Screenplay Margins and Font: The Industry Standard

The font: 12pt Courier, and what counts as a substitute

The standard is 12pt Courier. Not 11pt, not 12pt Times, and not a font chosen because it looks cleaner on your laptop. Three fonts are in practice interchangeable: Courier New, which ships with most operating systems; Courier Final Draft, which ships with Final Draft; and Courier Prime, commissioned by the screenwriter John August for a screenwriting app and now the font most working writers choose, because it holds up better on screen than Courier New's thin strokes.

All three are monospaced at 12pt with the same metrics: ten characters to the inch horizontally and six lines to the inch vertically. That is why swapping between them is safe. They are the same page, drawn differently.

Courier is not a style preference, it is the typewriter the format was designed on. Film scripts were typed on 12-pitch typewriters, and every margin, indent and line count in standard screenplay format is a description of what those machines produced. Courier's monospacing is the load-bearing part: because every character is the same width, a 6 inch action line holds exactly 60 characters and 110 pages means a predictable number of words. In a proportional font, a 6 inch line holds a wildly variable number of characters — some lines 60, some 95 — and the page count becomes meaningless.

Do not use Times New Roman, Arial, Helvetica, Georgia, Garamond or Calibri, and do not drop to 11pt to squeeze a long script into a round number. The font is the first signal a reader registers, before they have read a word, and a script that arrives in the wrong font reads as a script written by someone who has not read one. Also leave out bold, justification, hyphenation, and paragraph indents in action: none of them belong in a screenplay, and italics are reserved for a stressed word or a foreign-language line.

The margins, in inches

US Letter paper, 8.5 by 11 inches. These are the standard measurements, measured from the edges of the paper.

The asymmetry is deliberate and it is the detail beginners get wrong. Print books use symmetric margins; screenplays do not. The left margin is half an inch wider than the right for three reasons: scripts get bound or punched, scene numbers live in the left margin of a production draft, and the indent convention is built outward from the action margin. Quote a right margin of 1 inch and a left margin of 1.5 inches and you will match every piece of screenwriting software in the world. Different applications round a tenth of an inch one way or the other, and a tenth of an inch has never cost anyone a read.

Leading, line length, and why a page holds 54 lines

Set 12pt Courier at single spacing and you get six lines to the inch. With a 1 inch top margin and a 1 inch bottom margin on 11 inch paper, that leaves 9 inches of live text: 9 times 6, or 54 lines on a page. You will see the figure quoted as 55, and page breaks will land a line either side of it depending on how dialogue blocks fall, but 54 to 55 lines is what a screenplay page is.

Two character counts follow from the same geometry and are worth memorising, because they tell you what a page actually holds:

• Action lines run to about 60 characters — 6 inches at 10 characters to the inch. A full page of action is roughly 180 to 200 words.
• Dialogue lines run to about 35 characters — a 3.5 inch column. A page of dialogue holds fewer words than a page of action, because the block is narrow and the cue line and blank lines eat into the page.

Leading is not adjustable. One line of text sits directly on the next, with a single blank line between elements and nothing else: no 1.15 spacing, no "exactly 13pt" line height, no extra space before paragraphs. Those settings exist in every word processor and all of them are a way of fitting more script onto a page than the standard allows — which is the same offence as changing the font, and it is just as visible.

One exception is worth knowing, because it is not cheating: if a speech must break across a page, the convention is (MORE) at the bottom of the page after the last line of dialogue and the character's name with (CONT'D) at the top of the next. Standard screenwriting software inserts both automatically. Widows and orphans rules for line breaks do not apply here — a screenplay page is allowed to break wherever it breaks.

Page numbers: top right, half an inch down

The page number sits in the top right of the page, right-aligned to the 7.5 inch mark, half an inch down from the top edge — inside the top margin, clear of the text block, which starts an inch down. That half-inch position is the one measurement people misremember. The number is format 2. — the numeral followed by a period. Not "Page 2", not "2 of 110", not a footer.

The title page carries no number at all, because the title page is not page one of the script. Numbering then starts at 1 on the first page of the screenplay itself. Some writers leave the number off page one as a matter of taste; that is harmless either way, and every screenwriting application numbers all pages by default.

Two older conventions are worth retiring. CONTINUED: at the top and bottom of every page was standard in the typewriter era and is gone from modern scripts — it adds a line of clutter to thirty pages to solve a problem that only existed when pages were physically shuffled on a desk. What does survive is (CONT'D), and only in the specific case above, where a speech breaks mid-page. Do not add it to every appearance of a character; the reader can follow a conversation without being told who is speaking for the second time.

Page numbers matter more than they look. A producer, an agent or a reader will cite a page number when they talk about your script — "the kitchen scene on page 62" — and if your numbering sits in a footer, or your page count is off by fifteen pages, you have made your script harder to talk about. A script that is easy to reference is a script that gets discussed.

What the one page, one minute calibration is built on

The industry rule of thumb is that one page of properly formatted screenplay runs about one minute of screen time. It is not physics; it is an empirical average that the studio system settled on because scripts were typed on the same machines to the same measures, and it held up over thousands of films.

The mechanism is the geometry above. A page holds 54 lines. Dialogue in the 3.5 inch column paces at roughly the speed people speak, and action lines are calibrated to the speed a camera covers them. Take 54 lines of standard-format script, mix dialogue and action the way a scene does, and you land near a minute. Change any of the inputs — the character count per line, the number of lines per page, the shape of the dialogue column — and you break the only measurement the reader has.

The calibration is most accurate for dialogue-heavy material and at the level of a whole script rather than a single page. A dense page of action plays faster than a minute; a page of overlapping talk in a three-hander can play slower. The rule is a statistical property of 110 pages, which is why it is quoted as a script length, and why nobody promises that page 47 is exactly sixty seconds.

Here is what actually breaks when the font changes. Set the same 110-page script in 12pt Times or Arial and the 6 inch action measure holds 90 to 100 characters instead of 60. Action paragraphs drop by a third of their line count, page count falls from 110 to roughly 90, and nothing about the film has changed. Your runtime estimate is now wrong by twenty minutes, your coverage reader reports your script as a short when it is not, and any page requirement you were writing to — a contest, a fellowship, an assignment brief — has been missed. Courier at 11pt, or 1.15 line spacing, or a 1 inch left margin does the same thing in the other direction: it is a way of making a script look shorter or longer than it is, and readers who see it assume the writer is hiding something.

Page count is the currency because it is what everyone downstream uses: a feature spec is expected in the 90 to 120 page window, a runtime is estimated from it, a schedule and a budget are built on both, and the length of a script is the first line of most coverage reports. The only way to make that currency honest is to keep the page standard.

UK and A4 practice, and how stage plays differ

British film and television work to the same typographic standard as the American industry — Courier 12pt, the same indents, the same caps conventions — but the paper is usually A4, which is 210 by 297 millimetres, or 8.27 by 11.69 inches. Compare that with US Letter at 8.5 by 11 inches: A4 is a quarter of an inch narrower and about seven tenths of an inch taller.

Because the text block is defined in inches from the left edge, the action measure stays 6 inches and the dialogue column stays 3.5 inches on A4, so the page-per-minute calibration survives. What changes is the height. A4 gives an extra 0.69 inch, which is roughly four more lines per page if the bottom margin stays elastic, so a script printed on A4 without care can drift a page or two from its Letter page count over a hundred pages. The tidy way to handle it is to keep the US text block and let the extra height fall as white space at the foot of the page. UK scripts are also more likely to be fully scene-numbered from the first draft rather than only in production drafts, and UK production drafts use the same CONTINUED and scene-number conventions American drafts use. In practice most British spec scripts are written to the American standard, because that is the market they are trying to enter.

A stage play is a different document and it never uses screenplay margins. Standard play manuscript layout puts a character's name in caps at the left margin with their speech beside or beneath it, sets stage directions in parentheses or italics and indents them, uses no INT./EXT. headings at all, and typically runs to a 1 inch margin all round rather than a wide binding margin. There is no page-per-minute calibration either, because a play's running time is dominated by staging, pauses and the audience — a page of dialogue can play in forty seconds or three minutes depending on how it is performed. On top of that, published acting editions of plays are set in each publisher's house style, so a playwright's real obligation is to whatever layout the theatre or publisher asked for, not to a universal page.

The same caution applies to other formats: a multi-camera sitcom script is double-spaced and looks nothing like a film script, and its page count means something entirely different. If you are writing a screenplay, the answer is Courier 12pt, US Letter geometry, and the measurements above — and if a producer or a contest asks for something different, their instructions win, because format is only a convention until someone with the authority to change it says otherwise.

Frequently asked questions

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