We consider extrinsically biharmonic maps from an open domain R m into an arbitrary compact submanifold N R L . We show that the singular set of a minimizing biharmonic map has Hausdorff dimension at most m 5. Furthermore, we give conditions on the target manifold under which the dimension can be reduced further and conditions under which similar results hold for maps that are only stationary biharmonic or stable stationary biharmonic. The proof is based on the analysis of defect measures by tools of geometric measure theory. A byproduct of the proof is the theorem that weak limits of stationary biharmonic maps are weakly biharmonic.for all variations of the form u t D N .u C tW / with W 2 C 1 cpt .; R L /, where N W U ı ! N denotes the nearest-point-retraction from a neighborhood U ı R L of N onto N . Smooth biharmonic maps are characterized by 2 u ? N on , cf. (2.1).A weakly biharmonic map u 2 W 2;2 .; N / is called stationary biharmonic if it satisfies (1.1) additionally for variations of the domain, that is u t .x/ D u.x C t .x// with 2 C 1 cpt .; R m /.