✍️ Words Per Hour Calculator
Calculate your writing speed, project completion time, and daily word goal targets
| Writing Type | Avg WPH Range | Typical Session | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fiction / Novel | 500 – 1,500 | 1–2 hours | Creative decisions slow pace |
| Blog / Web Content | 600 – 1,200 | 1–3 hours | Research adds time |
| NaNoWriMo Drafting | 1,000 – 2,000 | 1–2 hours | Volume over quality |
| Academic / Research | 200 – 600 | 2–4 hours | Citations slow output |
| Copywriting | 500 – 1,500 | 1–2 hours | Revision-heavy |
| Journaling / Free Write | 800 – 2,000 | 15–30 min | No editing, stream of consciousness |
| Technical Writing | 200 – 500 | 2–4 hours | Precision required |
| Screenplay / Script | 300 – 800 | 1–3 hours | Formatting slows pace |
| Project Type | Word Count | At 500 WPH | At 1,000 WPH |
|---|---|---|---|
| Short Blog Post | 500 | 1 hour | 30 min |
| Standard Blog Post | 1,500 | 3 hours | 1.5 hours |
| Long Article | 3,000 | 6 hours | 3 hours |
| Short Story | 7,500 | 15 hours | 7.5 hours |
| Novella | 20,000 | 40 hours | 20 hours |
| NaNoWriMo Novel | 50,000 | 100 hours | 50 hours |
| Standard Novel | 80,000 | 160 hours | 80 hours |
| Long Novel | 100,000 | 200 hours | 100 hours |
| WPH Speed | 1 hr/day | 2 hrs/day | 4 hrs/day |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 WPH (slow) | 250 | 500 | 1,000 |
| 500 WPH (beginner) | 500 | 1,000 | 2,000 |
| 750 WPH (average) | 750 | 1,500 | 3,000 |
| 1,000 WPH (good) | 1,000 | 2,000 | 4,000 |
| 1,500 WPH (fast) | 1,500 | 3,000 | 6,000 |
| 2,000 WPH (elite) | 2,000 | 4,000 | 8,000 |
Average adult reads about 238 words per minute during silent reading. This figure is based on a study of more than 100 tests with more than 18 000 participants. Most readers reach around 200 words each minute with understanding of 60% That maybe surprises us, because most folks who read work documents, newspapers, books or screens, practice daily for at least one hour.
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When dealing with non-technical material, the pace is usually between 200 and 250 words each minute, which means around 2 minutes per page. College students commonly read more quickly, around 300 words each minute, probably because of their constant prcatice. With such pace, you would need 75 minutes to scan a whole magazine.
How Fast People Read and Understand
There are various levels of reading. Good readers easily reach 350 words each minute, while average readers reach 250 words and slow readers only 150. A pace of 150 words each minute is considered relatively slow.
When a reader gets momentum, they start to read more and more quickly, that happens naturally. Speed between 180 and 200 words each minute usually means 2 to 3 minutes per page.
An average textbook has around 800 words on a page. For example, it would take 3.2 minutes to read one page, 32 minutes for ten pages, and a bit more than an hour for 20 pages. For secondary students, the usual pace is between 40 and 60 pages each hour.
When you read hard scientific or technical text, the pace drops to 6 pages each hour, which matches 75 words each minute. That depends on how deeply the person analyses the content. Actually, there is no “objectively right” pace for every book.
Normal easy reading with good insight happens between 200 and 300 words each minute. If you focus, it is possible to read 100 pages each hour, but most commonly you reach only 60 or 70 pages. Looking at a big list of books, the lowest word count per page is 176, the highest is 569, with a median of 366 and a mean of 356.
Fast reading is a group of techniques to increase the haste without losing the insight. Training programs promise an increase of 200 to more than 1 000 words each minute, although the understanding commonly drops. A safe result after training is around 80 to 150 pages each hour.
The world record holder of fast reading reached a wonderful 4 700 words each minute with 67% insight. Maria Teresa Calderon claims that she reads 80 000 words each minute with full understanding, but that was never officially confirmed. Bill Gates is reported to read 150 pages each hour (around 625 words each minute) with 90% insight.
Even a modest increase of 33% in pace would save the reader 15 minutes each hour.
How many pages you read each hour depends on the difficulty of the text, the skill of the reader, the goal and the format. Not saying words in your head helps to increase the pace, but using a cursor to mark text on screen does not always work well. Making the window of the browser narrower indeed helped, because screens commonly are too broad.
There is an ideal count of words per line to increase the focus.
