Anki maximum reviews per day: what it does and what to set

Maximum reviews/day caps how many review cards Anki shows you in a day. The default is 200. When you reach it, Anki stops showing reviews and the rest wait until tomorrow. They don't go away: they stay due and become overdue. By default, hitting the limit also stops new cards for the day.

Where it is and what counts

It's in Deck Options, under Daily Limits, next to New cards/day.

• Review cards count. So do learning cards that have crossed into a new day (interday learning cards).
• Short learning steps don't. A card on its 1-minute or 10-minute step still comes up after you hit the limit.
• New cards stop too. Unless you turn on New cards ignore review limit, no new cards are shown once the review limit is reached.
• Subdecks. Each subdeck's limit caps what Anki takes from it, but the deck you click to study sets the total.

When reviews are held back by the limit, the congratulations screen says so and suggests raising it if you have time.

Choosing a number

Anki's manual gives a rough rule: learning 20 new cards a day leads to about 200 reviews a day. That's why the defaults are 20 and 200. If you change one, think about the other.

These are approximate; easy material needs fewer reviews and hard material more.

• If you hit the limit now and then, leave it. It smooths out a heavy day.
• If you hit it most days, the limit is hiding a growing backlog. Either raise it, or lower new cards until the reviews come down.
• Don't lower it to make a backlog look smaller. The cards still wait and get more overdue, which makes them harder to remember when they do come up.

Raising it for one day

You don't need to change the preset to do extra reviews. The daily limits section has a Today only option, and Custom Study has Increase today's review card limit, which shows the reviews that were held back. See Anki custom study.

If you're far behind

A limit won't fix a big backlog by itself. Pause new cards, then do a fixed number of reviews every day until you're caught up. What to do when reviews pile up has the steps.

In Decks

Decks has a Reviews per day setting that works the same way: once you reach it, the remaining reviews wait for tomorrow. The free plan has a fixed daily limit; with Premium you choose your own. New cards per day is a separate setting, 20 by default, as in Anki.