The State of Podcasting 2026

How long is the average podcast episode in 2026?

The median full episode from a podcast in Apple's top charts runs 41.8 minutes, and the mean 47.8, across 114,770 episodes from 861 shows released between 2 October 2025 and 2 October 2026. Half of all episodes fall between 23 and 62 minutes. Because daily news shows publish so often and so short, the typical show is longer than the typical episode: the median of each show's own median is 49.9 minutes.

Percentiles: 10% of episodes are under 10 minutes, 90% are under 93. Trailers (954 in the feeds) have a median of 2.5 minutes and bonus episodes (5,677) 23 minutes; neither is in the figures above.

Which podcast categories have the longest episodes?

Comedy: the typical comedy show's median episode is 66 minutes (86 shows). Next come TV & Film (62 minutes, 51 shows) and Sports (57 minutes, 85 shows). News is the shortest of the large categories at 35 minutes (114 shows).

Each bar is the typical show: the median of each show’s own median episode, so a daily news show counts once, like a weekly interview show. Counting every episode instead, the medians are Comedy 58, TV & Film 56, Sports 50, Technology 44, Society & Culture 54, Health & Fitness 53, History 50, Arts 35, True Crime 45, Business 27, Education 30, News 26, Religion & Spirituality 7 minutes. Categories are Apple’s, from each show’s primary genre; groups with fewer than 10 shows are left out.

Are podcast episodes longer in some countries?

Among the top 100 shows in each country's chart, the typical show's median episode ranges from 51 minutes in Canada to 44 minutes in India. Counting every episode instead, the gap is wider, because some charts lean on short daily shows.

Counting every episode instead: Canada 41, United Kingdom 45, United States 35, Brazil 26, Australia 41, India 27 minutes. A show in several countries’ top 100 counts in each. Only the overall charts are used here; the category charts are US-only and would tilt the US figure.

How often do top podcasts publish new episodes?

Weekly is the most common schedule (27% of 881 shows), then twice a week (17%), daily (15%) and three or four a week (14%). The median show that is still active publishes 7.2 episodes a month, measured over the six months to 2 October 2026.

Episodes a month, by category

Cadence is read from full episodes in the six months to 2 October 2026. Daily means five or more a week; irregular means the gaps between episodes vary more than their average (a season dropped at once, then silence). A show that started inside the six months is measured from its first episode, and one under four weeks old is not given a cadence. The episodes-a-month figures leave out both new shows and shows with fewer than three episodes in six months.

What day and time do podcasts release new episodes?

On weekdays: 89% of episodes come out Monday to Friday, with Thursday (19%) and Tuesday (18%) the busiest days and Sunday the quietest (5%). US shows most often release at 03:00 Eastern time, which is midnight Pacific. Times are read in each show's home market.

Each show’s times are read in its home market, the country whose overall chart ranks it highest (US for shows only in a US category chart), using one zone per country: New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Kolkata and São Paulo, daylight saving included. 1,695 episodes stamped exactly 00:00 are left out of the hours, because many feeds use midnight to mean “no time given”; they still count for the day. A UTC version is in the download.

How long should a podcast episode title be?

Top shows' titles have a median of 58 characters and 9 words; half are between 40 and 81 characters, and 35% run past 70. 28% use a colon to split the title and 16% a vertical bar.

Share of 114,884 episode titles from 845 shows (the last 12 months). The second figure gives each show equal weight. These are pattern matches, not a reading of every title: “with” followed by a capitalised word counts as a guest, so “Mornings with JJ” does too. Titles are in whatever language the show uses, so the all-caps count only covers Latin script.

Are podcasts getting longer?

For the same shows, slightly, and they publish far more often, though these are the shows that survived to chart today. The 327 current chart shows that released at least four episodes in every year from 2020 went from a typical 52 minutes to 56 minutes an episode, and from 4.4 to 8.6 episodes a month. Across all of today's chart shows, the median episode fell from 47 minutes in 2020 to 42 minutes in 2026, which suggests the newer shows in the charts are shorter, not that established shows have cut back.

2026 runs to 2 October 2026 (hollow point). The same-shows panel is every show with at least four full episodes in each year from 2020. These are today’s top shows looked at backwards: shows that stopped, or never charted, are not here, so this describes how successful shows changed, not the whole medium. Some feeds also hold only their most recent episodes; 368 of 881 reach back to 2020.

What this means if you clip your podcast

A top show that is still publishing puts out a median of 6.2 hours of new episodes a month, and a quarter of them more than 11.9 hours. 27% of episodes run past an hour.

For anyone making short clips, that length is the raw material: a long conversation has more stories and more moments that stand on their own than a short one. A weekly show at the typical length gives you roughly 4 hours a month to choose from. If you would rather not scrub through it yourself, Shorts by Slice finds the moments in a long episode and cuts them into vertical clips with captions.

Look up a show

Every show in the study, with its median episode length over the last 12 months and how often it published over the last six. Search by name or publisher, or filter by category and chart country.

How we did it

Which shows

Every show in Apple Podcasts’ top 100 for the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, India and Brazil, plus the US top 50 in eleven categories (Arts, Business, Comedy, Education, Health & Fitness, News, Society & Culture, Sports, Technology, True Crime, TV & Film), read on 2 October 2026. That is 17 charts and 887 unique shows once duplicates across charts are merged; each show keeps a record of every chart and rank it appeared at, which is in the download. The overall charts for United States and United Kingdom came from Apple’s Marketing Tools RSS API. For Canada, Australia, India and Brazil that API timed out or returned an error, so we used Apple’s older iTunes RSS chart; when we compared the two on 2 October 2026 they returned the identical US top 100 in the identical order. The category charts are only available from the iTunes RSS chart. Each show’s feed address and primary genre come from the iTunes Lookup API, and sub-genres are rolled up to their parent using Apple’s genre list.

The feeds

Each public feed was fetched once on 2 October 2026, at no more than three requests a second, with a User-Agent naming this page. 881 feeds answered; 6 shows are missing (3 had no public feed address, 3 returned an error or timed out), and we did not retry around a refusal. No audio was downloaded. From each episode we read the title, publication date, itunes:duration, enclosure size and type, episode type, explicit flag and season and episode numbers. Descriptions were not kept.

Cleaning

• Which episodes. Length, title and timing figures use full episodes released in the 12 months from 2 October 2025 to 2 October 2026 (114,910 episodes). Episodes marked trailer (954) or bonus (5,677) are reported separately; an episode with no type counts as full, which is Apple’s default.
• Durations. Read from itunes:duration in seconds, MM:SS or HH:MM:SS (minutes above 59 accepted, fractions rounded). 115 episodes had no readable duration and 25 fell outside one minute to twelve hours; both are left out of length figures rather than guessed.
• Duplicates. An episode repeated in the same feed (same guid) counts once (87 dropped). A show in several charts counts once.
• Outliers. We report medians and percentiles rather than averages, so a few four-hour episodes do not move the headline. Groups of fewer than 10 shows are not shown.
• Dates. Publication dates are converted to the show’s home-market time zone (see above); scheduled episodes dated in the future would be dropped (there were none).
• Cadence. Episodes per week over the six months to 2 October 2026: daily is 5 or more, three to four a week is 2.5 to 5, twice a week 1.5 to 2.5, weekly 0.75 to 1.5. Episodes released within the same minute count as one release. Shows with fewer than three episodes in six months are their own group, a show that started inside the six months is measured from its first episode, and one under four weeks old is labelled new.

Limitations

• Top-chart bias. These are the most popular shows on Apple Podcasts. Independent and new podcasts may look quite different.
• Survivorship. The 2020–2026 trends are today’s chart shows looked at backwards, not a sample of podcasts that existed in 2020.
• RSS durations are self-reported. We checked them against file size: for 83,615 audio episodes with both, 0.3% implied a bitrate outside 16–400 kbps, suggesting a wrong duration. Dynamically inserted adverts can also make the real file longer than the stated duration.
• Release times are the feed’s. Some hosts stamp the time the episode was scheduled or uploaded, not when it went live.
• Chart day. Apple’s charts move daily; this is one day’s snapshot.

Spot checks

After the run we re-fetched ten feeds by hand (The Daily, Crime Junkie, Up First, The Rest Is History, The Joe Rogan Experience, Unravel, Global News Podcast, Não Inviabilize, Tomorrow, Today and Pardon My Take) and compared the three latest episodes in each, read with a separate parser, against our dataset. All 30 durations and dates matched.

Attribution and terms

Chart positions are from Apple’s public Apple Podcasts chart feeds; episode data is from each show’s own public RSS feed, and the shows and their publishers own their titles and content. We used only publicly published feeds and Apple’s public chart APIs, did not scrape any website, and publish only aggregate statistics and per-show summaries. Slice is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Apple or any show listed here.

How to cite

The data is free to reuse under CC BY 4.0, with credit to Slice:

Slice. “The State of Podcasting 2026.” Data fetched 2 October 2026. https://tryslicemedia.com/data/state-of-podcasting-2026

Download the data (CSV) Aggregate tables (CSV)

The scripts that produced this are scripts/podcast-rss/fetch.js and scripts/podcast-rss/analyse.js; we plan to re-run them monthly. Questions or corrections: mediabyslice@gmail.com.