How Long Should a Eulogy Be and What That Looks Like

A eulogy should run 3 to 5 minutes, which is about 500 to 750 words read aloud at a funeral pace. Five minutes is the usual ceiling unless the celebrant or the family asks for longer. Nobody has ever left a funeral complaining that the eulogy was too short.

You are probably asking because someone gave you a number and you have no idea what that number looks like on a page. Or because you have written something and you cannot tell if it is too much.

Most pages give you minutes and stop there. Below you will find the same man's life written out three times, at ninety seconds, three minutes and five minutes, so you can see what you gain and lose at each length. Then a way to time your own draft and cut it down.

How long is an average eulogy?

The average eulogy at a funeral runs about 4 minutes. Most funeral directors and celebrants plan for 3 to 5 minutes per speaker, and most services allow one or two speakers, occasionally three.

To turn minutes into words, use 140 words per minute. That is slower than ordinary conversation, which runs nearer 150 to 160. You read more slowly at a funeral because you pause, because you look up, and because your breathing is not normal. People who plan at 160 words per minute always overrun.

• 90 seconds: about 210 words
• 2 minutes: about 280 words
• 3 minutes: about 420 words
• 4 minutes: about 560 words
• 5 minutes: about 700 words
• 7 minutes: about 980 words
• 10 minutes: about 1,400 words

If you are holding four double spaced pages, you are at eight minutes and you need to cut.

The same life, written at three lengths

These three are all for the same man, a plumber called Ray who died at 71. They are not the same text trimmed. Each one is written to work at its own length, which is the whole point: a short eulogy is not a long one with the middle removed. If you only need the shortest shape, there are more of those in our short eulogy examples.

1. Ninety seconds, about 200 words

Use this when there are several speakers, when you are not sure you can hold it together, or when the service is tight. One trait, one story, one goodbye.

My dad was Ray Dillon. He was a plumber for forty-one years and he was my father for thirty-eight of them.

If you came today because Ray fixed something at your house, you are in the right place. That is how he knew most of this room. A boiler in February. A burst pipe at midnight. And then a cup of tea at your own kitchen table and a long opinion about your radiators that you had not asked for.

He was not a talker in the way people usually mean it. He was a sitter. He turned up and he stayed. When my mum was in hospital for three weeks, he drove there every evening straight from work, still in his overalls, because going home to change would have cost him twenty minutes of visiting time.

He was stubborn as well. He drove a van with 290,000 miles on the clock and would not replace it, and he argued with my mother about the thermostat for twenty years and lost every single time.

Dad, we have the house. We will look after Mum. That was the only thing you ever asked for.

Thank you all for coming. He would have hated the fuss, and he would have come anyway.

2. Three minutes, about 400 words

This is the safe default if nobody has given you a limit. Room for two stories and one honest line about who he actually was.

My dad was Ray Dillon. He was a plumber for forty-one years, a husband to my mother Christine for forty-four, and my father for thirty-eight.

If you are here because Ray fixed something at your house, you are in the right place. That is how he knew most of this room. A boiler in February. A burst pipe at midnight on a Sunday. And then a cup of tea at your own kitchen table, and a long opinion about your radiators that nobody had asked for.

He was not a talker in the way people usually mean it. He was a sitter. He turned up and he stayed. When my mum was in hospital for three weeks in 2019, he drove there every evening straight from work, still in his overalls, because going home to change would have cost him twenty minutes of visiting time. The nurses knew him by the smell of solder.

He taught my sister and me to work, and he never gave a speech about it once. He took us out on jobs from about the age of eleven and handed us whatever nobody else wanted. Under the sink. In the loft. In the crawl space. I was fifteen before I worked out that he was paying us out of his own pocket, because the customers were not paying for a child.

He was stubborn. I am saying that at his funeral because he would say it at mine. He drove a van with 290,000 miles on the clock and would not replace it. He argued with my mother about the thermostat for twenty years and lost every single argument, and he kept starting them, which tells you most of what you need to know about the two of them.

I asked him once what he was proudest of. He thought about it properly, the way he thought about everything, and he said the extension on the back of the house. Then he looked at the two of us and said, and the pair of you, obviously.

Dad, we have the house. We have the extension. We will look after Mum, which is the only thing you ever actually asked us for.

Thank you all for coming. He would have hated the fuss, he would have come anyway, and he would have been early.

3. Five minutes, about 650 words

Five minutes buys you a beginning, a hard part and a proper ending. It is the longest you should go without a very good reason.

My dad was Ray Dillon. He was born in 1954 in a house about a mile from here. He was a plumber for forty-one years, a husband to my mother Christine for forty-four, and my father for thirty-eight.

I want to start with the thing most of you knew him for, because half this room met him with a wrench in his hand.

If Ray fixed something at your house, you did not just get it fixed. You got a cup of tea at your own kitchen table, a long opinion about your radiators that you had not asked for, and a bill that was usually lower than the figure he had quoted. My mother went through the books once and found eleven jobs in a single year where he had charged nothing at all. When she asked him about it he said those were the ones where people had cried, and he was not going to take money off somebody who had cried.

He was not a talker in the way people usually mean it. He was a sitter. He turned up and he stayed. When my mum was in hospital for three weeks in 2019, he drove there every evening straight from work, still in his overalls, because going home to change would have cost him twenty minutes of visiting time. The nurses knew him by the smell of solder. One of them told us last week that she used to save him the chair by the window.

He taught my sister and me to work, and he never gave a speech about it once. He took us out on jobs from about the age of eleven and handed us whatever nobody else wanted. Under the sink. In the loft. In the crawl space under Mrs Arnott's bungalow, where I found a dead bird and screamed, and he laughed so hard he had to sit down on the lawn. I was fifteen before I worked out that he was paying us out of his own pocket, because the customers were not paying for a child.

He was stubborn. I am saying that at his funeral because he would absolutely say it at mine. He drove a van with 290,000 miles on the clock and would not replace it. He argued with my mother about the thermostat for twenty years and lost every single argument, and he kept starting them, which tells you most of what you need to know about the two of them.

The last eight weeks were hard and I am not going to walk you through them. What I will say is that he was himself nearly the whole way. Four days before he died he asked me whether I had bled the radiator in the back bedroom. I had not. I have now.

I asked him once what he was proudest of. He took the question seriously, the way he took everything seriously, and he sat with it a while. He said the extension on the back of the house. Then he looked at my sister and me and said, and the pair of you, obviously.

So here is what I want to leave you with. My dad was not a complicated man and he had no interest in being one. He fixed things. He showed up. He stayed later than he needed to. When he said he would be somewhere at eight, he was there at ten to.

Dad, we have the house. We have the extension. The van is going to the scrapyard and you are not here to argue about it. We will look after Mum, which is the only thing you ever actually asked either of us for.

Thank you all for coming today. He would have hated the fuss. He would have come anyway, he would have been early, and he would have parked badly.

4. Four minutes for a mother, about 530 words

A different voice, because length is not the only thing that changes. This one is warmer and funnier, and it is for a mother who left instructions.

My mum was Anne Keating and she would want me to tell you, before anything else, that she chose the sandwiches.

She planned this. There is a list in her handwriting in my bag. It says no lilies, something from the garden instead, and underneath that, in capitals, KEEP IT SHORT. So I am taking four minutes and she can take it up with me later.

Mum was a primary school teacher for twenty-nine years, nearly all of it at St Brigid's, and at least four people in this room learned to read sitting next to her. She kept every class photograph, all twenty-nine years of them, in a cupboard on the landing, and she could still name most of the children in the 1991 one. She retired in 2014 and then went straight back in two mornings a week as a volunteer, which tells you she did not retire, she just stopped being paid.

She was funny in a way that caught you out. She looked like a nice woman in a cardigan and then she would say something about a colleague that you would remember for ten years. At my wedding she told my husband, in front of his parents, that he had got the good one but it had taken him long enough.

She fed people. That was her language. If you turned up at the house you ate, and it did not matter what time it was or whether you were hungry or whether you had eaten somewhere else an hour earlier. When I was nineteen and had my heart broken she did not ask me a single question. She made a shepherd's pie and sat on the end of my bed and watched three hours of television she hated.

She was also the one who quietly dealt with things. When my dad was made redundant in 1998 she went back to full time hours inside a fortnight and never once said so in front of him. I only found out how close we came to losing the house because I found the letters after she died, in a shoebox, with the gas bills.

She was not a saint and she would be insulted if I made her one here. She could hold a grudge like a professional. She did not speak to her brother for eleven years over something neither of them would ever explain to anyone, and then one Christmas she rang him and they were fine. I asked her what had happened. She said, I decided to stop. That was the whole answer.

The last year was hard. The woman who ran a classroom of thirty-two children could not always remember which of us had the baby. But she knew us. She knew us right to the end, and she still laughed in the right places in the old stories even when she had lost the start of them.

Mum, I have the list. No lilies. There is rosemary on the coffin and it is from your garden, not the shop, because I knew you would check.

Thank you all for coming. There are sandwiches at the hall, and she chose them, so they will be the right ones.

How do you time a eulogy before you stand up?

Read it out loud, standing, at the speed you will actually use, and time it on your phone. Silent reading runs about twice as fast as speaking, which is why people are surprised at the lectern.

Three things make the real delivery longer than the practice run:

1. Pauses. You will stop after the hard lines whether you plan to or not. Add about 10 seconds a minute.
2. Looking up. Finding your place again costs two or three seconds each time.
3. Breathing. If you get upset your sentences get shorter and slower. Our notes on delivering a eulogy without crying cover what to do when that happens mid-sentence.

So an out-loud read of 4 minutes 30 means about 5 minutes on the day. A read of 6 minutes means seven, and that is over.

How to cut a eulogy down when it runs long

Cut whole units, never individual words. A eulogy trimmed word by word reads like a legal document. One that has lost a whole story still reads like a person talking.

In order, what to cut first:

1. The biography. Dates, schools, job titles, addresses. The room either knows or does not need to.
2. The second story that shows the same trait. Keep the better one.
3. The thank-you list. Fourteen names costs forty seconds and the celebrant usually does it anyway.
4. Lines about how hard this is to write.
5. Anything that needs explaining. If a story needs thirty words of setup, it is the wrong story for a funeral.

Here is what that looks like in practice. The long version:

Standing up here is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, and I want to thank the staff at Ashfield Lodge, and Reverend Hall, and my cousins Michael and Dee for all their help this week. My mother was born in Leeds in 1949, the third of five children, and she trained as a nurse at the General before she married my father in 1972 and moved down here, where she worked at the surgery on Mill Road for thirty-one years.

That is 97 words and 40 seconds, and nobody will remember any of it. The short version:

My mother was a nurse for thirty-four years. She was the kind of nurse who remembered which of her patients had nobody coming at Christmas, and did something about it.

Thirty words, 13 seconds, and the room now knows who she was. That is the trade on every cut. If the draft is starting to feel thinner rather than tighter, starting again from a fresh draft is usually faster than rescuing the old one, and the preview is free.

Is 15 minutes too long for a eulogy?

Yes. 15 minutes is roughly 2,100 words and about three times the normal length, and most services do not have room for it. The practical limit is set by the service, not by how much you have to say.

What the slot usually looks like:

• Church funeral or requiem: 3 to 5 minutes. The eulogy sits inside a fixed liturgy and the clergy will tell you the limit.
• Crematorium service: 3 to 4 minutes. These are booked in 20 or 30 minute blocks and they run to time strictly, because another family is waiting outside.
• Graveside or committal: 1 to 2 minutes. People are standing, usually outdoors.
• Celebration of life or memorial: 5 to 8 minutes, and sometimes longer. This is the one format with real room.
• Two or three speakers: 2 to 3 minutes each. Agree who covers what, or you will all tell the same story about the caravan.

Ask the funeral director for your actual slot in minutes. They will know and they will not mind being asked, and it is the most useful thing you can find out before you start writing.

Questions people ask about eulogy length

How long should a eulogy be for a mother?

3 to 5 minutes, the same as any other eulogy. Length is not a measure of love, and a room that has been sitting for forty minutes is not thinking about how much you cared. If you have more to say than fits, say the rest at the wake, where people can answer you. If you are struggling to get the first version down at all, the eulogy writer asks you a few questions and gives you something to edit instead of a blank page, and the preview is free.

How many words is a 5 minute eulogy?

About 700 words, at a funeral reading pace of 140 words per minute. On a double spaced page in 14 point that is two and a half pages. If you want a margin for pauses, write 650 and you will land just under five minutes on the day.

What are the three parts of a eulogy?

Who they were to you, two or three specific stories, and what you want the room to keep. That is the shape underneath almost every eulogy that works, at any length. The five part eulogy structure breaks the same thing down further, with a word count for each section.

What should you not say in a eulogy?

Leave out medical detail, family disputes, money, inside jokes only four people understand, and anything you have not decided whether to say. Also leave out apologies for your own nerves. There is a fuller list in our guide to what to include in a eulogy.

What is the best last line of a eulogy?

A short one, spoken to them rather than about them. Something like, "Thank you, Dad. We will look after Mum," lands better than anything grand, because it is plain and it is true. Say it slower than the rest and then stop. We collected twelve endings and the words before them if you want to see the options side by side.

Before you start cutting

Find out your real slot in minutes, write to 140 words a minute, and read it out loud standing up. If you have no draft yet and the funeral is close, you can see a free preview of one first. Four hundred words is enough. It was always going to be enough.