Is my song too long for Suno?

The song came back at 7:59 again, or it stopped in the middle of verse four, and either way you are looking at a lyric sheet with no idea whether it is too long.

The box tells you how many characters you have used, which turns out to be the least useful number on the page.

A finished song is shorter than you think

I wrote a complete one for this piece: intro, four verses, the chorus after each, a bridge, a last chorus, an outro. Twelve sections, the kind of shape most songs use.

Pasted into the free Suno lyrics check, it reads:

41 lines · 12 sections · 351 syllables · about 3:56 at 90 BPM

That sheet is 1,566 characters. A whole song, verses and repeats included, uses about a third of what the box allows.

The ceiling has not moved with v6. Suno's page on what is new in v6 says all three variants generate up to eight minutes, so the length limits below still apply after the 9 September 2026 launch. Users on v6 also report quality falling away on busy songs after about two minutes, which makes a shorter sheet safer as well as cheaper.

Characters are the weak signal

Now the same song with eight verses instead of four, which is what happens when a story-song keeps going:

73 lines · 20 sections · 631 syllables · about 6:55 at 90 BPM

That sheet is 2,808 characters. It never trips the check's character warning, which starts at 3,000, and it is already a seven-minute song. The character count did not notice, because characters do not sing. Syllables do, and the tempo decides how many of them fit in a second.

It is worse than a rough proxy. A character count includes your section tags, the blank lines between them, every space and every comma, none of which take any time to perform. Two sheets of the same length can differ by a minute depending on how many long words are in them, since "everything" costs 10 characters and 3 syllables while "I want you back" costs 15 and four.

Where the character warning finally fires, you are at eight minutes

Add two more verses and the sheet reaches 3,427 characters, which is the first point the length finding appears:

Fix   3427 characters. Songs over 3000 usually lose quality. Consider trimming
      or using Extend.

The estimate for that sheet is 8:25, which is roughly where the complaints live. A February 2026 thread is people burning credits on songs that ignored the lyrics and ran to 7:59, and a July 2025 one fills up with songs landing between five and seven minutes.

Trim the repeats before you trim the story

The cheapest thirty seconds in any sheet is the third and fourth time the chorus arrives in full. Here is the chorus from the song above:

[Chorus]
I hear the kettle in my sleep
and I still leave the hallway light
The house has learned to keep the time
you kept it for eleven years

And the version that goes in the last three repeats:

[Chorus]
I hear the kettle in my sleep
and I still leave the hallway light

On the eight-verse sheet, halving those three repeats took it from 6:55 to 6:24 and removed 48 syllables. Nothing was lost from the story, because the listener has already heard those two lines four times.

The other cheap cuts, in the order I reach for them: the second pre-chorus, which nobody misses; any instrumental break that exists because the structure looked bare on the page; and the verse that repeats information the previous verse already gave, which is usually verse three or four. On this song, each verse and the chorus repeat after it is worth about 45 seconds, and that is the only cut that shortens the story rather than the arrangement.

Note

The hard limit is real and it is not where you will get into trouble. Somebody established it by experiment in May 2026: the box takes 5,000 characters, and at 5,001 the generate button goes grey. At the density of the song above, 5,000 characters is a twelve-minute song.

What the length reading does not know

The estimate is arithmetic over your syllables, and it takes the tempo from your Style field, or from the genre if you did not give one. Change 90 BPM to 120 and the same words get shorter without a single edit.

Instrumental sections get a flat allowance rather than a real measurement, so a sheet built around long breaks will read short.

And none of it is Suno's budget. Nobody outside Suno knows what that is, and the same sheet lands differently on different days, which is what the credits thread is really about. The estimate tells you what you asked for. It cannot tell you what you will get.

Paste your lyrics, it takes ten seconds: heho.ai/tools/suno-lyrics-check