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We analyze the controls on flood duration based on the concept of comparative hydrology. Rather than modeling a single catchment in detail, we compare catchments with contrasting characteristics in order to understand the controls in a holistic way. We analyze the hydrographs of 9223 maximum annual flood events in 396 Austrian catchments ranging from 5 to ∼10,000 km² as a function of climatic controls such as storm type (synoptic and convective storms, rain‐on‐snow, snowmelt), and catchment controls such as soils, soil moisture, geology, and land form. The ratio of the flood volume and the flood peak is used as a measure of the flood duration or flood timescale. The results indicate that, spatially, the median flood timescales range from 16 h in the hilly catchments, where convective storms prevail, to 104 h in the lowland catchments where substantial inundation into the floodplain occurs. The range is even …