Podcast Production Time Calculator

New podcasters almost always underestimate how long production takes. Recording is the fastest part of it. Everything after that adds up quicker than anyone expects.

Where the hours actually go

Recording runs about 1x the finished episode length for a live conversation, plus 10 to 20% for fumbles, a re-take, and the two minutes at the start where somebody’s microphone is muted. This calculator uses 1.15x.

Editing is the variable that decides everything. A lightly edited interview, where you only cut dead air and the worst mistakes, runs about 1x. Removing filler words, laying in music, balancing levels and dropping in ads takes closer to 1.75x. A narrative show with sound design is 3x, and full story editing in the NPR or Gimlet mould is 4.5x and up. That last figure is not a typo: the gap between “two people talking” and “produced radio” is the single biggest lever on this page.

Show notes and transcription used to be the sink. Transcribing an episode by hand runs 2 to 4x its length, which nobody does any more. Descript, Otter and Whisper get it to 15 to 30 minutes of reviewing and cleaning up what the machine produced, and the machine is wrong in predictable places: names, jargon, and anyone who talks over someone else.

Publishing is 15 to 30 minutes once you have done it a few times. Upload, metadata, chapter markers, a clip or two for social, schedule the posts. The calculator uses 24 minutes and that is generous only if you have a template.

The formula

total_hours = (episode_min / 60) x (1.15 + edit_ratio) + notes_hrs + 0.4

Worked example

A 30-minute weekly show with moderate editing and AI-assisted notes:

• Recording: 0.5 x 1.15 = 0.6 hours
• Editing: 0.5 x 1.75 = 0.9 hours
• Notes and transcription: 0.5 hours
• Publishing: 0.4 hours
• Total: 2.4 hours per episode, about 10 hours a month

That is the realistic floor for a show that sounds decent. Doubling to two episodes a week takes it to 20 hours a month, which is a second job sitting on top of the first one.

The part that kills shows

Podfade, the industry’s own word for a feed that stops updating, usually happens somewhere between episodes 7 and 21. It is rarely a content problem. It is that the production load was set at the level the founder could sustain for a fortnight rather than for a year.

If you have a day job and the weekly figure above lands over 10 hours, cut the editing style before you cut the schedule. A consistent lightly-edited conversation beats a beautifully produced show that stops in March, and listeners forgive rough audio far more readily than they forgive a gap.

Batching helps more than any software. Record four episodes in one weekend, edit them across the following week, and the setup time gets paid once instead of four times.