Work out how long a book, article or textbook takes to read. Enter pages or words, pick your reading speed and text difficulty, and get the time in hours and minutes with a session-by-session plan.
How long does it take to read 50 pages?
Work out how long a book, article or textbook takes to read. Enter pages or words, pick your reading speed and text difficulty, and get the time in hours and minutes with a session-by-session plan.
Wondering how long it takes to read 50 pages? At an average pace of 250 words per minute, with about 250 words on a standard page, 50 pages comes out to a set number of hours and minutes. Adjust your reading speed and the text difficulty above to match your own pace and get a session-by-session plan.
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Reading Time Calculator - how long any text takes to read
Give it a length and a speed, and it returns the reading time, splits it into sessions of your chosen length, and builds a plan showing which pages to read in each sitting. It also shows the same text at six different speeds so you can see what a faster pace would save.
How long common texts take to read
Times below assume an average reader at 250 words per minute, with 250 words per page:
| Text | Words | Pages | Time at 250 WPM |
|---|---|---|---|
| Web article | 1,000 | 4 | 4 min |
| College essay | 5,000 | 20 | 20 min |
| Master thesis | 20,000 | 80 | 1 h 20 min |
| Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone | 77,000 | 308 | 5 h 8 min |
| Average adult novel | 90,000 | 360 | 6 h |
| Academic textbook | 150,000 | 600 | 10 h light / 16 h 40 min dense |
| The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) | 480,000 | 1,920 | 32 h |
Scenarios - how readers use this
Result: 8 h 20 min, 12 sessions, about 33 pages a session.
Result: 6 h total, 12 sessions, so 12 days at that pace.
Result: effective 180 WPM, about 1 h 7 min, 3 sessions of 30 minutes.
Result: 5 h 20 min, 6 sessions, so 6 days of commuting.
Result: effective 480 WPM, about 1 h 3 min.
Result: 6 h 40 min, 27 sessions, about 9 pages a night.
Text difficulty and effective speed
A statute reads slower than a thriller. The calculator adjusts your speed with a difficulty multiplier:
| Text type | Multiplier | Effective WPM (base 250) | Examples |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light | 100% | 250 | Fiction, blog, news |
| Medium | 80% | 200 | Textbook, report, documentation |
| Dense | 60% | 150 | Science, law, medicine, math |
FAQ - frequently asked questions
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Calculator verified by the LiczGrupa.pl team
Content, formulas and results have been reviewed for accuracy and relevance by our team of specialists.
Reviewed by: Natalia Skrzek