Reading Time Calculator: How Long Will This Book Take?

This reading time calculator tells you how long a book takes to read from its page count or word count and your reading speed. A 300-page book with 250 words a page is 75,000 words: 5 hours at 250 words a minute, or 10 days at 30 minutes a day. It also shows the audiobook’s length.

It is built for books rather than articles: it starts from pages, offers the average speeds measured in adult readers, and has a timer for measuring your own speed in the book you are reading.

How to use the reading time calculator

The calculator opens on an example, a 300-page book at 250 words a minute. Replace it with your own numbers; the result updates as you type.

1. Describe the book

   Enter the page count from the book or its store listing, and pick how dense the pages are. If you know the word count, which many publishers and author websites list, switch to Words and type it in instead.

2. Set your reading speed

   Pick one of the four speeds, or type your own in words a minute. For a number that fits you, open Measure your speed: read your book for a minute or two with the timer running, enter the pages you read, and tap Use this speed.

3. Say how long you read each day

   Enter your daily reading time (15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes are one tap away) and the day you start. The calculator turns the total into days and gives you a finish date.

4. Compare the options

   Under the result, the tables show the same book at other reading speeds and other book lengths at your speed. The audiobook times show how long the book would take as a listen.

The calculator runs in your browser and keeps your inputs in the page’s address, so Copy link gives you a link with your numbers in it.

How the reading time calculator works

Every number can be checked by hand:

• Words are the pages times the words on a page, unless you entered a word count. 300 pages × 250 words is 75,000 words.
• Reading time is the words divided by your speed in words a minute, rounded to the nearest minute. 75,000 ÷ 250 is 300 minutes, or 5 hours.
• Days are the reading time divided by your minutes a day, rounded up, so the plan never falls short. 300 ÷ 30 is 10 days.
• Finish date counts the start date as day one. Ten days from Friday, October 30, 2026, ends on Sunday, November 8.
• Pages a day are the pages divided by the days, rounded up: 30 a day for this book.
• Audiobook time is the words divided by 155, a typical narration pace in words a minute, then divided by the playback speed.

Reading speeds, and how to measure yours

The best estimate of how fast adults read comes from a 2019 meta-analysis by Marc Brysbaert of Ghent University, which pooled 190 studies with 18,573 participants. It puts the average silent reading rate in English at 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Most adults read non-fiction at 175 to 300 words a minute, and fiction at 200 to 320.¹ The calculator’s four presets come from those figures:

Averages from studies are a starting point, not a measurement of you. Brysbaert notes that reading outside a study tends to be slower, because people are less focused and their minds wander: data from a Russian ebook app covering 8,000 users averaged 150 words a minute, about 187 in English terms by his estimate.¹ That is why the calculator includes a timer. A minute or two in the book you are about to read, at your normal pace, beats any average.

Words per page

Page density depends on the trim size, the font and the margins, so the presets (200, 250, 300 and 400 words a page) are rough guides. In Brysbaert’s own study of 48 regular readers who timed a whole book, the books averaged 385 pages and about 107,000 words, roughly 280 words a page; they were in six languages, so treat that as a rough figure too.¹ To check your book, count the words on three full lines, average them, and multiply by the number of lines on a full page.

How long does it take to read 100, 300 or 500 pages?

These are the calculator’s results with 250 words a page, at each of the four speeds:

With denser pages, every time grows in proportion: at 300 words a page, add a fifth. A 500-page book at 300 words a page is 150,000 words, which takes 9 hours 37 minutes at the fiction average. At 30 minutes a day and that same speed, a 500-page book takes 17 days with 250-word pages and 20 with 300-word pages.

A worked example: a 300-page novel in 10 days

Say you start a 300-page novel on Friday, October 30, 2026, with pages of about 250 words, and read for 30 minutes before bed. At the calculator’s default of 250 words a minute, between the two adult averages, the book is 75,000 words and 5 hours of reading. That is 10 evenings, finishing on Sunday, November 8, at 30 pages a night.

Speed matters more than it seems. At 175 words a minute the same book takes 7 hours 9 minutes and 15 evenings; at 300 it takes 4 hours 10 minutes and 9 evenings. If you have a deadline, such as a book club meeting, time yourself first and plan with your own number.

Is it faster to read or to listen?

At 1×, listening is slower than reading for most people. ACX, Audible’s audiobook-production service, says most narrators record about 9,300 words an hour,² which is 155 words a minute, against the 238 to 260 of an average reader. So the 75,000-word novel runs about 8 hours 4 minutes as an audiobook.

Playback speed closes the gap. At 1.5×, narration runs at about 232 words a minute, close to average reading, and the book takes 5 hours 23 minutes; at 2×, it runs at 310 words a minute and takes about 4 hours. On comprehension, a 2022 meta-analysis found little overall difference between reading and listening, as we cover in our look at whether reading is good for your brain.

Tips for finishing a book on time

• Plan in minutes, not pages. Pages differ from book to book, but minutes fit into a calendar. Put the daily figure where you will see it.
• Measure, then adjust. Time yourself in the first chapter, and update the calculator when you know the book better. Brysbaert’s averages differ by about 8% between non-fiction and fiction, and he traces the gap to the longer words non-fiction uses.¹
• Leave a buffer. A deadline met with a day to spare survives a busy evening. Starting a day early costs nothing.
• Use listening time you already have. A commute or a walk can carry part of the book as audio. At 1.5×, an hour of listening covers about as much as an hour of reading.
• For a yearly goal, think in pages a day. Our pages per day calculator turns a goal of 24, 52 or 100 books into a daily number.

Track your real reading time in Omniphile

A calculator gives you an estimate; a log shows what really happened. Omniphile, our app for iPhone and iPad, has a reading timer that records each session in the book’s readthrough, so you can see how long you actually read, session by session. Since version 4.5 it can infer pages read from an ebook’s percentage or from chapters, and track audiobooks by percentage, as listed in the changelog. It is free to download, with an optional Premium tier, and runs on iPhone and iPad with an Apple Watch app. If you read on Android or the web, see the best book tracking apps for trackers that run there.