Planning my doctoral work: What's the typical page length for a dissertation?

[REbus]

I'm starting to map out my PhD dissertation and I'm trying to get a realistic sense of scope. I know this varies tremendously by field, but I'm hoping to hear from people who've been through it—what's the typical page count for a dissertation in your experience?

From what I've gathered researching different universities, the range is surprisingly wide. Harvard's graduate school says most dissertations run between 100 and 300 pages . That's a huge range! For humanities fields like English, the University of Waterloo suggests 200-400 pages, excluding bibliography . That makes sense since literary analysis often requires deep textual engagement.

But STEM fields seem much more compact. Yale's medical school requires a minimum of 30 pages of text for their MD theses, with most averaging 40-80 pages . That's a completely different scale! And I've seen European programs where master's theses are expected to be just 25-30 pages .

For context, I'm in social sciences, and my advisor just said 'write until you're done'—which is not helpful for planning! If you've defended successfully, how many pages was your dissertation? Did you feel pressure to hit a certain length, or was quality the main focus?

 

[Disser]

I'm starting to map out my PhD dissertation and I'm trying to get a realistic sense of scope. I know this varies tremendously by field, but I'm hoping to hear from people who've been through it—what's the typical page count for a dissertation in your experience?

From what I've gathered researching different universities, the range is surprisingly wide. Harvard's graduate school says most dissertations run between 100 and 300 pages . That's a huge range! For humanities fields like English, the University of Waterloo suggests 200-400 pages, excluding bibliography . That makes sense since literary analysis often requires deep textual engagement.

But STEM fields seem much more compact. Yale's medical school requires a minimum of 30 pages of text for their MD theses, with most averaging 40-80 pages . That's a completely different scale! And I've seen European programs where master's theses are expected to be just 25-30 pages .

For context, I'm in social sciences, and my advisor just said 'write until you're done'—which is not helpful for planning! If you've defended successfully, how many pages was your dissertation? Did you feel pressure to hit a certain length, or was quality the main focus?

My advisor said the same thing, and I spiraled for weeks. For context, I'm in sociology and landed at 210 pages (excluding references). Some in my cohort hit 150, others 300+. It really depends on your methodology—qualitative work tends to run longer.

The best advice I got: look at recently approved dissertations in your specific department. Page counts vary wildly by institution and committee. My university's library has a database of past dissertations—game-changer for seeing what actually passes. You've got this!