Five minutes.
That is the answer most people are looking for, and it is a good one. But it is worth knowing where the number comes from, because "five minutes" is only useful if you can tell whether your speech actually is five minutes — and most people are wrong about that by some margin.
Where five minutes comes from
Five minutes is not a hard rule. It is a practical target: long enough to tell one or two stories properly, bring in the couple and finish with something sincere, but short enough to keep the speech moving when several people may be speaking.
Three minutes works perfectly well if you have one strong story and a warm ending. Seven is defensible if you are the only speaker, or if the room is genuinely with you. Beyond about eight, you are relying on goodwill rather than interest.
In the traditional UK speech order, the best man often speaks last, which cuts both ways. You have the room at its warmest, and you have a room that has already listened to two other people.
Why word count misleads you
The rough conversion is 130 words per minute, so five minutes is around 650 words. That is a useful sanity check, but it is not the whole picture, for one reason people consistently forget.
Laughter takes time. If the room reacts properly to several jokes and you wait for each response — which you should — those pauses can easily add tens of seconds that do not appear anywhere in your word count. A 650-word speech with plenty of audience reaction may therefore run noticeably longer than the word count suggests.
Pauses do the same. The deliberate silence before your sincere line, the beat while you turn towards the couple: all real time, none of it counted.
Timing it properly
The single most common mistake is timing a speech by reading it silently. Silent reading is much faster than actually delivering a speech, which is why timing it in your head gives a misleading result.
To get a real number:
- Read it out loud, standing up, at the pace you would actually speak — not the pace you read.
- Leave the pauses in. Stop after each punchline for as long as you would if people were laughing.
- Time the whole thing, including the toast.
- Do it twice. The first run is always slower than the second, and the wedding-day version may be faster than either, because nerves often make people speed up.
That last point is worth taking seriously. If you are on the boundary at home, you will probably come in under on the day — and you will have rushed the parts that needed room.
What to cut first
If you are over, resist the urge to speak faster. Cut instead, in this order:
The second story that makes the same point. Two anecdotes about your friend’s misplaced confidence is one anecdote and a repetition. Keep the better one and tell it properly.
Setup you do not need. Most stories can start later than people begin them. If your first two sentences are scene-setting, try opening at the moment something goes wrong.
Names in a list. Grouped thanks — "everyone who helped get us here today" — take a fraction of the time and sound warmer than a register.
The bit about how nervous you are. One line at most, and only if it earns a laugh.
What not to cut: the sincere paragraph. That is what the jokes have been building towards, and a speech that is all humour and no warmth feels oddly hollow, however funny it was.
When a longer speech earns it
Some speeches genuinely justify seven minutes. If you are the only person speaking, if the couple have specifically asked for something substantial, or if you are covering a friendship that needs more than one story to make sense of, take the time.
The test is whether every minute is doing work. A tight seven minutes beats a padded four. What does not work is a five-minute speech delivered in seven because the speaker keeps circling back.
If you are one of several speakers
Ask what everyone else is planning. Four speakers at five minutes each is twenty minutes of speeches, which is comfortable. Four speakers at eight minutes is over half an hour, and by the end the room is thinking about the bar.
It is also worth checking who is covering the formal thanks. If the groom has already thanked the guests and both families, you do not need to do it again — and repeating it costs you a minute you could spend on something only you can say.
Getting the length right
If you have more material than time, that is a better problem than the reverse. The difficulty is choosing.
Our best man speech writer asks you for the stories, the friendship and what you actually admire, then shapes them to a target length you set — so the cutting happens before you are standing up with a page and a half too much. You see the plan free before deciding anything.
And once it is written, the Rehearsal Studio times your actual delivery, out loud, and tells you how much your pauses added. Which is the only timing that counts.