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The cumulative empirical spectral measure (CESM) $$\Phi[\mathbf{A}] : \mathbb{R} \to [0,1]$$ of a $$n\times n$$ symmetric matrix $$\mathbf{A}$$ is defined as the fraction of eigenvalues of $$\mathbf{A}$$ less than a given threshold, i.e., $$\Phi[\mathbf{A}](x) := \sum_{i=1}^{n} \frac{1}{n} {\large\unicode{x1D7D9}}[ \lambda_i[\mathbf{A}]\leq x]$$. Spectral sums $$\operatorname{tr}(f[\mathbf{A}])$$ can be computed as the Riemann–Stieltjes integral of $$f$$ against $$\Phi[\mathbf{A}]$$, so the task of estimating CESM arises frequently in a number of applications, including machine learning. We present an error analysis for stochastic Lanczos quadrature (SLQ). We show that SLQ obtains an approximation to the CESM within a Wasserstein distance of $$t \: | \lambda_{\text{max}}[\mathbf{A}] - \lambda_{\text{min}}[\mathbf{A}] |$$ with probability at least $$1-\eta$$, by applying the Lanczos algorithm for $$\lceil 12 t^{-1} + \frac{1}{2} \rceil$$ iterations to $$\lceil 4 ( n+2 )^{-1}t^{-2} \ln(2n\eta^{-1}) \rceil$$ vectors sampled independently and uniformly from the unit sphere. We additionally provide (matrix-dependent) a posteriori error bounds for the Wasserstein and Kolmogorov–Smirnov distances between the output of this algorithm and the true CESM. The quality of our bounds is demonstrated using numerical experiments.