How Many New Anki Cards per Day? The Arithmetic Behind 20

The number, then the math. "New cards per day" is the limit on how many cards a spaced repetition scheduler may introduce for the first time each day, and it is the one setting that prices every review you will owe afterward. Anki's default is 20, and the Anki manual states the exchange rate plainly: a habit of 20 new cards a day settles at roughly 200 reviews a day. So the defensible answer for most self-learners is 10–20 new cards per day, picked by dividing the reviews your available minutes can pay for by about ten, and only an exam date justifies the 60–120 that medical students run. Below is the arithmetic behind that verdict: where 20 comes from, why each new card eventually costs about ten reviews, a real 528-review log, and the calibration formula. Disclosure: I build Piccard, an FSRS-based capture tool, so my own numbers appear near the end. Every external figure here was verified on September 20, 2026.

Where does 20 come from?

From Anki's source code, not from research. The deck options manual describes the setting — "This option controls how many new cards can be introduced each day you open the program" — but never prints a default; the number lives in the code:

> new_per_day: 20, — ankitects/anki, rslib/src/deckconfig/mod.rs

The default that sits beside it in the same block is 200 reviews per day: the same 10:1 ratio the manual teaches elsewhere. Beginners ask about exactly this. An Anki Forums thread titled "How many cards should I be studying a day? Is this a personal preference or did Anki set the daily limit to 20 cards for good reason?" collected the answer that matters:

> "These reviews will pile up quickly. Stick with the standard settings at first, alter them if necessary when you got a feeling how Anki works" — ferophila, Anki Forums

Twenty is a midpoint somebody at Anki chose. The number carries no law of memory; the question worth asking is what 20 costs you per day.

How many reviews does one new card cost?

About ten over its life on a default-tuned deck, and four to five inside its first month. The manual's own sentence:

> "If you are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews to be roughly about 200 cards/day." — Anki Manual, Deck Options

Under spaced repetition, each card returns just before the forgetting curve would take it, and the wait lengthens every time you answer correctly. On FSRS with desired retention left at its default of 0.9 — the manual calls desired retention "the most important setting in FSRS" and its default one that "offers a good balance of retention and workload" — a card first seen today comes back after roughly 1 day, then 3, then 7, then 21, then months. Those are round numbers chosen so the multiplication stays checkable; FSRS fits real intervals to your own answer history.

Now the month, multiplied out. At 20 new per day for 30 days you introduce 600 cards. Once the four short rungs are populated, each day's queue holds four cohorts of 20, about 80 reviews a day from the clean ladder alone. Failures add more: 0.9 retention means roughly one review in ten is a lapse, and every lapsed card re-enters the short rungs. That carries a month-old deck into the 100–150 range and a mature deck toward the manual's ~200. The forums state the multiplier directly:

> "You should expect that you'll have a daily review workload of 8-10x your daily New cards." — Danika_Dakika, Anki Forums

Converted to minutes at a brisk ten seconds per review:

That table is the whole answer wearing different numbers. "20 a day" is a 30-minute-a-day commitment. It is every day, indefinitely, for as long as the deck lives.

What does a real review log look like?

Mine, from my own Piccard account, because a worked example beats a heuristic. Between July 24 and September 18, 2026, I introduced 94 cards and answered 528 reviews across 39 active days. Busiest single day: 61 reviews, with several days landing in the 40–50 range. That is 528 ÷ 94 ≈ 5.6 reviews per card so far, which sits between the first-month ladder (4–5) and the long-run ten — where a two-month-old deck should sit. Per day it comes to 528 ÷ 39 ≈ 13.5 reviews on each day I actually studied, with those 94 new cards spread across the whole 57-day stretch.

I never chose that number; capture paced it. Cards entered when the material I was reading or watching handed them over, and the review load stayed a few quiet minutes rather than a decision. The community threads describe the opposite pole: r/Anki's "How many new cards/day do you recommend?" draws replies from people carrying four-figure review backlogs who treat any increase in new cards as the expensive decision it is, and in "How many new cards do you guys learn in a day?" the language learners cluster around 10–20 new cards, with one running 20 cards that cover only 10 words because each word carries two cards.

How do you set your own number?

Work backward from minutes, not forward from ambition. The formula: (minutes available × 60 ÷ seconds per card) ÷ 10 = new cards per day. Fifteen minutes at ten seconds a card budgets about 90 reviews, so about 9 new a day; call it 10. Half an hour budgets roughly 180, which is the default 20. A full hour reaches about 40. If you would rather not do the arithmetic, there is a self-calibrating trick from the forums:

> "An alternative approach is to set a review limit and 9999 new limit." "Within a few days this will stabilise to a reasonable number of new cards per day for your given review limit" — anon12869913, Anki Forums

Set the review ceiling where your minutes are. Open the new-card limit completely. Let the scheduler discover your number. The same thread's contributors add the guardrail: if reviews start slipping, pause new cards until you are caught up.

What about the MCAT and medical decks?

Medical learners run three to six times the default because a test date exists. Two r/Mcat threads show the shape: in "How many cards per day" the original poster runs the MileDown deck at 20 new cards per section per day, working backward from a June exam, and in "How many Anki cards should I be reviewing a day? (Test date: May 4th)" a poster describes clearing about 900 review cards in a single 1.8-hour sitting while learning roughly 20 new per subject. That workload is rented from the calendar; nobody sustains 800 reviews a day after the exam passes. If you have no exam date, you have no reason to be in that row of the table.

Where the dial lives in Piccard

Piccard has no new-cards-per-day knob at all, and that is deliberate. The scheduler is FSRS-6 with desired retention locked at 0.9 and four buttons from again through easy, no settings screen in between, so every line of arithmetic above applies unchanged. What gets paced instead is capture: a caption or media confirm takes at most 20 cards per round, a pasted document at most 40, and a document longer than 120,000 characters splits across four chunks toward a ceiling near 100 candidates per round. A ten-minute cache sits in front of proposals, so the same text pasted twice hands back the same batch; depth comes from pasting the next slice of the source.

On YouTube, capture means a video that has a caption track: the transcript unrolls line by line, you click the line that beat you, and only that line's candidates come back. Whole-video conversion is deliberately absent; you confirm line by line. What you feed the daily number matters as much as the number itself: for Japanese, the deck shortlist is in the best Japanese Anki decks (short version: Kaishi 1.5k first), the first 800 words have their own post in JLPT N5 vocabulary.

The free tier is 150 energy (about 150 cards), then prepaid top-ups at $5 / $10 / $20; no subscription, and topped-up energy never expires. Tier details are on the pricing page. The extension lives here: Piccard on the Chrome Web Store.

The honest close

Cutting new cards is cheap. Skipping reviews is not. When the queue outgrows your minutes, lower the new-card count and keep answering everything that is due; skipping reviews to keep introducing new cards is how decks die. The failure mode has a face — an r/Anki poster with about 4,856 cards spread across six decks asking whether 50 new a day is the right way through them. It is not. Ten good new cards a day, answered honestly, will outlearn fifty that drown you by November.

All guides: Piccard Blog.