How long does it take to read the Bible? Less than you think.
About 59 hours at average speed — but the number that matters is the daily one. Set your pace and your deadline and find out what it actually costs on a Tuesday.
How long would it actually take you?
Set what you're reading and how fast you read. It works out the total, and the daily minutes to hit your deadline.
365 is the classic Bible-in-a-year. 90 is an aggressive sprint. 30 is a marathon read.
Minutes a day
10 min
to finish the whole Bible in 365 days
Total reading time
2 d 11 hr
1,189 chapters
Words
783,770
31,102 verses
Word counts are estimated from verse counts at the King James Version's average of about 25 words per verse (≈783,000 words across 31,102 verses). That's accurate in aggregate and approximate for any single book — Psalms runs short per verse, Esther long.
The short answer
About 60 to 70 hours — but that number isn't the useful one
The Bible runs to roughly 783,000 words in the King James Version, across 1,189 chapters and 31,102 verses. At an average adult silent reading speed of around 220 words a minute, that's a little under 60 hours of actual reading. Read aloud, at the pace you'd use in church, it's closer to 80. Those are the headline figures, and they're the ones every page about this repeats.
They're also almost useless on their own, because nobody sits down to read the Bible for sixty hours. The question people actually have is some version of: can I finish this by Christmas, and what would that cost me on a Tuesday? That's a different calculation, and it depends on two things a static answer can't know — how fast you personally read, and how long you've got.
So this tool runs it the other way round. Set your pace, choose your scope, and pick a deadline, and it tells you the daily minutes. The answer surprises most people: the whole Bible in a year is about ten minutes a day. The New Testament in ninety days is roughly seven. Put against the time most of us lose to a feed without noticing, those numbers reframe the problem entirely — it was never really about time.
Reference figures
The numbers behind the calculation
Chapter and verse counts are the standard Protestant canon figures. Word counts are estimated from verses — see the note below the tool.
The whole Bible
66 books, 1,189 chapters, 31,102 verses, roughly 783,000 words. At 220 words a minute that's about 59 hours — or a little under 10 minutes a day across a year.
The New Testament
260 chapters and 7,957 verses — around 200,000 words, or roughly 15 hours. Reading it in 90 days works out at about 10 minutes a day; in 30 days, about half an hour.
The longest and shortest
Psalms is the longest book by verse count at 2,461, though its verses are short. Jeremiah is the longest by word count. 3 John is the shortest at 14 verses — about a minute and a half.
Worth knowing before you commit
Why most one-year plans die in Leviticus
The failure point is remarkably consistent. People start in Genesis on 1 January, move well through the narrative, and hit Leviticus somewhere in the second week of February — at which point the reading stops being story and becomes sacrificial regulation, and the daily habit quietly dies. By March the bookmark hasn't moved. It's so predictable it's almost a genre.
The fix isn't discipline, it's sequencing. A plan that pairs an Old Testament reading with a New Testament one each day means you're never more than a page from a Gospel, and the hard stretches have something carrying them. That's why the plan generator on this site offers a dual track — it's the single change most likely to get someone to December.
The other honest adjustment is scope. If you've never finished the Bible, starting with the whole thing is a strange first move — it's the equivalent of choosing a marathon as your first run. The New Testament in ninety days is about ten minutes a day and finishes; so does one Gospel in a month. Completing something small builds the thing an abandoned plan destroys, which is your own belief that you finish what you start.
Not sure where to begin?
Say where you are — new to this, returning after years, stalled in Leviticus — and get a straight recommendation. It stays private; create an account to keep going.
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Questions people ask
About the bible reading time calculator
How long does it take to read the entire Bible?+
At an average silent reading speed of about 220 words per minute, roughly 59 hours — the Bible runs to around 783,000 words in the KJV. Read aloud at a measured pace it's closer to 80 hours. Spread across a year that's a little under 10 minutes a day.
How long does it take to read the Bible in a year?+
About 10 minutes a day, or roughly 3.3 chapters. That's the figure that surprises people most — a one-year plan is a genuinely small daily commitment, and plans usually fail on sequencing and consistency rather than on time.
How long does it take to read the New Testament?+
Around 15 hours at average speed — 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, roughly 200,000 words. That's about 10 minutes a day over 90 days, or half an hour a day to finish in a month.
How many words are in the Bible?+
Approximately 783,000 in the King James Version, though the exact figure varies by translation — modern translations generally run slightly shorter. It's 31,102 verses and 1,189 chapters across 66 books, and those counts are stable across mainstream English translations.
How are the word counts in this calculator worked out?+
They're derived from verse counts at the KJV's average of about 25.2 words per verse. That's accurate in aggregate and approximate for any single book — Psalms runs short per verse and Esther long — which is the right level of precision for a reading-time estimate and why the tool says so rather than implying more.
What's the fastest anyone can read the Bible?+
At a genuinely fast 320 words per minute it's about 41 hours, which some people do across a single intensive week. Whether that's worth doing is a separate question — a fast read gives you the sweep of the story in a way slow reading never does, and gives you almost none of the depth.
Ten minutes a day gets you to the last page.
Create an account to read with something that answers questions as they come up — and turns the passage you didn't understand into one you did.
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