The short version
The average reading speed for an adult is about 250 words per minute. Children average around 150. Normal reading with full comprehension caps near 300 words per minute, and the fastest competent adults reach about 550. An average is a landmark and nothing more. Measure yourself before you trust one.
The numbers, and what they are worth
An average adult reads at roughly 250 words per minute. That figure gets quoted everywhere and it holds up well enough as a starting point.
Children read slower. Around 150 wpm is a fair average, though a child’s number swings more than an adult’s because the skill is still forming.
Then comes the part nobody selling a course wants to print. Normal reading, the kind where you understand the page and can still tell someone about it an hour later, tops out near 300 words per minute. Competent adults spread out above that, and the fastest of them land around 550. That is the ceiling. It sits a long way below the adverts.
Those figures 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. With George McConkie he invented the moving window method, the instrument that tells you how much text a reader takes in at a single stop. He had no course and no app to sell.
Our speed reading guide covers the whole field. This page covers one thing. What the average reading speed is, and why the average may have nothing to do with you.
Here is the trouble with an average. The only reading speed that matters to you is your own, measured on the kind of text you actually read.
Why the average reader is a fiction
There is no average reader. There are only readers, reading particular things, on particular days, for particular reasons.
Three things decide the number for any individual: ability, the difficulty of the text, and the reason for reading. Change one of them and the words per minute change with it. A single reader can vary by a factor of four across one week without their skill shifting at all.
The difficulty of the text
A thriller is not a tax return. A tax return is not a physics paper.
Easy prose flows because you know the words, you know the shape of the sentences, and the next word is half identified before your eyes arrive at it. Hard text stops you. Unfamiliar words break the rhythm. Dense sentences force you to hold three clauses in your head at once.
The same reader who cruises through a novel at 300 wpm will crawl through a legal contract at 100. Neither number is wrong. They are measuring different jobs.
The reason you are reading
Purpose sets pace. If you need to know whether an article is worth your time, you should be moving fast and taking in structure, not sentences. If you are reading a clause that will cost you money, you should be crawling.
Good readers change gear without thinking about it. Learning to shift gear on purpose is what speed reading techniques are for, and it does more for real reading than any raw wpm score.
The medium and the room
Paper and screen do not read the same. Most people slow down on a screen, and they trust what they read there a little less. Backlight, scroll position and the pull of a notification all take a toll. We look at that in reading on screen versus paper.
Reading is not one speed, and here is the table that proves it
Ronald Carver spent a career measuring reading rate. He found that a reader does not have a speed. A reader has gears, and changes gear according to the job in front of them.
| What you are doing | Rate |
|---|---|
| Memorising the text | about 140 wpm |
| Learning the text | about 200 wpm |
| Normal reading with full comprehension | about 300 wpm |
| Skimming | about 450 wpm |
| Scanning for a target word | about 600 wpm |
Now the part we would be dishonest to leave out. The bottom two rows are not reading.
The 450 wpm figure came from a task where readers hunted through a sentence for transposed words. The 600 wpm figure came from searching a text for one target word. Those are hunting jobs. Nobody in that work understood a passage at 600 words per minute, and Carver never said they did. If we handed you those two rows as reading speeds we would be committing the exact sin we accuse the industry of.
Carver coined a word for the middle row. Rauding: the process by which reading leads to actually understanding what was read. That is what you do with a book. It runs near 300 words per minute and it does not go much faster.
How to measure your own reading speed
The method is simple and it has not changed in a century. Read against the clock. Count the words. Divide the words by the minutes taken. That is your words per minute.
Do it on a text you would actually read. Do it more than once, on different material, or you will end up with a single number and false confidence. If you want the method in full, we cover measuring words per minute reading step by step.
Or skip the stopwatch. Take the speed reading test on our homepage. It times you, counts the words for you, and puts a comprehension check on the end so the score means something. It takes a few minutes.
What sets the pace
Four things sit between the average reader and a faster one. None of them is fixed by a slider in an app.
Your inner voice. Most readers pronounce every word in their head. The brain’s speech regions fire even though no sound comes out. Speech is slow, and that is part of why the average sits near 250 wpm. This is subvocalization. You can reduce it. You cannot delete it, and past a point you should not want to, because it carries the rhythm of the sentence and the rhythm carries the sense.
Your brain, not your eyes. A fixation lasts about 250 milliseconds. The flick from one fixation to the next lasts 25 to 30. Add the flicks up and they come to roughly a tenth of your reading time. The other nine tenths is your brain pulling meaning out of words. Reading rate is limited by how fast you understand, not by how fast you look. That one finding kills every drill built to train the eyes.
Long fixations are the proof. When you stall on a word you stall because the word was hard to identify or the sense was hard to grasp. The eye is waiting for the brain. A long fixation means the brain stalled, and no eye training shortens it.
The span is small. The eye resolves letters across about twenty characters. You can identify a word about seven to eight characters to the right of where you are looking, which is roughly the word you are on plus the next one. Reading a whole line at a glance is, in Rayner’s words, simply biologically impossible. We set out what the research does support in visual span.
Your regressions. Between 10 and 15 per cent of a skilled reader’s eye movements go backwards, over text already read. That is not carelessness and it is not a habit to drill out. It is comprehension failing in real time and the eyes going back to fetch what the brain missed. Fix the comprehension and the regressions fall away on their own.
Attention belongs on the list too. A reader who knows they will be questioned on a page reads it differently, and both speed and understanding move. Nothing changed but the stakes. That tells you how much of an average reading speed is really an attention score.
Does the average change with age?
It changes with skill, and skill tends to arrive with age. That is not the same thing.
By adulthood the growth stops. A reader of 25 and a reader of 55 who read the same amount will read at much the same speed. What separates adults is how much they read, not how old they are.
Parents and teachers want a table: this age, this number. We do not publish one, because the honest ranges are wide and the tidy tables you find elsewhere rarely say where their numbers came from. We set out what can be said with a straight face in reading speed by age.
What a realistic target looks like
Start from where you are. If the test puts you at 250, the honest ambition is not four figures. It is the top of your own comprehension range, and the judgement to know when to leave it.
Normal reading with full understanding sits near 300 wpm. The fastest competent adults reach about 550, and by then they are trading something away. Anyone promising you a thousand is describing skimming, scanning, or nothing at all.
The gains that stick come from mileage. Speed reading courses do sometimes work, and students do finish them faster than they started. The active ingredient is not the drills. It is that the course made them read a great deal of text over eight to twelve weeks. Reading a lot is the shortcut. There is no other one. We give the timeline in how long it takes to learn speed reading.
Aim for your optimum speed, not your maximum. Your optimum is the fastest you can go while still taking it in. That number is personal, and the only way to find it is to measure it.
Speed is the wrong goal
A high reading speed is not an achievement. What you understood, what you kept, and what you did with it are the achievement.
Reading quickly without understanding is worse than reading slowly. You spend the time, you finish the page, and you carry away nothing but the belief that you read it. That belief stops you going back.
Anyone who sells you a number and never mentions comprehension is selling you the wrong thing. The number is easy to inflate. Open any page, hold down the page down key, stop the clock and watch the counter fly past 25,000 wpm. You have not read a word. You have turned pages. That is what most of the extreme claims amount to, and it is why we are blunt about how to read 1,000 words per minute.
Find your own number instead. Take the speed reading test, note the speed, note the comprehension score, and treat the pair of them as one result. Then work on the slower half.
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.
