What is the average reading speed?

The Real Average for Adults

We built a speed reader, so we read a lot of reading speed claims. Most of them recycle one old number. The best evidence we have says that number is wrong.

In 2019 Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University pulled together 190 studies with 18,573 adult readers. He found an average silent reading speed of 238 words a minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction in English. Reading aloud averaged 183 words a minute across 77 studies and 5,965 people. All of these figures come from the paper's abstract (Journal of Memory and Language, volume 109).

Why is fiction faster? Shorter words. The same abstract says the gap is explained by word length, since nonfiction uses longer words. Fewer letters per word means more words per minute, even when your brain does the same amount of work.

The spread matters as much as the average. Brysbaert puts most adults between 175 and 300 words a minute for nonfiction and 200 and 320 for fiction. If you land anywhere in there, you read like a normal adult.

On June 13, 2019, the British Psychological Society's Research Digest covered the review. It noted that the 144 English only studies averaged 236 words a minute, and that the readers were aged 17 to 60. Brysbaert's own line was that a target of 300 is unrealistic for the majority of people (BPS Research Digest).

Why Everyone Quotes 300 Words a Minute

The 300 number is everywhere. It shows up in study guides, reading apps and book time calculators. It is too high for most people, and there are a few reasons it stuck.

• Short tests run fast. The BPS summary says studies with very short passages ranged from just over 100 to nearly 400 words a minute. Longer texts landed closer to the average. A 30 second test flatters you.
• Easy text runs fast. A thriller is not a tax form. Speed claims rarely say what was read.
• Comprehension gets skipped. A speed with no check on understanding is just how fast your eyes moved.

The Brysbaert abstract says plainly that its estimates are lower than the numbers often cited in scientific and popular writing. Treat 300 as a good goal, not the normal.

Reading Speed by Grade

Here is the part most charts get wrong. Schools measure kids reading aloud. Adult averages are silent. Put them in one table without a label and it looks like kids leap from 150 to 240 overnight. They do not. They are two different tests.

The standard for kids is the Hasbrouck and Tindal oral reading fluency chart, updated in 2017. It counts words read correctly in one minute from a grade level passage. Here are the spring numbers as Read Naturally publishes them (source).

These are words correct per minute, read aloud. The older 2006 chart on the same page puts the spring middle for 7th and 8th grade at 150 and 151. Read Naturally's rule of thumb is that a student 10 or more words below the 50th percentile may need help.

Some charts online mix these read aloud norms with adult silent speeds and never say which is which. Before you worry about your child, check that the chart names its source and says the numbers are read aloud.

Silent Reading Speed by Grade

Silent numbers for kids are much older and rarer. The ones still quoted come from a 1965 study by Taylor. Literacy researcher Timothy Shanahan wrote in January 2019 that he thinks they are still about right (Shanahan on Literacy).

Look at the spread, not just the middle. Shanahan cites one study where 4th graders averaged 153 words a minute with a standard deviation of 69 (Shanahan on Literacy). That means plenty of normal kids read 90 and plenty read 220.

Shanahan's advice is to treat slow reading as a symptom. Fix decoding and vocabulary, and speed tends to follow.

Read Aloud vs Silent

Reading aloud is slower because your mouth has a speed limit. The adult averages are 183 aloud and 238 silent, a gap of about 55 words a minute (Brysbaert 2019).

Silent reading has a limit too, and it is close to how fast you can follow speech. A 2021 study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found people read the test texts at their own pace at about 269 words a minute. When the same kind of text was played as speech, understanding held at 270 and dropped steeply at 315 (study record).

That is the honest ceiling for normal reading with full understanding. It is why claims of 1,000 words a minute should make you suspicious. We cover that in is speed reading real.

Pages per Hour, Worked Out

People search in pages, not words. So here is the math. This is a worked example that assumes about 275 words on a paperback page, which is our planning figure. Your book may hold more or less.

So is 100 pages an hour fast? Yes. On a 275 word page that is about 460 words a minute, well above the normal adult range. Is 30 pages an hour slow? A bit, for a novel. For a textbook or a contract it is perfectly fine. Two minutes a page works out to about 140 words a minute on the same page size.

For whole books, use the formula in how long it takes to read a book.

What Counts as a Good Reading Speed?

Here is how our own reading speed test labels an effective score. That is speed multiplied by how many questions you got right, so a fast skim with bad answers does not count.

Compare those bands with the review above and they line up. Most adults sit in the middle band, and anything from 250 to 400 with good answers is a strong result for real material.

Speed also depends on who is reading. The Brysbaert abstract says rates are lower for children, older adults, and people reading English as a second language. Comparing yourself to a college student when you read in your second language tells you nothing.

How to Find Your Own Number

The average is a starting point. Your number is the useful one. Here is a quick way to get it.

1. Pick normal material. Something like what you usually read, not a children's book and not a manual.
2. Read for at least a minute. Short tests flatter you, as the BPS summary showed.
3. Check what you remember. If you cannot answer simple questions, the speed does not count.
4. Test more than once. One day's number mostly tells you how tired you are.

Or let the free WPM test do it. It times you, asks five questions and gives you an effective score. If you want to push past it, try the honest guide to reading faster.