Most master’s theses in Canada run between 80 and 150 pages, front matter and bibliography included. The handful of universities that publish a hard ceiling set it between 150 and 200 pages. Below that range, the number that actually governs your document is not the page count at all. It is the word count, and the layout rules your university imposes on top of it.
The direct answer, with the numbers universities publish
Very few Canadian universities put a number on thesis length. Those that do are worth quoting exactly, because they are the ones your graduate studies office will apply.
McGill’s Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies is the most explicit in the country: “Normally, a Master’s thesis does not exceed 100 pages in length. GPS considers 150 pages to be the maximum (including title page, abstracts, table of contents, contribution of authors/preface, acknowledgements, bibliography/reference list, and appendices).”
Polytechnique Montréal publishes the same order of magnitude and adds the conversion that makes it usable: assuming roughly 400 words per page at 1.5 line spacing, a mémoire should not exceed 100 pages and a thèse should not exceed 175.
McMaster is more permissive: “the text of the Ph.D. thesis must not exceed 300 pages double spaced; a Master’s thesis must not exceed 200 pages double spaced.”
The University of New Brunswick sets the widest ceiling and, usefully, gives both units: “Normally, a Master’s Thesis should not exceed 200 pages in length (50,000 words) and a PhD dissertation should not exceed 400 pages in length (100,000 words) from title page to CV.”
Notice what those four have in common. Every one of them is phrased as a maximum, none of them sets a minimum, and each defines what is counted differently.
By discipline: where the real variation lives
University-wide rules are blunt. Departmental guidelines are where discipline shows up, and the spread is wide.
Art history. Concordia’s Department of Art History specifies that “MA theses are 13,000 - 15,000 words in length (plus notes, title page, abstract, acknowledgements, table of contents, list of illustrations, figures, bibliography, and appendices where applicable).” At 400 words per page, that is roughly 35 pages of body text before everything else is added.
Political science. Carleton’s Department of Political Science puts the master’s thesis at 80 to 100 pages, against 65 to 80 pages for the research essay option.
Journalism. Carleton’s School of Journalism and Communication states that a thesis “will normally be 30,000 to 50,000 words in length (approximately 120 double-spaced pages), although there is no absolute minimum or maximum.”
Planning. Waterloo’s School of Planning answers the question head on: “An ideal master’s thesis should be between 90 and 110 pages of text exclusive of references and appendices.”
Education. The University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Education works in words first: “The final text should range in length between 20,000 and 25,000 words but may not exceed 35,000 words (between 100 and 130 pages).”
Health sciences. McGill’s Faculty of Dental Medicine and Oral Health Sciences simply restates the 100 and 150 page figures from GPS, which is common in experimental fields where the university-wide rule already fits.
The pattern is consistent. Text-heavy disciplines are expressed in words and lean short in pages once the count excludes notes and figures. Empirical disciplines are expressed in pages and absorb tables, figures and appendices that inflate the count without inflating the argument.
Master’s versus PhD: the ratio is roughly two to one
Where a university publishes both numbers, the doctoral figure is between 1.75 and 2 times the master’s figure.
Polytechnique Montréal gives 100 pages against 175. McMaster gives 200 double-spaced pages against 300. The University of New Brunswick gives 200 pages (50,000 words) against 400 pages (100,000 words).
That ratio reflects scope, not effort per page. A PhD thesis typically carries several distinct studies, a deeper literature review and a discussion that has to situate the whole programme of research. If you are moving from a master’s to a doctorate, our guide on how to write a master’s thesis covers the structural shift.
What Canadian universities actually cap, and what they do not
Here is the part that surprises most students. Page count is almost always a recommendation. The abstract word count is a hard limit, checked at deposit.
The University of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies is unambiguous: “Abstract must not exceed 350 words for a doctoral thesis or 150 words for a master’s thesis.”
Western University’s Senate policy uses the same figures: “The abstract must be no longer than 350 words for a doctoral thesis and 150 words for a master’s thesis.” Western adds a separate summary for a lay audience, itself capped at 350 words.
In Quebec the caps are higher and the units differ. Université de Montréal allows 250 words (one page) for a mémoire and 500 words (two pages) for a thèse, plus a maximum of ten keywords. McGill measures in characters rather than words: “Abstracts have a maximum limit of 4000 characters.” Polytechnique Montréal states that a résumé generally does not exceed three pages. The University of New Brunswick caps its abstract at 350 words.
So the enforced numbers are: abstract length, keyword count, margins, line spacing and pagination. Appendices, by contrast, are rarely capped at all. McGill is the notable exception, since its 150-page maximum explicitly swallows appendices and bibliography. At Waterloo’s School of Planning the opposite applies, since the 90 to 110 page target excludes references and appendices entirely.
Before you worry about your total, check which document your university counts. The same thesis can be 120 pages or 160 pages depending only on where the line is drawn.
Why page count depends on the layout you are given
A page is not a unit of content. It is a unit of layout, and your university chose the layout.
Polytechnique Montréal gives the conversion outright: a document at 1.5 line spacing holds roughly 400 words per page. Move that same text to double spacing, which McMaster and the University of New Brunswick both assume in their limits, and you land closer to 250 words per page. The identical manuscript grows by about 60 percent without a single new sentence.
Line spacing is only the first variable. Margins set by policy, mandatory 12-point type, whether footnotes sit at the bottom of the page or at the end of each chapter, whether figures get their own page with the caption on a separate sheet, whether appendices restart their pagination: each of these moves your total by several pages. Two students with the same research and the same word count can hand in documents that differ by thirty pages.
This is why comparing your page count to a friend’s at another university tells you nothing useful.
How to estimate your final length before you format
Plan in words. Convert to pages only at the end.
- Set a word budget per chapter. Use your discipline’s published figure if there is one. Twenty thousand words for a humanities or education thesis, fifteen thousand for an art history thesis, thirty thousand for a journalism thesis are all real published targets.
- Divide by the words-per-page factor your university’s spacing implies. Roughly 400 at 1.5 spacing, roughly 250 at double spacing.
- Add front matter. Title page, abstract, table of contents, lists of tables and figures, acknowledgements. Ten to fifteen pages is typical.
- Add one page per full-page figure or table, plus a page for any caption your university requires on a separate sheet.
- Add the bibliography and appendices, then check whether your university counts them. That single check decides whether you are inside or outside a limit like McGill’s.
Do this once at the outline stage and once after your literature review. It costs twenty minutes and it prevents the most expensive discovery in graduate writing, which is finding out at deposit that your document is forty pages over.
Conclusion
If you need one number, use 80 to 150 pages for a Canadian master’s thesis. If you want the number that matters, use your word count, since that is what survives a change of line spacing. Then read your own university’s guidelines for two things specifically: the abstract word limit, which is enforced, and the list of what counts toward any page maximum, which varies more than anything else in the rules.
Last verified: 2026-09-03.