Many fans are wondering what the Stranger Things Season 5 episode lengths will be, particularly how long the runtime will be for every episode in the show’s final season. While Netflix has announced a lot of information about Stranger Things during its 2025 Tudum event, like the episode titles and the holiday release schedule being split into three parts, there wasn’t that much revealed about the duration of every episode. That said, The Duffer Brothers and the cast of the show have provided some details about what to expect as far as the Stranger Things 5 runtimes.
How long are the Stranger Things 5 episode runtimes?
It is expected that the Stranger Things Season 5 episode runtimes will be between 40 minutes and 2.5 hours. That said, given the episode lengths in Season 4, we anticipate that most of the episodes in Season 5 will be at least one hour long.
Actor Finn Wolfhard, who plays Mike Wheeler, revealed during an interview with Collider at the Sundance Film Festival explained the spread of runtimes for Stranger Things 5. “Not every episode is like a full-blown movie, but there are definitely some episode this year that the runtime is definitely film-length.” Describing them as “little micro-movies,” he further said that some episode will be “40 minutes, 45 mins.” This is a little surprising since every episode in Season 4, except for the finale, was anywhere from 1 to roughly 1.5 hours long.
As for the Season 5 finale, creators Matt and Ross Duffer suggested back in 2022 during the Happy Sad Confused podcast, per The Wrap, that its length would mimic Season’s 4 2.5-hour finale. “We’re more likely to do what we did here which is to just have a 2.5-hour episode,” Ross Duffer said. “I would expect the finale to be at least two hours.”
This finale length makes sense given the release date schedule for Season 5. Volume 1 will release on November 26 with four episodes, Volume 2 will drop on Christmas with three episodes, and the finale will release as a single episode on New Year’s Eve. The creators likely wouldn’t have done that if the finale wasn’t long enough to begin with.
Netflix officially unveiled the runtimes for the Season 4 episodes about two days before its premiere on May 27, 2022, so we likely won’t get official confirmation of the Season 5 episode lengths until the middle of November 2025.