Every dissertation season the same question floods every academic forum and group chat — how long should a literature review be — and the reason nobody gives a straight answer is because they're trying to be accurate rather than helpful. So here's the helpful version: aim for 20–30% of your total word count, make sure every paragraph is doing real critical work, and stop when you've covered the key debates and identified your research gap clearly. That's it.
The students who nail their literature reviews aren't the ones who hit the highest word count — they're the ones who build a coherent argument through their sources rather than just summarising them one by one. If your lit review reads like an annotated bibliography it needs a rethink, and if every paragraph is moving your argument forward then you're already in a better place than most of your cohort