This work measures the time to equilibrium for the multicanonical method on the 2D-Ising system by using a new criterion, proposed here, to find the time to equilibrium, t eq , of any sampling procedure based on a Markov process. Our new procedure gives the same results that the usual one, based on the magnetization, for the canonical Metropolis sampling on a 2D-Ising model at several temperatures. For the multicanonical method we found a power-law relationship with the system size, L, of t eq =0.27(15) L 2.80(13) and with the number of energy levels to explore, k E , of [Formula: see text], in perfect agreement with the above result. In addition, a kind of critical slowing down was observed around the critical energy. Our new procedure is completely general, and can be applied to any sampling method based on Markov processes.