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How Long Are YouTube Courses? Real Lengths of 37 Course Playlists, Measured

The median YouTube course playlist we measured is 10h 53m long. We read 37 well-known free course playlists through our own playlist length tool on October 26, 2026: Harvard's CS50 courses, MIT and Stanford lectures, Khan Academy, Crash Course, 3Blue1Brown, language courses and courses in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Korean. Together they hold 2,240 videos and 698h 58m of video.

Below are the full results, how long each kind of course runs, what 1.5x and 2x do to them, and how many days each takes at 30 or 60 minutes a day. To check any other course, use our playlist length calculator: it gives the same numbers for any playlist link.

How long are YouTube courses?

From 3h 01m to 91h 56m, with a median of 10h 53m. The shortest playlist in our set was Essence of linear algebra (3Blue1Brown), 3h 01m; the longest was Curso Java (pildorasinformaticas), 91h 56m. The mean is 18h 53m, pulled up by a few very long series, so the median is the better "typical" number.

Most courses sit between 7 and 30 hours. Short explainer series (3Blue1Brown, Khan Academy units) take an afternoon or two. Semester-length university lecture courses (CS50x, MIT 18.06, MIT 6.006, Stanford CS229) took 26 to 35 hours, because each lecture runs close to an hour or more.

Grouped by length, the picture is clearer. Easy German's German A1 playlist, at 10h 53m, sits exactly at the median, in the 10 to 15 hour band:

And this is what each length band means in days:

How long does it take to finish a YouTube course?

For the median course, 22 days at 30 minutes a day, or 11 days at 60 minutes a day, at normal speed. At 1.5x the median course takes 7h 15m of watching; at 2x, 5h 27m.

Formula: days = total length / speed / minutes a day, rounded up. Example: 10h 53m / 1.5 = 7h 15m; at 30 minutes a day that is 15 days.

Our guide on how to finish a YouTube playlist on time turns this into a plan, and the study planner builds a day-by-day schedule for a deadline.

All 37 course playlists: length, videos and days to finish

Sorted from shortest to longest. "Days" assumes watching every day at normal speed. Each name opens the playlist on YouTube; "Calculate" opens it in our calculator, where you can change the speed and plan.

Download the data as CSV: youtube-course-lengths-2026-10-26.csv (one row per playlist, with the playlist ID, so anyone can check it).

How long are programming courses on YouTube?

The 17 programming playlists we measured have a median of 11h 51m. Harvard's CS50 lectures are long; tutorial series from single creators are shorter.

How long is CS50?

The CS50x 2025 Lectures playlist had 13 lectures and 26h 22m of video: about 2h 02m per lecture. At 1.5x that is 17h 35m, and at 30 minutes a day 53 days. Problem sets and sections come on top of the lectures.

How long is CS50P (CS50 Python)?

CS50's Introduction to Programming with Python (CS50P) 2022 had 11 lectures and 15h 54m. At 2x it is 7h 57m. This is CS50P in our calculator:

The other CS50 courses we measured: CS50's Introduction to Artificial Intelligence with Python 2023 11h 51m (8 lectures) and CS50's Introduction to Databases with SQL 11h 08m (8 lectures).

Machine learning and AI courses

Stanford's CS229 (Andrew Ng, 2018) ran 27h 52m, Stanford's CS231n 19h 30m, Andrej Karpathy's Neural Networks: Zero to Hero 19h 21m and StatQuest's machine learning playlist 29h 51m across 106 videos.

How long are math courses on YouTube?

The 8 math playlists have a median of 18h 01m, but the range is huge. 3Blue1Brown's Essence of linear algebra is 3h 01m over 16 videos. MIT's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra, Spring 2005 is 28h 00m, and Professor Leonard's Calculus 1 (Full Length Videos), with lectures up to 3h 00m long, is 44h 57m.

Khan Academy's Algebra 1 shows how video count misleads: 302 short videos that add up to 25h 20m.

How long are science and exam prep playlists?

The 8 science and exam prep playlists have a median of 8h 54m. Crash Course series are compact: Biology (2012) is 7h 55m over 41 episodes. The Organic Chemistry Tutor's New Organic Chemistry Playlist is the second longest in our set at 67h 28m, and its SAT Math playlist runs 21h 43m, which is 22 days at an hour a day before the test.

How long are language courses on YouTube?

The 4 language playlists have a median of 9h 28m. Easy German's German A1 | For Absolute Beginners is 10h 53m over 64 lessons, and Super Easy German - German Grammar & Vocab for Beginners is 43h 12m over 299 videos. Dreaming Spanish's Superbeginner Dreaming Spanish playlist is 7h 11m.

For language lessons, normal speed or slower can make more sense than 2x, because listening is the point. At 0.75x a playlist takes a third longer than its length; our watch time calculator handles slow speeds too.

Courses in other languages

We included courses in Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Korean, and they follow the same pattern. pildorasinformaticas' Curso Java desde cero (edición 2014) is the longest playlist we measured: 279 videos and 91h 56m. Curso em Vídeo's Curso de Python 3 - Mundo 1: Fundamentos is 10h 37m. Yobinori's linear algebra playlist (線形代数) is 10h 42m, Saenghwal Coding's WEB1- HTML & Internet is 3h 29m, and Mathe by Daniel Jung's Folgen und Reihen, Analysis is 4h 30m over 73 short videos.

How long is a YouTube course at 1.5x or 2x?

A third shorter at 1.5x and half as long at 2x. For the median course that means 7h 15m at 1.5x or 5h 27m at 2x instead of 10h 53m. Over all 37 playlists, 2x would save 349h 29m of watching.

Research on lecture videos found little loss up to about 1.5x and more above 2x; see is watching YouTube at 2x speed good for learning.

How long is the average video in a YouTube course?

The median of the playlists' average video length is 20m. It ranges from 4m (Folgen und Reihen (Mathe by Daniel Jung)) to 2h 02m (CS50x 2025 (Harvard)). Short-video courses suit 10 to 15 minute study slots; lecture courses need a full hour or a plan to stop mid-video and resume later.

How we measured: methodology

Every number on this page comes from YouTube's own data, read on October 26, 2026.

• Which playlists: well-known free course and tutorial playlists from university channels (Harvard CS50, MIT OpenCourseWare, Stanford), education channels (Khan Academy, Crash Course, 3Blue1Brown, StatQuest, Professor Dave Explains, The Organic Chemistry Tutor, Professor Leonard, Corey Schafer, Andrej Karpathy), language channels (Easy German, Dreaming Spanish, Curso em Vídeo) and channels in other languages. We picked the playlists before measuring them, not after.
• How: each playlist went through our own playlist endpoint, which asks the official YouTube Data API for the playlist's items and then for each video's duration.
• What counts: the sum of the durations of every playable video. Videos that are private, deleted or blocked have no duration and are not counted; across all 37 playlists this was 1 video. Live or upcoming streams would also be left out; there were none.
• What does not count: ads, exercises, readings and problem sets. A course takes longer than its video.
• Derived numbers: time at a speed = length / speed. Days = length / speed / minutes a day, rounded up. Medians are of the per-playlist totals.

How accurate is this data?

Exact for the day we measured, and it will drift. Creators add, remove and re-upload videos, and some playlists here are still growing. Measure a playlist again in the calculator for today's number. Thirty-seven playlists is a sample of well-known courses, not every course on YouTube, so treat the medians as a guide rather than a rule. The playlist page on YouTube shows the number of videos, which can include videos that can no longer be played.

Why not just add up the times yourself?

You can, but a 300-video playlist is 300 numbers. This is what each way gives you.

Why we wrote this

“I was getting distracted on YouTube. This calculator helped me concentrate on my playlist, and it also helped me complete things on time.”

Nitin Raja, who builds PlaylistTime

People ask "how long is this course?" before they start, and the honest answer is a number of hours, not a number of videos. We had the tool to measure it, so we measured the courses people actually take and published the data.

What we do differently: real durations from YouTube's official API, the playlist IDs so anyone can check, every speed at once, and the days to finish at the minutes you choose. No account.

Sources

• YouTube Data API: PlaylistItems. How we listed the videos of each playlist
• YouTube Data API: Videos resource (contentDetails.duration). The duration of each video
• Harvard CS50. The courses behind the CS50 playlists
• MIT OpenCourseWare. The courses behind the MIT playlists
• Khan Academy. The courses behind the Khan Academy playlists
• PlaylistTime course length data, measured October 26, 2026 (CSV). All playlists with their IDs

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Built by Nitin Raja. Last updated October 26, 2026. About PlaylistTime