Silence at End
Damian Moore, Last updated: 15 October 2026
It makes sense to give listeners an audio cue that they have reached the end of an episode and a small break before the next episode in their queue starts. It’s kind of like how in the world of graphic design it is important to give your content some “white space” to let it breathe.
You don’t want too much silence though. This is actually very common and can happen after you or your sound engineer has made a few cuts but has not reduced the overall length of the file. It’s quite confusing to the listener to be left in limbo after your show has finished if they were expecting the next show in their queue to start. They might take their phone out of their pocket and go looking for other content only to find that your silence is still playing.
We use ACX as a source of reference for selecting this range. They are a large publishing platform for getting audiobooks into various stores. There weren’t any podcast-specific standards we could find. Based on this we suggest between 1 and 5 seconds of silence (or “room tone”). For this measurement we consider silence as anything below a threshold of -40 dB.
For tips on how to create great intros and outros for your podcast you may want to take a look at this article. The start of the episode has a check of its own too: see Silence at Beginning.
The 1 to 5 second range is the default in every built-in standard, where this check is Informational — it shows up as a note on the report but won’t fail it. If your show needs something different, a custom standard lets you change the range or make the check Required.
Long pauses inside the episode are covered by a separate Silences in the middle check. It flags any silence of 3 seconds or longer (the default, and also the shortest limit you can set), shown as amber markers on the report’s player and as dividers in the transcript. You can read more about it in this news post.
