Average reading speed by age, language and type of text

The short answer: 238 words per minute

The most complete analysis to date is Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis (Ghent University): it pools 190 studies and 18,573 adult readers in English. The averages:

For decades the standard line was that adults read at 300 words per minute. Brysbaert concludes that figure was inflated, coming from older studies with small samples. If a course or app compares your results with 300, it is using a baseline that is too high.

Reading speed by age

Children are almost always measured reading aloud, counting only the words read correctly. The most widely used benchmarks are the Hasbrouck and Tindal (2017) norms from US schools. These are the middle values (50th percentile) at the end of the school year:

Two caveats: these are oral reading rates (a fluent reader is usually faster silently), and they come from US schools reading English. Use them as a guide, not as an exam.

For adults there are fewer reliable age-by-age figures: most studies, Brysbaert’s included, are dominated by university students. What is clear is that practice and vocabulary matter (Rayner et al., 2016). Needing larger print or better light over the years is normal; on a screen, a bigger text size fixes it.

Reading speed by language

Words per minute is a tricky measure across languages, because languages do not use words of the same length. The IReST study (Trauzettel-Klosinski and Dietz, 2012) tested 436 native readers aged 18 to 35 in 17 languages, reading aloud texts matched for content and difficulty. The average was 184 words per minute (about 863 characters per minute), with differences between languages.

The interesting part: in 14 of those languages, the time per character was very similar (around 68 milliseconds). Languages with long words, such as German or Finnish, produce fewer words per minute, but their readers are not taking in less content.

In practice: compare yourself with readers of your own language, and if you read in a second language, expect to be slower than in your first. That is normal.

Reading speed by type of text

Nobody reads a novel like a manual. Brysbaert found fiction is read slightly faster (260 vs 238 words per minute). Other factors:

• Difficulty and vocabulary. A technical text or a new topic slows you down, and it should.
• Purpose. Studying for an exam is not the same as looking something up or reading for fun.
• What you already know. The more familiar the topic, the less you reread.

So your speed is not one fixed number: it is a range that shifts with every book.

What is a good reading speed?

There is no official figure. As a guide, our reading speed test uses these bands, based on the 238 words-per-minute average and adjusted for comprehension:

Above roughly 400 words per minute, research finds comprehension starts to drop (Rayner et al., 2016). Claims of 1,000 words per minute with full understanding are not supported; we go through the evidence in Does speed reading work?.

How to measure your reading speed

The quickest way is our reading speed test: read a short story, answer three questions and get your speed plus your effective speed (adjusted for comprehension).

To do it by hand: pick a text you have not read, read for five minutes at your normal pace, count the words and divide by five. Repeat with a similar text and take the average.