There is no single agreed-upon number of hadiths in Islam, and scholars actually emphasize that it cannot be precisely counted.

Quick Scoop

  • You often see two very different “numbers”:
    • How many reports were collected, checked, and rejected/accepted overall.
    • How many hadiths are considered authentic and without repetition.
  • Classical scholars differed widely in their estimates, from a few thousand to several hundred thousand, depending on what they are counting.

Why the number is unclear

Several factors make the answer “how many hadiths are there?” complicated:

  • Are we counting:
    • Only authentic (sahih) hadiths, or also hasan and da‘if?
    • Only marfu‘ (directly attributed to the Prophet) or also sayings of Companions and Followers?
    • Each text once , or counting all its chains , variants and repetitions?
  • Different scholars and books use different methods of counting, so their totals naturally differ.

A simple analogy: asking “how many songs exist?” is very different from asking “how many unique melodies on one album?” — hadith counting has a similar problem of scope.

Key reference points (with approximate figures)

These are often-cited reference points in discussions about how many hadiths there are:

1. Sahih al‑Bukhari

  • One fatwa notes that:
    • If you count with repetitions , Sahih al‑Bukhari has around 7,397 hadiths (excluding some with missing chains).
* Without repetitions, the core hadiths are around **2,602–2,761** , depending on what is included.

2. Saheeh Bukhari + Muslim together

  • Scholarly discussions commonly say:
    • Roughly 2,900 authentic hadiths in the two Sahihs without repetition.
  • These are considered the strongest core and are heavily relied upon.

3. Wider authentic hadith beyond the two Sahihs

  • Some hadith specialists, drawing on classical authorities like Ahmad ibn Hanbal and others, report a famous estimate:
    • Around 4,400 authentic hadiths in total.
  • Other scholars and later compilers sometimes speak in ranges:
    • About 4,000–5,000 authentic hadiths when you include collections beyond Bukhari and Muslim but avoid repetition.

So if someone asks, “How many authentic, unique hadiths (without repeats) exist?” many scholars will quote an approximate range around 4,000–5,000 , while stressing that this is ultimately an estimate.

Large totals you sometimes hear (hundreds of thousands)

You’ll also hear very large numbers mentioned in lectures and books:

  • Some classical scholars mention examining hundreds of thousands of reports.
    • For example, Imam al‑Bukhari is reported to have reviewed around 600,000 narrations in total while compiling his Sahih.
  • Modern discussions sometimes mention that counting all narrations, weak reports, chains and repetitions, the total can be in the hundreds of thousands , and some popular speakers even talk about figures close to a million.

These huge numbers are not “authentic unique hadiths”; they reflect:

  • Repeated chains for the same wording.
  • Weak or rejected narrations.
  • Variants in wording.
  • Reports from many different collections over centuries.

Putting it all together

If we rephrase the question in more precise ways, we get clearer answers:

  • “How many hadiths did scholars work with in total across history?”
    • Likely hundreds of thousands of narrations when you include all chains, variants and weak reports.
  • “How many authentic, unique hadiths (without repetition) are there approximately?”
    • Common scholarly estimates sit in the range of around 4,000–5,000.
  • “How many hadiths are in Sahih al‑Bukhari alone?”
    • About 7,397 with repetition, and about 2,600–2,700 without repetition.

So the best short answer is:

There is no exact agreed number , but scholars often estimate about 4,000–5,000 unique authentic hadiths , while the total narrations examined across history (including repeats and weak reports) reach into the hundreds of thousands.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.