diff --git a/examples/finetune/finetune.cpp b/examples/finetune/finetune.cpp
index 8563f80cd..f476813ab 100644
--- a/examples/finetune/finetune.cpp
+++ b/examples/finetune/finetune.cpp
@@ -1250,6 +1250,10 @@ size_t tokenize_file(
         return out_tokens.size();
     }
 
+    // account for possible leading whitespace that will be added by tokenizer
+    // e.g. '\t' will be tokenized by llama spm tokenizer to [29871, 12]
+    const int n_max_tokens_overhead = 1;
+
     std::vector<char> buf;
     buf.resize(f.size+1);
 
@@ -1264,7 +1268,7 @@ size_t tokenize_file(
 
     if (sample_start.size() == 0) {
         // tokenize all data at once
-        out_tokens.resize(buf.size());
+        out_tokens.resize(buf.size() + n_max_tokens_overhead);
 
         int n_tokens = llama_tokenize(lctx, buf.data(), out_tokens.data(), out_tokens.size(), false);
         if (n_tokens < 0) {
@@ -1358,7 +1362,7 @@ size_t tokenize_file(
                 // printf("sample: '%s'\n", buf_sample.data());
 
                 // tokenize the sample
-                tok_sample.resize(sample_size);
+                tok_sample.resize(buf_sample.size() + n_max_tokens_overhead);
                 int n_tokens = llama_tokenize(lctx,
                     buf_sample.data(),
                     tok_sample.data(),