How Many Books Does the Average Person Read a Year?

The average person in the US read 8 books in 2025, but the typical person read 2. In a YouGov survey of 2,203 American adults, the mean was 8 and the median 2, because a small group of heavy readers lifts the average while 40% read no book at all.¹ Older surveys by Pew and Gallup put the average between 12 and 14.

That gap between the average and the typical reader is the most useful thing to know about book statistics, and the reason headlines disagree. Below are the main surveys, what each one measured, and what twenty years of time-use data show about reading for pleasure. We make Omniphile, an app for tracking books and audiobooks, so the last section is about finding your own number.

How many books does the average person read a year?

YouGov asked 2,203 US adult citizens from its online panel, weighted to match the population, how many books they read in 2025. The two surveys ran between December 15 and 19, 2025, with a margin of error of about 3 points.¹ Six in ten (59%) had read at least one book. The answers spread out like this:

The median, the middle person, read 2 books. The mean was 8, because the 10% who read 20 or more books, including the 4% who read 50 or more, add a great deal to the total. YouGov says the results are in line with its 2023 and 2024 surveys. When someone asks how many books the average person reads, the median of 2 is the better description of a typical reader, and the mean of 8 the better measure of how much reading happens in total.

Why surveys of reading disagree

Every well-known survey of American reading gives a different number:

Part of the spread is time: the Pew and Gallup figures are from 2021, during the pandemic. Part is method: people may answer a phone interviewer differently from an online form. And part is the question itself. Gallup asks how many books people read “either all or part of the way through,” and tells interviewers to include printed books, e-books and audiobooks, so a half-finished book counts.² Pew counts books in any format,³ and the National Endowment for the Arts, whose survey is run by the Census Bureau, reports the share of adults who read at least one book in the past year.⁴

Two patterns stand out. In both surveys that report a median, it is far below the mean: 2 against 8 at YouGov, and 5 against about 14 at Pew. And in every survey, a large share of adults read no book in the year: 17% at Gallup, 25% at Pew, 40% at YouGov and 51.5% in the NEA’s survey.

Is reading for pleasure declining?

The strongest evidence comes from the American Time Use Survey, in which people record everything they did the previous day. In a 2025 study in iScience, Jessica Bone and colleagues at University College London and the University of Florida analyzed the diaries of 236,270 Americans aged 15 and over from 2003 to 2023, leaving out 2020 because of the pandemic.⁵

• What they measured: whether a person spent at least a minute reading for personal interest on the diary day. That includes books, magazines and newspapers, listening to audiobooks and reading on a Kindle or other e-reader.
• What they found: the share who read for pleasure peaked at 28% in 2004 and fell to 16% in 2023, the lowest year, a decline of about 3% a year. On an average day in 2023, people spent 16 minutes reading for pleasure.
• People who read, read for longer: the 1,747 people who did read for pleasure in 2023 spent an average of 1 hour 37 minutes on it, with a median of 60 minutes, and time per reader rose over the period.
• Who is reading less: the gaps widened for Black Americans compared with white Americans, and for people with less education and lower incomes.

The study describes a trend rather than its cause. The authors suggest possible reasons, such as more time on social media or at work, but did not test them, and the diary method counts reading of any kind, not books finished.

Other federal data point the same way. In the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the share of adults who read at least one book in the past year fell from 54.6% in 2012 to 52.7% in 2017 and 48.5% in 2022, and the share who read a novel or short story fell from 45.2% to 37.6%, the lowest in the survey’s history of more than three decades.⁴ Gallup found the same pattern among readers: its average fell from 15.6 books in 2016 to 12.6 in 2021, while the share who read no books stayed about the same, at 17% in 2021, so the drop came from readers reading fewer books.²

Reading statistics for children and teenagers

Children’s reading for fun has fallen too. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the share of 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day fell from 27% in 2012 to 17% in 2020 and 14% in 2023, and among 9-year-olds from 53% in 2012 to 39% in 2022.⁴

The UK has a rare recent rise. The National Literacy Trust’s annual survey, with 125,375 responses from children and young people aged 5 to 18 at 479 schools, found that 36.1% of children and young people enjoyed reading in their free time in 2026, up from 32.7% in 2025, the first increase since 2021. The share of 8- to 18-year-olds who read daily in their free time rose from 18.7% to 20.3%.⁶ The 2025 figure for enjoyment had been the lowest in 20 years.⁷

Who reads the most books?

In YouGov’s 2025 survey, adults aged 65 and over read the most, an average of 12.1 books, against 5.8 for 18- to 29-year-olds, though the median was the same across the four age groups. Education made a bigger difference: people with a postgraduate degree read a median of 5 books and an average of 13.6, while those with a high school education or less read a median of zero and an average of 4.6.¹

Formats overlap. In 2025, 46% of American adults read at least one physical book, 24% at least one digital book and 23% listened to at least one audiobook; 29% used more than one format. Only 2% of adults listened to audiobooks without reading in another format.¹

How many books a year is a lot?

Using YouGov’s 2025 distribution, here is the share of American adults who read at least each number of books in 2025:

So 5 books a year puts you in the top third, a book a month in roughly the top fifth, and 50 books in the top 4%. These shares come from adding up the survey’s groups, for example 13% + 9% + 6% + 4% = 32% for five or more.

How many books does the average person read in a lifetime, a month or a week?

No survey counts books over a whole life, but the yearly figures give a range. Over 60 adult years, the median of 2 books a year comes to about 120 books, and the average of 8 to about 480. Per month, the average is about two-thirds of a book, and the median reader finishes one book every six months. Per week, both round to zero; “a book a week,” 52 a year, would put a reader among the top 4%.

What it means for you

• Compare yourself with the median, not the mean. If you read three or four books a year, you already read more than the typical American adult.
• Time matters more than willpower. Readers in the time-use survey averaged more than an hour and a half on the days they read. Our pages per day calculator turns a yearly goal into a daily page count, and the reading time calculator shows how long a given book will take you.
• Listening counts in most surveys. Gallup and the time-use survey count audiobooks, and our look at whether audiobooks count as reading covers what the research says about listening.
• Why bother at all: the research on whether reading is good for your brain finds links between lifelong reading and cognitive health, mostly from observational studies.

Finding your own number

Most people guess how many books they read in a year, and a log replaces the guess. Omniphile, our app for iPhone, iPad and Mac, tracks every book and audiobook as a readthrough with start and finish dates, and its statistics count what you finished each year. Since version 4.2 you can set daily, weekly, monthly or yearly reading goals, and a setting decides whether finished audiobooks count toward your book goals. The app is free to download, with an optional Premium subscription that adds Home Screen widgets, including one for the yearly reading goal. On Android or the web, StoryGraph tracks yearly reading, page and listening goals.⁸

Sources

1. David Montgomery, “Most Americans didn’t read many books in 2025”, YouGov, December 31, 2025. Survey of 2,203 US adult citizens, December 15–19, 2025. https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53804-most-americans-didnt-read-many-books-in-2025 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

2. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past”, Gallup, January 10, 2022. Telephone survey of 811 US adults, December 1–16, 2021. https://news.gallup.com/poll/388541/americans-reading-fewer-books-past.aspx ↩ ↩²

3. Michelle Faverio and Andrew Perrin, “Three-in-ten Americans now read e-books”, Pew Research Center, January 6, 2022. Survey of 1,502 US adults, January 25 to February 8, 2021. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/01/06/three-in-ten-americans-now-read-e-books/ ↩

4. Sunil Iyengar, “Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump”, National Endowment for the Arts, October 3, 2024. https://www.arts.gov/stories/blog/2024/federal-data-reading-pleasure-all-signs-show-slump ↩ ↩² ↩³

5. Jessica K. Bone, Feifei Bu, Jill K. Sonke and Daisy Fancourt (2025), “The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey”, iScience 28(9), 113288. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.113288 ↩

6. National Literacy Trust, “Children and young people’s reading in 2026”, June 9, 2026. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2026/ ↩

7. National Literacy Trust, “Children and young people’s reading in 2025”, June 3, 2025. https://literacytrust.org.uk/research-services/research-reports/children-and-young-peoples-reading-in-2025 ↩

8. The StoryGraph on the App Store, checked November 2, 2026. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-storygraph/id1570489264 ↩