What Is the Average Reading Speed? Adults and by Age

The average adult reads about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, according to Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Most adults land between 175 and 300. The famous 300 figure is too high. And when you read to remember, people often slow to half that pace or less.

The rest of this post gives you the real numbers in words per minute (wpm), including by age, a way to measure your own, and the research on why the number you're about to compare yourself to is the wrong one to chase.

Why Did You Search for This Number?

It's late. There's a book on the bedside table with a receipt sticking out at page 61, where it has been since August.

Someone online has just announced their 40th book of the year. Another swears by an app that flashes words at you at 900 a minute. A colleague forwards a 6,000-word article with "worth a read!" and your stomach does a small drop, because you already know how your evening will go.

So you type "average reading speed" into a search bar. You're not curious. You want a verdict. Am I slow?

Maybe you've already timed yourself. You got 190, or 160, and the number sat in your head like a bad grade. Maybe you tried one of those speed-reading apps, understood about a third of one session, and quietly never opened it again.

I know that flinch. I was placed in learning support for reading at five. Long texts made me feel stupid, so I shied away from them, and when someone sent me an article, what I felt wasn't interest. It was dread, because it was one more thing on a list I was already failing to clear.

Here's what I eventually saw. The number most of us measure ourselves against was never true.

And the cost of believing it isn't slower reading. It's a different way of reading. You stop reading to understand and start reading to get through. You nod at a sentence you didn't process because the clock in your head says you're behind. You reach the end, tick it off, and a week later you couldn't explain a single idea from it.

That gap has a name worth keeping: comprehension debt. It's the distance between what you finished and what you actually took in. Chasing a higher words-per-minute figure makes that debt grow faster, not slower.

So, the real numbers first.

What Is the Average Reading Speed for Adults?

About 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, for adults reading silently in English.

Those figures come from Marc Brysbaert, a psychologist at Ghent University, who pooled 190 studies with 18,573 participants in a 2019 paper in the Journal of Memory and Language. The BPS Research Digest called it the most thorough review to date. He also found that most adults fall in a range, not at a point:

Fiction is faster for a dull reason: word length. Brysbaert found the gap can be predicted by it, because non-fiction uses longer words.

So what does 238 mean in practice? A 1,200-word article takes about five minutes. A 70,000-word non-fiction book takes about five hours. And the range is wide enough to matter:

That's plain arithmetic (words divided by speed). A near three-hour gap sounds like a lot. It's the gap between two completely normal readers.

Where did the 300 words per minute figure come from?

You've seen it everywhere, and Brysbaert spent a good chunk of his paper tracing it. One influential source was Carver, a reading researcher who argued in papers from the 1970s to the 1990s that readers shift between "gears" depending on their goal, and set the gear for normal reading at 300. A widely cited 2016 review of speed reading by Rayner and colleagues gave the range for college-educated adults as "about 200 to 400". Its supporting table came from ten skilled readers who averaged 308. Ten people. Not a population.

Brysbaert's point is that 300 became "one of the few numbers experimental psychological research has given to society", and then got used to calculate how long everything takes, from newspaper articles to contracts and legal cases. When he pooled everything, the true average sat about 20% below it.

So if you timed yourself at 220 and felt behind, you weren't behind. You were close to the middle of the actual distribution, measured against a figure that was wrong.

How Does Reading Speed Change With Age?

Reading speed climbs steadily through school, peaks somewhere in adulthood, and falls in later life, though not as early as most people assume. If you've been carrying your own number around like a bad grade, this is the table to check it against.

The best-known data on children come from Taylor, who in 1965 tested at least 1,000 US readers at each grade from 1 to 12, plus college students. Everyone had to answer at least 70% of the comprehension questions correctly to be included, so these are speeds with understanding:

Source: Taylor (1965), as reported in Brysbaert (2019). The shape is the lesson, not the exact figures. When Spichtig and colleagues repeated the study with 2,203 children in 2011 (published in 2016), they found lower rates for every grade except grade 2, and read that as a drop in how automatically children recognise words. Brysbaert also notes that the college group was more selected than the school groups, which may explain why it looks so much faster than grade 12.

Children read slower because they make more and longer fixations (the brief pauses where your eyes sit still), shorter jumps forward and more look-backs. Words take longer to recognise when you've met them fewer times.

For older adults, several studies find slower silent reading, but Brysbaert says the drop isn't expected before about 60 to 65 in healthy people, which is why his meta-analysis stopped at age 60.

One more group worth naming, because they're exactly the people who end up searching for this number: second-language readers. Brysbaert reports speeds below 100 wpm are not uncommon, and in one study of reasonably proficient Dutch-English bilinguals reading half a novel in each language, the second language was 17% slower.

And within every group the spread is real. People tend to land close to their own number from one long text to the next. It's a stable trait, not a bad day. None of it tells you how much anyone understood. We'll get to that.

How Do You Measure Your Own Reading Speed?

Time yourself on a long text you'd actually read, count the words, divide by minutes, and then check what you can say back. The last step matters as much as the first three.

Here's the version that gives a number you can trust:

1. Pick something at least 1,000 words long. Long texts give steadier numbers. In one study Brysbaert reviews, the speeds people got on two texts of 7,300 words each matched almost perfectly (a correlation of 0.95). Short passages are noisier.
2. Choose something you'd read anyway. An article from your own list, or a chapter. Fiction and non-fiction give different numbers, so keep them separate.
3. Get the word count. Paste it into any word processor, or estimate from a printed page: count the words in three lines, divide by three, multiply by lines per page.
4. Read at your natural pace, no skimming. Start a timer. Stop it when you finish the last sentence. Paper and screens give very similar speeds, though Brysbaert notes comprehension is slightly better on paper.
5. Say it back. Close it. Write three sentences about what it argued, without looking.
6. Divide. Words by minutes. 1,500 words in 6 minutes 15 seconds is 1,500 ÷ 6.25 = 240 wpm.

Now you've got two results instead of one: a speed, and a rough sense of how much of it stuck. The second one is the number the bedside-table book never asked for, and it's the one that tells you something.

If you land between 175 and 300, you're in the pack. Below 175 isn't a diagnosis. Dense text, tiredness, reading in a second language and dyslexia all pull the number down, and none of them is a measure of intelligence. Above 300 is also normal for some people. Brysbaert's review includes fast readers who read above 450 wpm with the same comprehension as average readers on the same text. They're real. They just aren't the average.

Can Speed Reading Actually Double Your Speed?

Not without paying for it in understanding. The strongest evidence says speed reading mostly trades comprehension for pace.

Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter and Treiman reviewed the science and the commercial claims in a 2016 paper in Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Their conclusion, as Brysbaert summarises it, is that reading rates above about 1,000 wpm are impossible without severe loss of understanding. The reasons are physical.

Your eyes move in jumps. Each pause picks up roughly 7 or 8 letters clearly and lasts 200 to 250 milliseconds, so about four a second. Mark Seidenberg's back-of-envelope sum, quoted in Brysbaert's paper: 240 pauses a minute, times 7 letters, is 1,680 letters. Divide by six (five letters plus a space) and you get roughly 280 words a minute.

That number sits right next to the average. Your eyes aren't failing to keep up with some faster possibility. They're doing about what the geometry allows.

What about apps that flash one word at a time, so your eyes never have to move? Benedetto and colleagues tested this in 2015. People read the first chapter of an Orwell novel for over 20 minutes in that format, and could pause when it went too fast. They ended up pacing themselves at around 200 wpm, about the same as reading a book, and did worse on the comprehension test than people reading from a book.

There are real exceptions, and they're worth knowing:

• Very short bursts. Rubin and Turano (1992) found middle-aged adults could understand paragraphs of 95 to 125 words at a median of 790 wpm. Brysbaert's caution is that this only works for brief stretches, like a 100-metre sprint.
• Skimming. If you only want the gist or you're hunting for the paragraph you need, speed-reading techniques may help. Rayner's review says as much. That's a different task from reading.
• Naturally fast readers. Jackson and McClelland (1975) found six readers above 450 wpm with the same comprehension as six average readers. Brysbaert points out the groups were tiny. In a follow-up study the fast readers made more errors on lab tasks, which suggests they accepted a lower level of accuracy. What set them apart was how quickly they connected written words to meaning. It wasn't a trick.
• Ordinary practice. The Rayner review concludes that modest gains are possible through normal reading, because words you've met often get processed faster. Reading widely helps. There's no quick way to get faster without a cost to understanding.

So you can't hack your way to 600, and the app that promised 900 a minute was never going to deliver it. You can read more varied material, and over years your speed will drift up a little.

Is Reading Speed Even the Right Thing to Measure?

No. Speed measures how fast words go past your eyes. It says very little about whether anything stays.

Here's what happens when people read in order to remember. Brysbaert's paper collects the numbers:

In Greene's 1931 study, the two slower groups did better on the later memory test than the fast group. The people who looked slowest remembered more.

In Dirix's study, the same kind of text went from 189 wpm to 54 once the goal changed from "read this" to "learn this". That's about 70% slower.

The obvious assumption is that people shift into a slower gear. Brysbaert's reading of the evidence is more interesting. Studying isn't slow reading. It's reading with going back: eyes returning to earlier sentences, rereading, connecting one part to another. The lower number is the footprint of the work that makes a memory.

That reframes the guilt. The pace that makes you feel slow, backtracking and rereading and stopping to join two ideas, is what understanding looks like from the outside.

Do slow readers understand more?

Not automatically, and it'd be dishonest to say so. Brysbaert notes there's little evidence that differences in reading rate lead to better or worse comprehension, and if anything fast readers are slightly better. Every reader has a sweet spot: faster loses meaning, but slower breaks ideas into pieces too small to join up. Slow, careful reading builds richer memories, though that only pays off when the stakes are high.

So speed on its own predicts almost nothing. Which is the point.

There's an old distinction from the memory researcher Robert Bjork that fits here. Performance is what you can do right now. Learning is the durable change underneath. The two come apart all the time, and quick gains in performance can work against what you retain later. A fast reading speed is a performance number. The thing most of us actually want from reading is the other one.

The number worth watching is what you can still say, in your own words, tomorrow and next week. If you want the mechanism for why that fades, the forgetting curve is the place to start, and how to remember what you read covers what works. If the trouble is that your attention gives out partway through, why your brain gives up after three paragraphs is the closer match.

Where Does Listening Fit In?

Listening runs at about the same ceiling as reading, so the speed question looks similar. Brysbaert puts audiobook narration at 140 to 180 words per minute, slower than silent reading.

That's one reason people turn the speed up. But his paper also finds that reading rates are in line with maximum listening speed. In Carver's 1982 experiments, understanding dropped as information arrived faster, in much the same way whether people heard it or saw it.

Here's what the speed dial looks like in words per minute, using that 140 to 180 narration range. This is arithmetic, not a measurement. Your voice and the text will move it.

At 1.5x you're landing right on the average silent reader. At 2x you're past what most people read. That squares with a 2022 study of lecture videos by Murphy and colleagues in Applied Cognitive Psychology: small costs going from 1x to 1.5x or 2x, but performance fell beyond 2x. Watching a second time at 2x shortly before the test also beat watching once at 1x a week earlier. The time you save only helps if you spend it on something.

What about comprehension when you listen instead of read? Rogowsky, Calhoun and Tallal (2016, SAGE Open) split 91 people between an audiobook, an e-text and both at once, using a non-fiction chapter. Comprehension didn't differ significantly straight afterwards or two weeks later. Listening wasn't worse and wasn't better. It changes how you spend your attention, and for some readers (the ones whose eyes slide off the page) it can make finishing easier.

Alexandria's free tier has a speed dial from 0.5x to 5x, and it highlights each word as it's read, so your eyes have something to follow. The research above is why I'd treat the top of that dial as headroom, not a target. For lecture videos, the evidence says you start paying past about 2x.

Try Alexandria free if you want to find your own pace by listening and following along.

The dial doesn't solve the second problem, though. About a third of everything people save to Alexandria is never opened again. That's our own graveyard, not a rival's, and a faster playback speed wouldn't have emptied it. What helps is the layer after reading: in the web app, Alexandria pulls out the key ideas from what you read and brings them back for review, so what you read doesn't sit at the end of a list of things you meant to get to.

What Should You Track Instead of Speed?

Three small things beat a words-per-minute figure, and none needs software.

Stretch. How long can you stay with a text before you slide off it? When I was learning to read for longer, I used a five-minute timer. Five minutes became ten, ten became twenty, until I was reading in control rather than hunting for pictures. The thing I was extending was time, not speed.

Say-back. After anything that matters, close it and say what it argued in two sentences. If you can't, you've found comprehension debt at the moment it formed, which is the cheapest place to pay it off. It's also active recall, which rereading never gives you.

Return. Does the idea come back a day later? A week later? This is the one most of us never check. Reviewing an idea just as it starts to fade is how it sticks, and the research on that is in the spaced repetition post.

Alexandria is free to start if you'd like the Return step handled for you.

Your 238, or 190, or 310 is a fact about this afternoon and this text. It isn't a verdict on you. So what's the last thing you read that you could explain to someone right now?

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the average reading speed for adults?

Adults read about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction when reading silently in English. That comes from Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. Most adults fall between 175 and 300 wpm for non-fiction, so speeds well above or below the average are still ordinary.

What is the average reading speed by age?

Speed rises through school. Taylor's 1965 US data, with comprehension, show about 80 wpm in grade 1, 173 in grade 5, 250 in grade 12 and 280 for college students. Brysbaert says declines in healthy adults usually don't appear before about 60 to 65.

Is 300 words per minute a good reading speed?

It's a fine speed, but it isn't the average. Brysbaert's pooled figure for adult non-fiction is 238 wpm, about 20% lower than the 300 often quoted. Plenty of people read at 300 or more with good understanding, and plenty read at 200 with equally good understanding. Neither number shows how much you retain.

How do I calculate my reading speed?

Time yourself reading at least 1,000 words at your natural pace, then divide the word count by the minutes taken. For example, 1,500 words in 6 minutes 15 seconds is 240 wpm. Then write three sentences about what you read without looking, so you know whether speed came at the cost of understanding.

Does speed reading actually work?

Not for full comprehension. A 2016 review by Rayner and colleagues concluded that reading far above 1,000 wpm isn't possible without severe loss of understanding, and that there's a trade-off between speed and understanding. Speed-reading techniques can help with skimming for the gist. Ordinary, varied reading raises speed slowly and modestly.

How fast should I listen to text-to-speech?

Narration typically runs at 140 to 180 wpm at normal speed. A UCLA study of lecture videos found small comprehension costs up to 2x and a decline beyond it. Start at whatever lets you retell the main idea afterwards, and move up only while that stays true. Faster isn't the goal.

Why do I read so slowly?

Common causes are unfamiliar vocabulary, dense text, tiredness, reading in a second language (one study found a 17% slowdown) and dyslexia. Backtracking to join ideas together also lowers your number, and that's what studying looks like. Slow isn't the same as poor. How much you can recall later is the better test.