Reading goal calculator
To read 52 books a year, you need to read about 43 pages a day. At the average adult reading speed for fiction, that takes about 46 minutes, or 1.8 reading sessions of 25 minutes. Change any number below to fit your own books and pace.
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How many pages a day to read 12, 24, 52 or 100 books a year?
To read 12 books a year you need about 10 pages a day, 24 books about 20, 52 books about 43 and 100 books about 83. That’s for 300-page books at 275 words a page, read every day of the year, with figures rounded up:
| Books a year | Pages a day | Minutes a day, fiction | Minutes a day, non-fiction |
|---|---|---|---|
| 12 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 24 | 20 | 21 | 23 |
| 36 | 30 | 32 | 35 |
| 50 | 42 | 44 | 48 |
| 52 | 43 | 46 | 50 |
| 75 | 62 | 66 | 72 |
| 100 | 83 | 87 | 95 |
How many books a year is 10 pages a day?
Ten pages a day is about 12 books a year of 300 pages, and 20 pages a day is about 24. The same arithmetic in reverse, for common daily page counts and three book lengths:
| Pages a day | Pages a year | Books a year, 200 pages | Books a year, 300 pages | Books a year, 400 pages |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 1,825 | 9 | 6 | 4 |
| 10 | 3,650 | 18 | 12 | 9 |
| 15 | 5,475 | 27 | 18 | 13 |
| 20 | 7,300 | 36 | 24 | 18 |
| 25 | 9,125 | 45 | 30 | 22 |
| 30 | 10,950 | 54 | 36 | 27 |
| 40 | 14,600 | 73 | 48 | 36 |
| 50 | 18,250 | 91 | 60 | 45 |
A small daily amount you keep up beats a large one you abandon. The research on building a reading habit explains why, and how long a daily habit takes to stick.
How the numbers are worked out
Pages a day is the number of books times the length of a book, divided by 365. Minutes a day is those pages times the words on a page, divided by your reading speed. Both are rounded up, because a daily target rounded down comes up short by the end of the year.
Three of the inputs are assumptions, and the calculator shows all three so you can change them:
- Book length, 300 pages. A round figure, not a measured average. Nothing moves the answer more, so if you mostly read 450-page fantasy or 200-page novellas, change it.
- Words per page, 275. This depends on the edition, the type size and the margins.
- Reading speed, 260 words a minute for fiction and 238 for non-fiction. These are the averages for adults reading silently in English, from Marc Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies and 18,573 participants. Plenty of readers are faster or slower. If you know your own speed, use it.
Sessions are 25 minutes because that is one standard Pomodoro, the timed interval Francesco Cirillo’s Pomodoro Technique is built on.
What changes the answer
- Not reading every day. Reading five days a week instead of seven, multiply the daily figures by 1.4. Four days a week, by 1.75.
- Starting partway through the year. Count the books you still have to read and the days left. Pages a day is books left times pages per book, divided by days left.
- What you read. At 238 words a minute against 260, the same pages of non-fiction take about 9% longer than fiction.
Sources
- Marc Brysbaert, Journal of Memory and Language 109 (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Checked 22 September 2026.
- Francesco Cirillo, Currency (2018). The Pomodoro Technique. Checked 22 September 2026.
Published by Chaptify LLC, the maker of Chaptify, a reading tracker and social reading app for iPhone.