How to Test Your Reading Speed and Calculate Words per Minute

To test your reading speed, read a passage you have not seen before at your normal pace, time yourself, and divide the number of words by the minutes it took. That gives your words per minute (WPM). Then check what you understood, because a speed without comprehension is not a reading speed. The quickest way is the free reading speed test, which times you and asks four questions. For a figure that reflects your own reading, add a longer test on the kind of text you actually read, with a stopwatch.

How to calculate words per minute

The formula is one line:

Words per minute = number of words read ÷ reading time in minutes. With a time in seconds: words × 60 ÷ seconds.

Suppose you read 1,200 words in 5 minutes and 20 seconds. That is 320 seconds, so 1,200 × 60 ÷ 320 = 225 WPM. Most people find the seconds version easier, because it avoids turning 20 seconds into a decimal of a minute.

If you stop part-way through a text, count only the words up to where you stopped. Paste that stretch into any word processor and its word count will do the work for you.

How to test your reading speed with a stopwatch

An online test is convenient, but a manual test lets you measure your speed on the material you care about: reports, textbooks, novels or papers. It takes about ten minutes.

1. Pick an unfamiliar text. Choose something you have not read, at the difficulty you normally deal with. A text you know already will flatter your result.
2. Make it long enough. Aim for at least 1,000 words, or about five minutes of reading. Plain prose works best; skip pages dominated by tables or lists.
3. Count the words. Copy the text into a word processor, or count the words on three typical lines, average them and multiply by the number of lines.
4. Read the way you normally would. Start a stopwatch, read every sentence at the pace you would use for something you want to understand, and stop the clock at the end. Do not race: you are measuring a habit, not a sprint.
5. Check comprehension without looking back. Write down the main point and three to five supporting details, or answer questions someone else prepared.
6. Calculate. Words × 60 ÷ seconds, then note the result together with your comprehension check and the kind of text.

How long should a reading speed test be?

Longer than most online tests. In his 2019 meta-analysis of reading rate, Marc Brysbaert noticed that many studies asked people to read for only a minute or two. He expected short tests to produce inflated speeds, as if readers sprint for a minute and could not keep it up. That is not what the data showed. Short tests were not faster on average, but their results were far more scattered. Studies in which people read one reasonably long text for several minutes gave steadier estimates than studies that used a string of one-minute passages.

Two practical rules follow:

• Treat a single short test as a rough estimate. Read for five minutes or more when you want a number you can compare over time.
• Test more than once. Take three tests on different texts or days and use the middle result, not the best one.

Why the text you choose changes your result

Speed depends on the text as much as on the reader. Brysbaert found that adults read fiction a little faster than non-fiction (about 260 against 238 WPM) and that word length explains much of the gap: in large English corpora, fiction words average 4.2 letters and non-fiction words 4.6. He suggests adjusting the expected rate for a specific text as 238 × 4.6 ÷ the text's average word length. A dense text averaging 5.4 letters per word predicts about 203 WPM, even for an ordinary reader.

Familiarity and purpose matter too. You will read a news story on a topic you know faster than a contract, and you should. So compare like with like: when you retest, use the same kind of text under the same conditions, or the change you see will mostly be the text.

Why comprehension has to be part of the test

Anyone can reach 1,000 WPM by moving their eyes down a page. The research review by Rayner and colleagues (2016) concludes that speed and understanding trade off: past your normal rate, extra speed is paid for in comprehension. A test that only times you rewards skimming.

A simple way to keep the number honest is effective reading speed: WPM multiplied by the share of questions you answered correctly. Reading at 300 WPM and getting three of four questions right gives 300 × 0.75 = 225 effective WPM. It is a practical convention, not a standardised scientific measure, but it stops you from treating a skim as a gain.

Report your speed as a pair: words per minute and how much you understood. A higher speed with lower comprehension is not an improvement.

Take the free reading speed test

Tachi's reading speed test does the timing and scoring for you in a few minutes. Here is exactly what it does:

• It shows one of three original non-fiction passages of about 300 words, in ordinary paragraph layout, and times you from the moment the passage appears until you press the finish button. Each retake picks a different passage from the last one.
• It then asks four multiple-choice questions about details the passage states, so they cannot be answered reliably without reading it.
• It reports your WPM, your comprehension, your effective speed, and how you compare with the adult average of 238 WPM for non-fiction.
• Results above 700 WPM are flagged as skimming rather than reading, and so is one correct answer or fewer, which is no better than guessing. Neither is presented as your speed.
• There is no sign-up. Your latest result is saved only in your browser, and you can open the RSVP reader with your measured speed as the starting pace.

Use the online test for a quick, consistent baseline, since every run uses passages of the same length and difficulty. Use the stopwatch method above for the longer, more stable measurement on your own material. The two answer slightly different questions, and together they give you a fair picture. The passages are in English only.

What does your result mean?

For the full picture of what is normal, including fiction, reading aloud and age, see average reading speed.

How to practise and retest

A test is most useful as a starting point and a check-in. A routine that fits around most days:

1. Week 1: take three tests on different days and record the middle result as your baseline, with its comprehension score.
2. Daily, 10 minutes: read your own text in a paced reader, starting at your baseline. Raise the speed by 25 WPM only when you can still summarise what you read; drop 50 WPM when you cannot. The ten-minute routine adds short drills before the reading block.
3. Every four weeks: retest with the same method and the same kind of text. Compare effective speed, not raw speed.

Expect modest changes. Reading speed is limited mainly by how quickly you recognise words and understand language, not by your eye movements, so the reliable gains come from reading more, learning vocabulary and knowing when a text deserves only a skim. The evidence is laid out in does speed reading work?, and how to improve reading comprehension covers the other half of the score. If your goal is to get through more material rather than to raise a number, skimming and scanning will save you more time than any test.