NotebookLM limits in 2026: sources, words, size

NotebookLM, now Gemini Notebook — Google renamed it on July 16, 2026, same product, new name (announcement) — has limits on three axes: how many notebooks you can have, how many sources fit in one notebook, and how big one source can be. Then one usage budget for chat and generated outputs, which since September 2, 2026 refreshes every five hours under a weekly limit instead of resetting daily. The numbers below are Google’s, copied from the help centre on the date shown, with the page linked. They change; check the link before you plan around one.

The limits, per plan

The free tier is called “Gemini Notebook Standard”. The paid tiers come with the Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra subscriptions.

Plan	Notebooks	Sources per notebook	AI usage budget
Standard (free)	100	50	1× (baseline)
Plus	200	100	2×
Pro	500	300	4×
Ultra (20 TB plan)	500	500	5× or 20× Pro
Ultra (30 TB plan)	500	600	5× or 20× Pro

Notebook and source caps checked 2026-09-28 against Google’s Upgrade Gemini Notebook page. The usage column is from Google’s usage limits page and the August 28 announcement, checked 2026-09-28. Google gives Ultra as “5x or 20x higher than AI Pro” without saying which Ultra plan gets which. The upgrade page still shows the old per-day table; Google has not updated it yet. The per-source cap is restated in the FAQ — “The current limit is 500,000 words per source or up to 200MB for local uploads”, checked 2026-09-19. Work, school and Enterprise accounts run on different numbers; the two sections below.

How many notebooks can you have in NotebookLM?

100 on the free plan, 200 on Google AI Plus, 500 on Pro, and 500 on both Ultra tiers. The ladder stops at 500: Ultra buys more sources per notebook and a bigger usage budget, not more notebooks.

Plan	Notebooks per user
Standard (free)	100
Plus	200
Pro	500
Ultra (20 TB and 30 TB)	500

Work and school accounts get the same ladder, graded by Workspace access tier rather than by subscription: 100 / 200 / 500 / 500 / 500 for Standard, More, Higher, Expanded and Highest access (Google’s Workspace page, checked 2026-09-19). Gemini Notebook Enterprise is 500 per user — below.

What happens when you hit the cap, Google does not say. The upgrade page publishes the caps and nothing about the behaviour at the limit, and we are not going to invent it. The practical answer is the obvious one: delete a notebook you are done with, or upgrade.

Usage limits: a 5-hour window and a weekly cap

Notebooks and sources are standing caps — they stay used until you delete something. Chat, Audio and Video Overviews, Reports, Deep Research and the rest draw on one AI usage budget. Since September 2, 2026 there is no fixed count per feature. Google: “the quota refreshes every 5 hours until you reach your weekly limit” (usage limits page, checked 2026-09-28).

What a request costs depends on “prompt complexity, chat length, number of sources, and the features you use” (Google’s announcement). A long chat over 300 sources costs more than a short question over five. Google publishes no per-feature price, so nobody can tell you how many chats the free budget buys.

The app shows where you stand. Its “Gemini Notebook AI usage and limits” panel has two bars: current usage as a percentage with the time it resets, and the weekly limit with its reset date. It also warns that “Advanced models and features can take up more usage.” Near the end of the budget you get “You’re almost at your AI usage limit”; at the end, “Limit reached. All features are available after [time]”. On the web, “Generate later” queues outputs like Video Overviews and Slide Decks for after the refresh.

Before September 2, 2026: fixed daily caps

Until the change, every feature had its own daily count, and “Daily quotas are reset after 24 hours; monthly quotas are reset after 30 days”. Most other limits articles still quote these numbers. They are history now:

Per day, until 2026-09-01	Standard (free)	Plus	Pro	Ultra 20 TB	Ultra 30 TB
Chat queries	50	200	500	2,500	5,000
Audio Overviews	3	6	20	100	200
Video Overviews	3	6	20 (2 cinematic)	100 (10 cinematic)	200 (20 cinematic)
Reports	10	20	100	500	1,000
Flashcards	10	20	100	500	1,000
Quizzes	10	20	100	500	1,000
Mind Maps	10	20	100	500	1,000
Deep Research	10 per month	3	20	75	200

What changed is the unit. Fifty short questions used to cost the same as fifty long ones; now the long ones run the budget down faster, and a spent budget comes back in five hours rather than the next day.

NotebookLM Enterprise limits

Gemini Notebook Enterprise is a separate Google Cloud product, not a higher consumer tier, and these are plainly not the consumer numbers. From Google’s Enterprise overview, checked 2026-09-19:

Quota	Gemini Notebook Enterprise
Notebooks	500 per user
Sources	300 per notebook
Per source	500 MB or 500,000 words
Queries	500 per user per day
Audio Overviews, Video Overviews, Mind Maps, Reports	20 per user per day each
Slide Decks, Infographics	15 per user per day each
YouTube transcripts	500,000 words per transcript

Two differences worth naming. The uploaded-file cap is 500 MB, against 200 MB on the consumer plans. And notebooks “can only be shared to other users within the same Google Cloud project” — no public links — with the data staying in that project.

The September 2 change was announced for consumer accounts. Google says nothing about Workspace or Enterprise, so the per-day figures above and below are still what their pages show.

Workspace accounts are a third thing again, neither consumer nor Enterprise. Google grades them Standard, More, Higher, Expanded and Highest access, mapped from the Workspace edition: sources per notebook 50 / 100 / 300 / 400 / 600, chats per day 50 / 200 / 500 / 1,000 / 5,000, Audio Overviews 3 / 6 / 20 / 40 / 200 (Workspace page, checked 2026-09-19). The “Expanded” add-on is not consumer Ultra: 1,000 chats a day against 2,500.

Per source: 500,000 words or 200 MB

One source can hold up to 500,000 words, or up to 200 MB for an uploaded file. This cap is the same on every consumer plan — paying raises how many sources a notebook takes, not how large each one can be. Google states it on the sources page and again in the FAQ (“500,000 words per source or up to 200MB for local uploads”), both checked 2026-08-21. Two source types have their own smaller caps: Google Slides up to 100 slides, Google Sheets limited to 100k tokens.

So the free tier’s ceiling for text is 50 sources × 500,000 words — 25 million words per notebook, if every source is full. Almost nobody’s sources are full. A typical PDF or web page is a few thousand words; the cap that bites is the 50, not the 500,000.

What counts as a source

A source is one item in the Sources panel, whatever its size. Gemini Notebook accepts, per the same Google page: PDF, Google Docs, Slides and Sheets, Microsoft Word (docx), text (txt), Markdown (md), CSV, PowerPoint (pptx), ePub, images, audio files (MP3, WAV and others), web URLs, copy-pasted text, public YouTube URLs, and Gemini chats as context. Files from Google Drive re-sync every few minutes.

Three caveats that cost people sources. A YouTube video is imported as its caption text only, public videos with captions only, and one video is one source. A web URL imports the text of that one HTML page — no images, no embedded video, no nested pages, no paywalled pages. An audio file needs speech in it.

How to fit more in

Three honest options, and one thing that does not help.

Pack the corpus into fewer, fuller sources. The cap is per item, and most items are nowhere near 500,000 words. If your material is a dataset rather than a pile of files — a chat export, a forum dump, survey free-text, a bibliography — it can be packed. source-lm does this for a JSON export: it splits the records into Markdown files under a 400,000-word budget, measured on the rendered Markdown with headings and metadata included, which leaves a margin under the 500,000-word warning. A record is never split between two files. Preview shows the file list before anything uploads, flags any file over 500,000 words, and warns when a run would produce more than 50 files — the free plan’s source cap. In a real run, a three-year Telegram group chat became 4 sources (the walkthrough); 200 paper abstracts are a small fraction of one source’s budget (literature review).

Split by notebook. The free tier gives 100 notebooks. One per course, per season, per year, per client. You lose cross-notebook questions, but each notebook stays under 50 and the chat answers from the material that matters.

Pay Google. Plus doubles the source cap to 100, Pro goes to 300, Ultra to 500 or 600. Numbers above, with the link.

What does not help: bundling YouTube videos. A video is always one source — source-lm adds them from the watch, playlist and channel pages with one click, but it does not merge transcripts, and nothing does inside Gemini Notebook. For a long playlist the honest choices are the latest N videos, one notebook per course, or the paid tier. Details on the YouTube page.

FAQ

Is there a limit for NotebookLM?

Yes. On the free plan: 100 notebooks, 50 sources per notebook, 500,000 words or 200 MB per source, and an AI usage budget for chat and outputs that refreshes every 5 hours up to a weekly limit. Paid plans raise the counts and the budget; the per-source size does not change.

Is NotebookLM free unlimited?

No. The free tier (“Gemini Notebook Standard”) is free but quota-limited — the table above. The usage budget refreshes every 5 hours until you reach a weekly limit, so “free” means free within an allowance, not unlimited.

Does NotebookLM have an upload limit?

Per file: 500,000 words or 200 MB, whichever you hit first. Per notebook: 50 uploads on the free plan, 100 on Plus, 300 on Pro, 500 or 600 on Ultra. There is no separate total-storage figure on Google’s pages.

How do I add more than 50 sources to NotebookLM?

Three ways. Combine material into fewer, larger sources — one source can hold 500,000 words, so a dataset packed into Markdown files fits in a handful of sources rather than hundreds. Spread the material over several notebooks. Or upgrade: Plus gives 100 per notebook, Pro 300, Ultra 500 or 600.

How many files can you add to NotebookLM?

50 per notebook on the free plan, 100 on Plus, 300 on Pro, 500 on Ultra 20 TB, 600 on Ultra 30 TB. Each file up to 500,000 words or 200 MB. One notebook’s theoretical text ceiling on the free plan is therefore 25 million words.

What are the limits of NotebookLM Pro and AI Plus?

Google AI Plus: 200 notebooks, 100 sources per notebook, and twice the free plan’s AI usage. Google AI Pro: 500 notebooks, 300 sources per notebook, and four times the free usage. Both keep the 500,000-word, 200 MB per-source cap. Checked 2026-09-28 on Google’s upgrade page and usage limits page.

What are the limitations of NotebookLM?

Beyond the quotas: YouTube sources are caption text only, public videos only, and videos younger than 72 hours may not import; web pages import text only and paywalled pages are not supported; audio without speech is rejected; Sheets are limited to 100k tokens and Slides to 100 slides; chat answers come only from your sources, which is the point, but it means nothing outside them. Google also states that consumer Gemini Notebook is not covered by its HIPAA Business Associate Agreement — a limit for medical material.

How many notebooks can you have in NotebookLM?

100 on the free plan, 200 on Google AI Plus, 500 on Pro and 500 on either Ultra tier; Workspace accounts follow the same 100 / 200 / 500 ladder by access tier, and Gemini Notebook Enterprise gives 500 per user. Google publishes no behaviour for reaching the cap — delete a notebook or upgrade.

Is there still a NotebookLM daily limit?

No, not since September 2, 2026. The fixed daily counts (50 chats and 3 Audio Overviews on the free plan) were replaced by one AI usage budget. It refreshes every 5 hours until you reach a weekly limit, and heavier requests use more of it. Plus gets 2× the free budget, Pro 4×, Ultra 5× or 20× the Pro budget (checked 2026-09-28).

What are the NotebookLM Enterprise limits?

500 notebooks per user, 300 sources per notebook, 500 MB or 500,000 words per source, 500 queries per user per day, and 20 per user per day each for Audio Overviews, Video Overviews, Mind Maps and Reports (15 for Slide Decks and Infographics). Checked 2026-09-19 on Google’s Enterprise overview. Enterprise is a Google Cloud product with its own sharing and residency rules, not a consumer tier.

Limits of this article

• Numbers rot. Every figure here is Google’s, first copied on 2026-08-21 and re-read from the linked pages on 2026-09-28. Google replaced the daily quotas with a usage budget on 2026-09-02 and will change things again; the link is the source, this table is a snapshot.
• The counts are Google’s. This post does not measure anything — it reads the help centre. If a quota in your account differs, your account is right.
• Our word count is not Google’s. source-lm counts whitespace-separated tokens in the rendered Markdown; Google counts with its own tokenizer. That is why the default budget is 400,000 and not 500,000, and why the 500,000 figure in Preview is a warning, not a guarantee.
• Three different products. Consumer plans, Google Workspace tiers and Gemini Notebook Enterprise each have their own numbers and their own page. Mixing them is the most common mistake in limits articles, including ours before this revision.

Not affiliated with Google. NotebookLM and Gemini are Google trademarks; this is an independent extension that automates a signed-in session.