Mine was 90 000 plus or minus 10%. I applied for an extension as this limit included everything (refs, appendices) and my word limit was well over. I handed in with the max 110 000 (extension).

Jojo, I am not sure how far off submitting you are. My initial chapter drafts were way longer (12 000 - 16 000) than my final ones. I did some serious editing at the end and maybe you could do the same. Apologies if you have already done this.

no, i haven't done that yet. all advice welcome. still about 18 months to go. would like to submit in 15 months if that were at all possible. .

my institution has a max of 100,000 excluding refs.

i am going to be doing a lot of editing

I've always been terrible about word counts!, but so far I've manged to get away with it by shoving a lot of stuff in footnotes or endnotes or in the appendix which didn't count, that way I managed to increase my total allowance by at least 75%. I assumed that I could do the same here I hope so or I will have a mass of editing to do. I hate editing, everything always seems so necessary

putting things in foonotes/endnotes saved my life in my MA, but they count towards the limit for my thesis

i seem to be having the opposite of everyone here. Because i'd planned (rightly or wrongly who knows) to do a general introduction with lit review etc in it, now ive started writing my first chapter and seems really short! think ill be lucky to get to 6,000 words at a push......arghh
anyone else get really short chapters?