The short version
Reading speed by age has no reliable table behind it. Children average around 150 words per minute. Adults average about 250. Those are the honest figures. Everything between them depends on the text, the purpose and the child, which is why measuring one reader beats reading any chart.
The two numbers we will stand behind
Children read at roughly 150 words per minute as an average. Adults read at roughly 250. Normal reading with full comprehension caps near 300 words per minute, and the fastest competent adults reach about 550.
That is what we are willing to put our name to. It is fewer numbers than you came here for. We know.
Search for reading speed by age and you will find neat tables. Age six, so many words per minute. Age seven, a few more. A tidy staircase climbing year by year to adulthood. They look authoritative. They get copied from site to site until the numbers feel like established fact.
Ask where those numbers came from and the trail goes cold. Most of the tables cite nobody. Some cite each other. A few point at a classroom fluency assessment designed for a different purpose, on a different kind of text, in a different country, and then present it as a universal law of childhood.
We can say where ours came from. The adult and child figures, the 300 wpm ceiling and the 550 wpm top end all come from a 2016 review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest, led by Keith Rayner. Rayner spent forty years measuring eye movements in reading. He co-invented the moving window method, the instrument that measures how much text a reader takes in at a single stop, and he had no course and no app to sell. The full citation sits at the foot of this page. Look for one at the foot of the tables.
We are not going to add another table to that pile. What follows is what can be said honestly about reading speed and age, and how to get a number that is about your child rather than an average of somebody else’s. Our speed reading guide covers the wider field. This page is for the parent or the teacher with a reader in front of them.
Why age based reading speed tables are shaky
A reading speed is not a property of a person. It is the result of a person meeting a text for a reason. Change the text or the reason and the number changes, even though the reader has not.
Three things set the speed of any individual read: the reader’s ability, the difficulty of the text, and the reason for reading it. Age touches the first one. It touches neither of the other two. That alone is enough to make an age column suspect.
The text moves the number more than the age does
An eleven year old reading a familiar comic and the same eleven year old reading a science textbook are two different readers. Same eyes. Same brain. Two speeds, and the gap between them can be threefold.
Easy text runs because the words are known and the sentences fall the way the reader expects. Hard text stops the eyes. One unfamiliar word breaks the rhythm and costs a second.
Now look again at a table that says a nine year old reads at a given speed. On what? Nobody says. The single most powerful variable in the measurement is missing from the chart, and the chart still expects you to compare your child against it.
The purpose moves it too
A child skimming a page to find one fact reads at one speed. The same child reading for a comprehension test reads at another. The same child reading aloud to a teacher reads at a third, and reading aloud is slower than reading silently for everyone, at every age.
Plenty of classroom reading rates are recorded aloud, because that is how a teacher can hear the errors. That is a sound way to check decoding. It is a poor way to measure silent reading speed, and the two get conflated in the tables all the time.
The medium and the room move it
Most readers slow down on a screen compared with paper. Children are no exception, and a child reading on a tablet in a noisy classroom is not the same reader as a child with a book in a quiet corner. We look at that gap in reading on screen versus paper.
Attention is the raw material. Tiredness, noise and a device with notifications on it all take their cut before a single word is read. Tell a reader that a quiz follows and both the speed and the understanding move. Nothing changed but the stakes. So much of a reading speed is really an attention score.
Grade level is not a reading rate
Parents run into grade level benchmarks and reasonably assume they are reading speeds. They are not the same thing.
A grade level describes the difficulty of text a child can handle. A reading rate describes how fast they move through it. A child can sit comfortably at their grade level and read slowly, and a child can race through text two years below them and look brilliant.
The two get mixed together because schools often record them in the same assessment, and the assessment usually has the child reading aloud. Reading aloud is capped by the speed of the mouth, not the eyes. Nobody reads aloud at 400 words per minute. Using an oral rate as a silent reading benchmark builds a ceiling into the chart before the child even sits down.
And the spread within an age is enormous
The spread between children of the same age is far wider than the gap between one age and the next. Any teacher knows this. A class of nine year olds holds children who read like six year olds and children who read like adults, sitting at the same table.
An age average hides that completely. It gives a parent a single number to fail against, and the child who sits below it is often a normal reader having a normal year. That is the real damage these tables do. They turn variation into worry.
What genuinely changes as a child gets older
Something real does develop with age. It is just not a wpm figure that climbs on a schedule.
A young child reads by decoding. Letters become sounds, sounds become words, words become meaning. It is slow because it is three jobs stacked on top of each other, and the working memory is full before the sentence ends.
With practice, decoding fades into the background. The word is recognised whole and the meaning arrives with it. That is reading fluency, and it is the thing that actually improves through childhood. Speed is a symptom of it, not the cause.
Fluency arrives at different times for different children, and it arrives text by text. A child can be fluent in a story about football and back to decoding in a chapter about volcanoes. Vocabulary is doing much of the work, which is why reading to children matters so much.
By the mid teens most readers who read regularly have stopped growing in raw speed. A high school reader who reads a lot and an adult who reads a lot land in much the same place. From then on it is not age that separates readers. It is mileage.
Measure the child, not the chart
You cannot do anything with an age average. You can do a great deal with a number you took yourself.
The method is simple. Give the child a text at the level they are actually being taught with. Time them reading it silently. Count the words. Divide the words by the minutes. That gives you words per minute, and it is worth more than any table on the internet because it was measured on the reader you care about.
Then ask what the passage said. Not a quiz with marks. Just a conversation. What happened, who did what, what surprised you. Speed with no comprehension is not reading, and a child who races through a page and remembers nothing has a comprehension problem wearing a speed costume.
For an older child or a teenager, take the speed reading test on our homepage. It times the reading, counts the words and follows with comprehension questions, so you get both halves of the picture in a few minutes. Sit with them while they do it. The score is a starting line, not a verdict.
Adults should do the same. Most people guess their own speed, and they guess it high. The full method for measuring words per minute reading is set out step by step if you would rather use a stopwatch and a book.
What to do if a child reads slowly
Slow reading in a child is almost never a speed problem. It is a fluency problem, a vocabulary problem or an attention problem, and speed is the visible edge of it.
Do not drill the child to read faster. A child pushed past their comprehension learns that reading is a race they lose, and learns to hate it. That costs far more over a lifetime than a low wpm score ever will.
Read to them, past the age you think you should stop. Books carry a bigger vocabulary and longer sentences than anything a child hears at the dinner table, and vocabulary is what turns decoding into fluency.
Let them read what they want to read. A child who reads four books about dinosaurs is building the same machinery as a child who reads four prize winning novels. Mileage is mileage. Getting kids interested in reading beats every technique in this field, and it is not close.
Do not panic about backwards eye movements. Between 10 and 15 per cent of a skilled reader’s eye movements go back over text already read, and those jumps come from comprehension failing in the moment, not from lazy eyes. They are the repair, not the fault. A child who re-reads constantly is telling you the text is too hard, not that they need a faster metronome. We cover that in reading regressions.
And check the obvious. Eyesight. Hearing. Whether the book in their hand is two years above the reading they can manage. Plenty of slow readers are simply reading the wrong book.
Give it time before you intervene. Reading speed in childhood does not climb in a straight line. It stalls for months and then jumps, usually after a run of books the child loved. A term of no movement is normal. A year of no movement, with comprehension flat too, is worth a conversation with the school.
When speed reading is worth teaching
Not before the fundamentals are solid. A child still decoding does not need technique. They need books and time.
Around the age of ten the picture changes. Fluency is usually there, the child reads to learn rather than learning to read, and the habits that will follow them through school are forming. Teaching speed reading at that point would improve reading habits for life, and it is a shame that schools rarely do.
What can be taught then is not a trick, and it is smaller than the adverts suggest. Reducing the inner voice that pronounces every word and holds most readers near speech pace, which is subvocalization. Learning to change gear between skimming a page and studying it. Learning to skim on purpose, which Rayner called a reasonable way to cope with the amount of text we have to get through.
What cannot be taught is a bigger pair of eyes. The eye resolves letters across about twenty characters, and a reader can identify a word about seven to eight characters to the right of where they are looking. That is the word they are on, plus the next one. Taking in a whole line at a glance is, in Rayner’s words, simply biologically impossible. Any course promising a child five words a stop is promising something the eye cannot do. We set out what is real in visual span.
None of it is fast. Reading is a psychomotor skill, like the piano or touch typing. Doubling a reading speed takes weeks of practice on real text, at any age. Anyone promising a child a new reading speed in an afternoon is selling something. Our page on how long it takes to learn speed reading gives the honest timeline.
Expect a ceiling, too. Normal reading with full comprehension caps near 300 words per minute, and the fastest competent adults reach about 550. Nobody reads a page at a thousand and understands it, whatever the app says, and a child who is told otherwise learns to fake it.
The honest answer for a parent or a teacher
You wanted a table. Here is what we can give you instead, and we think it is worth more.
Children average around 150 words per minute. Adults average around 250. Both figures come with a spread so wide that a single child’s position inside it tells you very little on its own.
What tells you something is the trend. Measure the child on real text, note the speed and note what they understood, then measure again a term later. A child moving upward on both is a child who is fine, whatever the chart says. A child stuck on comprehension while the speed climbs is a child to worry about, even if the chart says they are ahead.
Comprehension, retention and thinking about what was read are what make reading work. Speed is a by-product. Reading fast without understanding is not a lesser form of reading. It is worse than reading slowly, because it feels like progress and is not.
Start with a real measurement. Take the speed reading test yourself first, so you know what the child is walking into, then let them try it. Two numbers, taken three months apart, will tell you more about a reader than every reading speed by age chart on the internet put together.
Sources
Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So Much to Read, So Little Time: How Do We Read, and Can Speed Reading Help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4–34.
Carver, R. P. (1992). Reading rate: Theory, research, and practical implications. Journal of Reading, 36(2), 84–95.
