What is the average reading speed?
About 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, in English, reading silently. That is not a rule of thumb — it comes from the largest review of the question anyone has done.
Where the number comes from
Marc Brysbaert's 2019 meta-analysis (How many words do we read per minute?, Journal of Memory and Language, volume 109) pulled together 190 studies run between 1901 and 2019, covering 17,887 people. The headline figures:
- 238 words per minute — silent reading, non-fiction.
- 260 words per minute — silent reading, fiction.
- Reading aloud is slower, around 180.
The gap between fiction and non-fiction is not about one being more interesting. It tracks word length: non-fiction simply uses longer words, and longer words take longer.
What counts as fast
There is no official scale, but the research spread is wide enough to place yourself in it honestly:
- Under 150 wpm — slower than typical. Often a sign the material is hard rather than that the reader is slow.
- 200–260 wpm — the ordinary adult range, where most people sit.
- 300–400 wpm — genuinely quick, and reachable with practice on familiar material.
- 400–500 wpm — fast, usually with some loss of detail on anything dense.
- Above 600 wpm — at this point you are skimming. That is a legitimate thing to do deliberately; it is not the same as reading.
Measuring your own
Pick something ordinary you have not read. Read for exactly one minute at your natural pace, mark where you stopped, and count the words — or read a known number of words and time it, which is easier. Do it two or three times across different material and take the middle value, because a single run on an unusually easy or hard passage will mislead you.
Do it before trying to improve anything. People consistently misjudge their own speed in both directions, and a number you measured is the only thing that makes progress visible.
What actually moves the number
Reading rate rises mostly with familiarity: the more often you have met a word, the faster you process it. That makes the dependable route unglamorous — read a lot, especially in the subjects you want to be quick in. Technique helps at the margins by removing waste, not by raising the ceiling.
The waste worth removing is real, though: losing your line, re-reading without meaning to, and drifting off while your eyes keep going. A pacer — a finger on paper, or an RSVP reader on screen — holds a steady rate so none of those happen quietly.
A realistic target
If you read around 240 now, aim for 350–400 on ordinary prose within a few weeks of short daily practice. That is roughly 50% more reading in the same time, which compounds to a great deal over a year, and it is achievable without giving up comprehension. Targets of 1,000 and above are not supported by the evidence.
Questions people ask
What is the average reading speed for adults?
About 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, reading silently in English, based on a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering 17,887 people.
Is 300 words per minute fast?
Slightly above average. The typical adult sits around 240, so 300 is quick but unremarkable; 400 and above is genuinely fast reading.
How fast do college students read?
Studies of university students generally land in the same 200–300 band as adults overall. Material difficulty moves the number far more than education level does.
What is the fastest anyone can read?
Claims of several thousand words per minute describe skimming. Comprehension falls as speed rises, and the research finds no method that removes that trade-off.