The average adult reads about 238 words per minute in non-fiction and 260 in fiction, according to a 2019 meta-analysis of reading rate that pooled 190 studies. In practice that’s roughly 55 to 60 pages an hour, so a 300-page book takes about five hours of actual reading. Below you’ll find a table for different lengths, a simple way to test your own speed, and what the research says about reading faster.

Average reading speed in numbers

238words a minute, non-fiction
260words a minute, fiction
≈ 57pages an hour at an average pace

Marc Brysbaert’s meta-analysis covered studies with more than 18,000 participants. For adults reading English:

  • silent reading, non-fiction: 238 words per minute on average, most people between 175 and 300,
  • silent reading, fiction: 260 words per minute on average, most between 200 and 320,
  • reading aloud: 183 words per minute on average.

Fiction is faster mostly because its words are shorter. The author also notes that these figures are lower than the numbers you’ll often see quoted.

Other languages differ. Research on Polish, for example, is thin: a doctoral summary from the Jagiellonian University (in Polish) reports that first-year students read 160 to 240 words a minute, from a small and uniform group. Longer words mean fewer words a minute, so treat any single number as a rough guide.

How long does it take to read a book?

Words per page depend on the format and font. For the table we assumed 250 words per page (our assumption: pocket paperbacks often have fewer, large formats more) and the three speeds from the meta-analysis.

Book Slower (175 wpm) Average (238 wpm) Faster (300 wpm)
30 pages about 45 min about 30 min about 25 min
50 pages about 1 h 10 min about 55 min about 40 min
100 pages about 2 h 25 min about 1 h 45 min about 1 h 25 min
200 pages about 4 h 45 min about 3 h 30 min about 2 h 45 min
300 pages about 7 h 10 min about 5 h 15 min about 4 h 10 min
400 pages about 9 h 30 min about 7 h about 5 h 30 min
500 pages about 11 h 55 min about 8 h 45 min about 7 h

That’s reading time only, without breaks or rereading a paragraph. Want to work out a specific book and see when you’d finish it? Try the reading time calculator. For every page count from 10 to 1,000, see how long it takes to read 100 pages, and for real books, how long famous books take to read.

Test your speed in 10 minutes

Counting words is tedious; counting pages is easy. So here’s a page-based test:

  1. Take the book you’re reading now, not a textbook or something unusually dense.
  2. Note your page number and set a timer for 10 minutes.
  3. Read as you normally would, without speeding up.
  4. When the timer goes off, note where you are. Multiply the pages you read by 6 to get pages per hour.

Got 30 pages an hour? Nothing wrong with that. Speed depends on the book, the time of day and how tired you are, and one reading is just a starting point. Repeat the test next week with a different book and compare. For a quicker version without a timer, take our reading speed test: a short passage, three questions and your words per minute.

Can you read faster without losing anything?

Speed-reading courses and apps promise to double or triple your pace. A review of the research, “So Much to Read, So Little Time” (Rayner et al., 2016), is clear: there’s a trade-off between speed and comprehension. The authors find it unlikely that readers can double or triple their speed, say from around 250 to 500–750 words a minute, and still understand the text as well.

Skimming makes sense when you’re looking for one piece of information. For a novel you want to enjoy, not so much. According to the same review, speed grows over time with regular reading and a bigger vocabulary. The best training is simply reading. We put the tips that hold up, and the tricks that don’t, into a separate guide on how to read faster.

What to do with this

Reading speed is useful for planning, not for comparing yourself with others. A few examples at an average pace:

  • 20 minutes a day is about 19 pages, so a 300-page book in roughly 16 days.
  • Two 10-minute sessions, on the bus and before bed, get you the same.
  • A quarter of an hour on a weekend morning adds more pages with no plan at all.

We explain how to turn this into a comfortable target in how many pages a day to read, and how many books that adds up to in how many books a year to read.

Talemi does the counting for you: log your page and, if you like, your minutes, and the app shows your progress, daily goal and stats. For more on tools like this, see how to choose a reading tracker app. See how Talemi works or join early access.

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