How long does it take to read the New Testament? About 15 hours.
260 chapters and roughly 200,000 words — a quarter of the Bible. Ten minutes a day finishes it in 90 days. The calculator opens there; switch to a single book for its own reading time.
How long would it actually take you?
Set what you're reading and how fast you read. Then work it either way — from a deadline to the daily minutes, or from a daily habit to the finish date.
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 New Testament in 90 days
Chapters a day
2.9
260 chapters in total
Total reading time
15 hr 11 min
200,516 words at 220 wpm
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 answer
About 15 hours — a quarter of the whole Bible
The New Testament is 27 books, 260 chapters, 7,957 verses and roughly 200,000 words. At an average adult reading speed of about 220 words a minute that comes to just over 15 hours from Matthew to Revelation. Read aloud it's nearer 26 hours; read quickly, about 10. The whole Bible is 59 hours, so the New Testament is a little over a quarter of it — which is the fact that reframes the project for most people.
Fifteen hours is two working days. Spread across 90 days it is ten minutes of reading, which is less than a one-year plan through the whole Bible asks for. In a month it's half an hour a day. At a chapter a day it takes 260 days, finishing comfortably inside a year with room for every evening you miss.
That combination — genuinely short, and covering the part of the Bible most people are actually trying to understand — is why the New Testament is the better first complete read, and why finishing it beats abandoning something larger. Completing a book of the Bible does something to your sense of what you're capable of that no amount of good intention replaces.
Four ways through it
The same 15 hours at four deadlines
At an average silent reading speed. The tool above opens on the 90-day version — change the deadline or the speed and the daily number changes with it.
~30 minutes a day · 8.7 chapters
In 30 days
A month of half-hour sittings. Fast enough that Paul's letters stay in view of each other, which makes the arguments running between them far easier to follow than they are at a chapter a day.
~15 minutes a day · 4.3 chapters
In 60 days
Two months at a quarter of an hour. Probably the best balance in the list — quick enough to hold the thread, gentle enough to survive a bad week.
~10 minutes a day · 2.9 chapters
In 90 days
Three chapters a day for a season. Ten minutes is small enough that the plan almost never fails on time, which makes this the highest-completion option for a first attempt.
260 days · about 8½ months
One chapter a day
Three minutes a day, done before the year is out. No schedule to fall behind on, which is its real advantage: there is only a bookmark, so a missed week costs a week and nothing else.
Where the 15 hours goes
The four sections, by reading time
Useful for planning, and quietly revealing: the four Gospels are almost half the New Testament by time, and the twenty-one letters together are about a third.
The Gospels — about 7 hours
89 chapters across Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Luke is the longest at roughly 2 hours 10 minutes, Matthew about 2 hours, John 1 hour 40, and Mark the shortest at about 1 hour 20 — which is why Mark is the standard recommendation for a first Gospel.
Acts — about 2 hours
28 chapters, and the only narrative bridge between the Gospels and the letters. Reading Acts immediately before the letters, rather than in canonical isolation, turns most of Paul's correspondence from abstract theology into mail with a return address.
The letters — about 5¼ hours
21 books and 121 chapters, and far shorter than their weight suggests. Romans is about 50 minutes, 1 Corinthians the same, Hebrews 35, and Philemon is 25 verses — roughly three minutes. Nine of the letters take under fifteen minutes each.
Revelation — about 45 minutes
22 chapters, and the shortest of the four sections by some distance. Read in one sitting it is a startlingly different book from the one that gets quoted in fragments — the images accumulate, and the ending does something the pieces on their own never do.
Worth knowing before you start
Read it in the order it happened, not the order it's bound in
The New Testament is arranged by category and length rather than chronology, which produces one genuinely confusing effect: the letters sit in descending order of size, so you meet Romans — Paul's densest and most systematic argument — before anything he wrote earlier and more plainly. A lot of people conclude from Romans that the letters are beyond them, when what they've actually done is start at the hardest one.
A better order for a first read is Mark, then Acts, then the letters roughly as Acts introduces them — Galatians, the Thessalonian letters, the Corinthian correspondence — and Romans somewhere well after. Then Luke and John, then Hebrews and the general letters, then Revelation. It costs the same fifteen hours and it reads as a story with people in it rather than a filing system.
The other honest note is about repetition. Matthew, Mark and Luke overlap heavily, and at 30-day pace you'll read some episodes three times inside a fortnight. That feels like inefficiency and isn't — the differences between the three accounts are where most of the interest lives, and they only become visible when the readings are close enough together to compare. Slow plans lose this almost entirely.
Which book should you actually start with?
Say where you're coming from — never read it, raised on it and drifted, started Matthew three times — and get a specific first chapter rather than a generic plan. It stays private.
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Questions people ask
About the how long to read the new testament
How long does it take to read the New Testament?+
About 15 hours at an average reading speed of 220 words per minute — 260 chapters, 7,957 verses, roughly 200,000 words. Read aloud it's nearer 26 hours; a fast reader can finish it in about 10.
How long does it take to read the New Testament in 30 days?+
About 30 minutes a day, or 8.7 chapters. A month is a genuinely comfortable deadline for the New Testament in a way it isn't for the whole Bible, where 30 days means two hours daily.
How many chapters a day to read the New Testament in 90 days?+
2.9 — so three chapters a day, about ten minutes. That's less daily reading than a whole-Bible-in-a-year plan asks for, and it finishes in a season.
How long does it take to read the book of Matthew?+
About two hours — 28 chapters and 1,071 verses. Luke is the longest Gospel at roughly 2 hours 10 minutes, John about 1 hour 40, and Mark the shortest at around 1 hour 20.
What's the shortest book of the New Testament?+
2 John, at 13 verses — under two minutes. 3 John is 14 verses, Jude and Philemon each about 25. Nine of the letters take less than fifteen minutes to read, which surprises most people given how often they're quoted.
Should I read the New Testament before the Old?+
For a first complete read, usually yes. It's a quarter of the length, it's the part most people are trying to understand, and finishing it is achievable in a season — where a whole-Bible plan is far more likely to be abandoned somewhere in Leviticus.
Fifteen hours. Ten minutes a day for a season.
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