eDiscovery volume translator: GB to pages and review hours
Between roughly 15,500 and 678,000 pages per gigabyte, depending entirely on what the files are. Set your volume and data mix to see what your gigabytes mean in documents, pages, reviewer hours and review cost.
Updated September 6, 2026
Your data
Approximate figures are fine.
If printed and stacked, roughly 1,023 boxes of paper. Across 130 GB of collected data.
Pages by file type
How many pages and review hours are in a gigabyte?
Computed from volume.json at the default mix of 60% email, 25% office documents, 5% presentations and 10% scans, with 65% culled, 55 documents per reviewer-hour and a $50 hourly rate. Change any of those above and the figures move.
| Collected | Pages | Documents | After culling | Review hours | Review cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GB | 78,675 | 7,495 | 2,623 | 48 | $2,385 |
| 10 GB | 786,750 | 74,950 | 26,233 | 477 | $23,848 |
| 100 GB | 7,867,500 | 749,500 | 262,325 | 4,770 | $238,477 |
| 500 GB | 39,337,500 | 3,747,500 | 1,311,625 | 23,848 | $1,192,386 |
The pages-per-gigabyte guide sets out the full table by file type, with worked examples and sources.
Where these numbers come from
Published analysis of roughly 2,000 hosted matters covering more than 150 million documents produced a widely used rule of thumb: about 10,000 emails per gigabyte and 5,000 loose files per gigabyte. Email and attachments account for around 80 percent of documents in a typical collection.
| File type | Approx. pages per GB |
|---|---|
| Plain text | 678,000 |
| 100,000+ | |
| Microsoft Word | 65,000 |
| PowerPoint | 17,500 |
| Images and scans | 15,500 |
Why this matters to what you pay
A vendor charging per gigabyte bills the same amount whether that gigabyte holds 15,500 pages or 678,000. The invoice tracks storage; the work tracks documents. Two matters of identical size can differ more than fortyfold in how much a human actually has to read.
It cuts both ways, which is why this tool is worth running before you agree a price. If your data is image-heavy, per-gigabyte pricing is expensive relative to the reviewing it generates. If it is text-heavy, you may be getting comparatively good value on storage while the review bill quietly becomes the real number.
Review is the cost that actually hurts
The RAND Institute for Civil Justice study Where the Money Goes found that review accounts for roughly 73 percent of the cost of producing documents, against 19 percent for processing. That is a share of production cost, not of total litigation spend. Processing and hosting fees are the ones printed on the vendor invoice, but reviewer hours are usually the larger figure, and they scale with document count, not with gigabytes.
That is why culling matters more than any line item on a rate card. Deduplication, date filtering, search terms and email threading routinely remove the majority of a collection before a human sees it. Move the culling slider and watch the review cost move with it.
What this tool does not include
These are review costs only, human time reading documents. Processing, hosting, user licenses, production, format conversion and project management sit on top, and our pricing page publishes what they cost on a flat rate. The cost calculator models those, and the Fee Field Guide explains each one.
Where these figures come from
The hosting range of $5 to $15 per GB per month is a commonly published market rate. The review rate, reviewer hourly rate and cull percentage in volume.json are internal defaults with no published source, and the month-to-month figure is computed from our own published rate.
Common questions
How does this translator convert gigabytes into pages?
By file type, which is what decides the answer. Published analysis of thousands of hosted matters gives approximate figures of 678,000 pages per gigabyte for plain text, more than 100,000 pages for email, around 65,000 for Word documents, roughly 17,500 for PowerPoint decks, and about 15,500 for images. That is a spread of more than 40 times between text and images, which is why a gigabyte count alone tells you very little about how much work a matter involves.
What document counts does this translator use per gigabyte?
A common working rule of thumb, drawn from analysis of around 2,000 hosted matters and over 150 million documents, is approximately 10,000 emails per gigabyte and 5,000 loose files per gigabyte. Email and attachments account for around 80 percent of documents in a typical collection.
How long does it take to review a gigabyte of data?
Review speed is usually estimated in documents per hour rather than gigabytes. A reviewer working at 50 to 60 documents per hour would need roughly 170 to 200 hours to review a gigabyte of email at 10,000 documents per gigabyte. The calculator above uses 55, the midpoint of that band, as its default. Analytics, deduplication, email threading and culling reduce the reviewable set substantially before that point.
Why is document review the largest eDiscovery cost?
Document review is human time, and it scales with document count rather than storage size. The RAND Institute for Civil Justice found review accounts for roughly 73 percent of the cost of producing documents, with processing at 19 percent. Processing and hosting fees are visible on the invoice, but the reviewing hours are usually the larger number.