 30 lines, or about 320 words a page. And font size multiplies everything — 10-point type fits roughly 20% more words than 12-point in the same block.
The honest takeaway: any words-per-page figure is an estimate tied to its assumptions. If someone quotes you a number, ask what font, size, margins, and spacing it assumed. Two people can both be right about different numbers for exactly this reason.
One more thing eats space without adding words: whitespace. Paragraph breaks, subheadings, and bullet lists all consume lines that carry no words. A page of short paragraphs with frequent subheadings can hold a fifth fewer words than the table above claims, and dialogue-heavy fiction runs lighter than narration for the same reason. Dense, paragraph-style prose is the best case for the headline numbers; anything with visible structure lands below them.
Manuscripts and books: the 250-word page
The publishing industry standardised this long ago. A manuscript page means 12-point Courier New, double-spaced, 1-inch margins, and it is counted as 250 words. Editors, agents, and word processors use this page to estimate a book's length before it is typeset, because it does not depend on anyone's particular word choice. A 100,000-word novel is 400 manuscript pages. An 80,000-word novel is 320.
The printed book page is denser. A trade paperback page typically holds 300 to 350 words, so that 80,000-word novel comes out at roughly 230 to 270 printed pages before front matter. If you ever wondered how a manuscript becomes a bookstore book, this is most of the conversion: 250 words a page going in, 300-plus coming out.
Word counts to page counts, in practice
With the math above, common conversions are straightforward. A 1,000-word essay is about 2 single-spaced pages, or about 4 double-spaced. Five thousand words is roughly 10 single-spaced pages or 21 double-spaced. Ten thousand words is about 21 single-spaced pages, or 42 double-spaced — which is also exactly 40 manuscript pages at the standard 250 words a page.
If you are working from a word count rather than toward one, stop guessing and measure. Paste the text into our free word counter, get the exact count, and divide by the words-per-page figure that matches your formatting. It takes ten seconds and beats every rule of thumb on this page.
When the page stops mattering
Some formats have no fixed pages at all. E-books reflow to the screen, which is why e-readers report “locations” instead of pages. Web articles are measured in scroll depth or reading time, not pages. A useful yardstick: adults read about 200 to 250 words per minute, so 1,000 words is roughly four and a half minutes of reading. That often answers the real question behind “how many pages” — the writer wants to know whether the piece feels long or short.
For that, listening beats counting. Paste the draft into a text-to-speech tool and hear it read back. If a section drags at four minutes of listening, it will drag on the page too, whatever the page count says.