Reading Time Calculator

This free reading time calculator turns a word count, a page count, or a block of pasted text into an honest estimate of how long it takes to read. The default assumes 238 words per minute, the average adult silent reading speed for English non-fiction, and you can change it to whatever speed you actually read at.

Most reading time calculators pick a words-per-minute constant, never show it, and never say where it came from — which is why the same article gets labelled a four-minute read on one site and a six-minute read on another. The assumption is printed above the result here, it changes when you change the speed, and the number behind it is sourced at the bottom of this page.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

About 4 minutes, at 238 words per minute — the average adult silent reading speed for non-fiction. A careful reader at 175 wpm takes 6 minutes; a fast reader at 300 wpm takes 3 minutes. Read aloud, the same 1,000 words take 5 minutes.

1,000 words is the length of a standard long blog post, which is why it is the default in the calculator above. If you are working backwards from a “5 min read” badge instead, you want about 1,190 words.

What is the average reading speed?

Last reviewed: August 26, 2026

Silent reading

238 words per minute for adults reading English non-fiction, and 260 wpm for fiction. Most adults fall between 175 and 300 wpm on non-fiction, and between 200 and 320 wpm on fiction. Fiction is faster mostly because its words are shorter.

Those figures come from a 2019 review and meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert at Ghent University, published in the Journal of Memory and Language, which pooled 190 studies and 18,573 participants. It is the best available answer to this question, and it is cited in full below.

The number you have probably seen — 300 words per minute — is too high. It is repeated constantly, including by several calculators currently ranking for this search, and it traces back to early work: Huey's 1901 experiment timed twenty university students with a stopwatch, and by 1959 Buswell was writing that “for college students the average is about 300 words”. Undergraduates are not adults in general. When Henry and colleagues tested both, university students averaged 248 wpm while a community sample averaged 218 wpm. In one of the book-reading studies Brysbaert reviews, only 11 of 48 readers — 23% — actually read faster than 300 wpm. The average adult is not a fast undergraduate, and 238 wpm is the better number.

Reading aloud

183 words per minute, from 77 studies and 5,965 participants in the same meta-analysis (95% confidence interval 177–189 wpm). Reading aloud is slower than reading silently because speech itself is the bottleneck.

Audiobook narration is a different number again, and the two should not be swapped. ACX, Audible's production exchange, tells narrators to plan on 9,300 words per finished hour — 155 wpm — because a finished hour includes pacing, pauses and character work that ordinary reading-aloud does not.

What changes your reading speed

Text difficulty is the largest ordinary factor: in the studies behind these figures the same readers managed 262 wpm on easy texts and 182 wpm on difficult ones. Familiarity with the subject matters nearly as much, because a reader who already knows the material spends less time resolving it. Reading in a second language is consistently slower, as is reading as a child or as an older adult. And the goal changes the number more than anything else: reading to retain is slower than reading to cover, and both are slower than skimming, which is a different activity.

You will find reading-speed-by-grade tables all over the web. They circulate without attribution and they contradict each other, so this page does not repeat them. If you need a per-student figure, time a student on a real passage and put that number in the custom field above — that is what it is there for.

Is speed reading real?

Skimming is real and useful. Reading several times faster with comprehension intact is not supported by the evidence: the eye has to fixate, and fixations and saccades take time, which is why reviews of the research put a hard ceiling well below the speeds commercial courses advertise. What speed-reading training usually teaches is skimming — a genuine skill for finding ideas in a text, and not the same thing as reading it. The presets above stop at 300 wpm for that reason; the custom field will still take whatever you enter.

How long does it take to read a book?

A typical adult novel runs about 80,000 words, so 4 hours 27 minutes to 7 hours 37 minutes depending on how fast you read — 5 hours 36 minutes at the average adult speed of 238 wpm. Both ends of that are ranges, which is why the answer is one too.

Reading versus listening

Listening takes roughly twice as long as reading, and the reason is simply that narration is slower than the eye. That same 80,000-word novel is 4 hours 27 minutes of reading for a fast reader, but 8 hours 36 minutes of listening at the 155 wpm narration rate — which is exactly why so many audiobook listeners run the playback at 1.25× or 1.5×. At 1.5× that novel comes back down to 5 hours 44 minutes.

Want more prompts to write with instead? Try the writing prompt generator.

Twenty minutes a day

Here is the arithmetic that actually matters. Twenty minutes a day at 238 wpm is 4,760 words. A typical 80,000-word novel is 80,000 ÷ 4,760 = about 17 days. Under three weeks, for twenty minutes a day. Nobody is short of the time. What everybody is short of is the twenty minutes going to a book rather than to a phone.