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The cumulative empirical spectral measure (CESM) Φ[A]:R→[0,1] of a n×n symmetric matrix A is defined as the fraction of eigenvalues of A less than a given threshold, i.e., Φ[A](x):=∑ni=11n𝟙[λi[A]≤x]. Spectral sums tr(f[A]) can be computed as the Riemann--Stieltjes integral of f against Φ[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|λmax[A]−λmin[A]| with probability at least 1−η, by applying the Lanczos algorithm for ⌈12t−1+12⌉ iterations to ⌈4(n+2)−1t−2ln(2nη−1)⌉ 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.