How Many Books Does the Average Person Read a Year?

How many books does the average person read a year?

The average American adult reported reading about 12 to 14 books a year in 2021, according to the two national polls that publish an average. The typical adult reads far fewer: about five books in 2021, and in late 2025 about half of adults read three books or fewer.

Both numbers are true at once. The average adds up every book and divides by every adult, so a small group of heavy readers pulls it up. The typical number, the median, is the reader in the middle of the line.

Gallup's 12.6 was the lowest average it had measured since it first asked in 1990, down from 15.6 in 2016 (Gallup, 2022). Its margin of error on the average is plus or minus 1.9 books, so treat 12.6 as "about 11 to 14".

Pew's early-2021 survey found a mean of roughly 14 books and a median of five, the same as in 2011 (Pew Research Center, 2022). Its October 2025 survey, done mainly online, did not publish an average, only how many books people read (Pew Research Center, 2026).

Why is the average so much higher than the typical reader?

A few people read a lot, and many read a little or nothing. Picture ten adults who read 0, 0, 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 15 and 40 books in a year.

• Average: 74 books divided by 10 people is 7.4 books.
• Median: the middle two people read 2 and 3 books, so the median is 2.5.
• The pull: remove the one person who read 40 and the average falls to 3.8.

The real data have the same shape. In Pew's 2025 survey, 25% of adults read no books, 8% read one, 19% read two or three and 10% read four or five (Pew topline, 2025). Add those up and the middle adult lands in the two-or-three group. At the other end, 14% read more than 20 books, and those readers carry the average.

Reading time is skewed the same way. On a diary day in 2023, only 16% of Americans read for pleasure, but those who did read for an average of 1 hour 37 minutes, with a median of 60 minutes (Bone et al., 2025).

How many books does the average person read a month or a week?

Divide the yearly figures. The average works out to about one book a month; the typical adult finishes a book every two to three months.

No national survey asks about books per week or per month directly. These are yearly answers divided by 12 or 52.

How much time do Americans spend reading each day?

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of people to log one day, minute by minute. In 2025, people aged 15 and older spent 0.27 hours a day reading for personal interest, about 16 minutes (US Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2026). That is an average across everyone, including the many people who did not read at all that day.

Women averaged 0.31 hours (about 19 minutes) and men 0.23 hours (about 14 minutes). BLS does not publish a figure for ages 15 to 19 because the sample does not meet its standards.

These minutes include magazines, newspapers, e-readers and audiobooks, not only books, and they count reading only when it is the main thing a person is doing. As a rough check, 16 minutes a day is about 97 hours a year. At the adult average of about 238 words a minute (Brysbaert, 2019), that is enough for roughly 15 novels of 90,000 words, if all of it went to books.

How many books does the average person read in a lifetime?

No survey tracks one person's reading over a whole life, so this is arithmetic, not data. Here are the assumptions.

1. Adult years only. Count from age 18 to 78, about 60 years. US life expectancy at birth was 79.0 years in 2024 (CDC, 2026).
2. The same pace every year. Real reading rises and falls; the time-use data show people 65 and older reading more than twice as long a day as people in their 30s.
3. No childhood or school books. Those would add more.

So the typical American adult reads a few hundred books in a lifetime, and the average comes to roughly 750 to 850. A reader who keeps a book a week going for 60 years reaches about 3,000.

How many books do you read compared with other adults?

Find your yearly count on the left. The middle column uses Pew's October 2025 groups, which do not line up exactly with every row, and the last column shows what each pace takes with 300-page books.

If you read a book a month, you are above the typical adult and close to the average. The guide on how many pages to read a day turns any of these paces into minutes.

What changes how many books you read?

Time, not willpower. Most people who read on a given day read for about an hour; the hard part is starting. A fixed daily slot of 15 to 20 minutes, the size of the national average, is enough for a book or more a month.

Format. Both Gallup and Pew count print books, e-books and audiobooks, and books read "all or part of the way through". In Pew's 2025 survey, 64% of adults read a print book, 31% an e-book and 26% listened to an audiobook. If you already listen on a commute, those books count; see whether audiobooks count as reading.

Book length. A 120-page classic and a 700-page fantasy novel both count as one book. Short books raise the count without adding time, so mix in a few; the list of classic books to read starts with a group under 150 pages.

Education, gender and age. In 2025, 88% of college graduates read at least one book, compared with 60% of adults with a high school education or less. In Gallup's 2021 poll, women averaged 15.7 books and men 9.5, and college graduates 14.6.

What do these numbers not show?

• They are self-reports. People estimate a year of reading from memory, and round numbers like 10 or 20 are common answers.
• Partial books count. Both polls include books read "all or part of the way through", so the counts are not finished books.
• They do not measure length or difficulty. Twelve picture books and twelve long histories are both twelve books.
• Surveys changed method. Pew's 2025 survey was mainly online after years by phone, so its numbers are not a clean comparison with 2021.
• The NEA figure is a low bar. Reading one book outside work or school counts as a reader; with audiobooks included, the 2022 share rises to 51.9% (National Endowment for the Arts, 2023).
• They are US figures. These surveys cover American adults only, and they say nothing about why some people read more.

How can you read more books a year?

Pick a pace one step above where you are now, not the top of the table. A book a month takes about 10 pages a day with 300-page books.

1. Measure your speed. The reading speed test takes two minutes, and the reading time calculator turns any book into minutes a day.
2. Choose a yearly goal and a list. The 2027 reading challenge has 52 prompts with 12- and 24-book versions; a book a week is covered in the 52 book challenge guide.
3. Track what you finish. Color one spine per book on the book tracker, so your yearly count is always in view.
4. Protect a daily slot. The guide on how to read more has 12 tactics for finding the time.

For a daily habit under all of this, the 30-day reading habit plan starts with a few minutes a day, or you can build your own reading plan around your schedule. Every reading guide and tool is on the reading topic hub.