Reading time calculator

Who this page is for: anyone who has to decide something from the time, not from the text. The label at the top of an article, the cut of a script that will not fit in three minutes of video, the talk that has to end inside the ten minute slot. If your question is about the text itself, how many words, how many sentences, which terms repeat, the right page is the word counter. Here the question is a planning one: how much time will this take from whoever is on the other side, and how much text fits in the time I have.

A single reading time number is always an average in disguise

Every blog prints a label along the lines of "5 min read", and almost none of them says where it came from. Behind it there is always the same division, words over speed, with a fixed speed chosen by whoever coded the theme. WordPress, Ghost and Medium use values between 200 and 265 words per minute, while the real reader moves anywhere between 130 and 400 depending on the subject, the device and whether they are reading or skimming.

That does not make the label useless. The label does its job, which is to give the visitor a sense of commitment before they decide to scroll. It does make it useless for planning delivery. A three minute script written with a silent reading speed will overrun by almost a minute once somebody says it out loud, and by almost two once that person is on a stage, with pauses and breathing in between.

So this page shows six rows instead of one. The first three are on-screen reading, from the careful reader to the skimmer, and they are there to calibrate the label and the visitor's expectation. The last three are speech, and they are there for scripting: audiobook or podcast narration, video script and live presentation. And the last column flips the problem around: instead of asking how long your text takes, it answers how much text fits in your time.

How to use it

1. Pick where the volume comes from. Enter the word count works while you are still planning and the text does not exist yet. Paste the text counts the words for you.
2. Pick a profile. It fills the pace field with that profile's speed, and you can override the pace afterwards without losing anything else.
3. Declare images and lines of code if the page has them. They add screen time in the reading profiles and are ignored in the spoken ones.
4. Copy the ready-made label if all you wanted was the "X min read" to print at the top of the article.
5. Adjust the time available and read the last column when the question runs the other way: how many words fit in five minutes of video, or ten minutes on stage.

How it works: the formula and the three rules

The main calculation is a division. What matters is what goes into it, and that is declared here instead of buried in the code:

Three rules are worth a note. First: images have a decreasing cost, because the first image in an article gets examined and the tenth gets glanced at. The 12 seconds decaying to a floor of 3 is the model Medium popularised, and a gallery of twenty photos costs far less than twenty times the first one. Second: in the spoken profiles images and code do not count, because nobody narrating or presenting stops to look at a figure, and a script inflated by screen time is a script that overruns on air. Third: the total is shown in seconds when it is short, because "0.7 min" tells nobody anything, and the label is rounded with a minimum of one minute, because no blog prints "0 min read".

Worked example (reproduces the default result)

The prefilled values are 1,200 words, 3 images, no lines of code, on the average reading profile at 220 words per minute. Checking each number on screen:

• Text only: 1,200 / 220 = 5.4545 minutes, which is 327.27 seconds, shown as 5 min 27 sec.
• Images and code: the 3 images cost 12 + 11 + 10 = 33 sec. With no code, nothing else is added.
• Reading time: 327.27 + 33 = 360.27 seconds, rounded to 360, shown as a round 6 min.
• Ready-made label: 360.27 / 60 = 6.0045, which rounds to 6 min read.
• In the table the same text takes 8 min 33 sec for the careful reader (480 + 33 sec), 6 min at average reading and 4 min 33 sec for a skimmer (240 + 33 sec).
• In the spoken profiles, without the image time: 7 min 30 sec read aloud at 160 wpm, 7 min 4 sec for a video script at 170 wpm and 9 min 14 sec for a live presentation at 130 wpm.
• In the last column, with 5 minutes available: 979 words fit at average reading (the 33 seconds of images come off the 300 seconds before the division), 800 read aloud and 650 in a live presentation.

Look at what that last trio reveals. The same five minute block holds 1,335 words if somebody is skimming a screen and 650 if somebody is speaking on a stage, a difference of more than double. Writing a script with a silent reading number is the most common mistake of people who start producing video, and it only shows up on shooting day.

How to read each number

Reading time is the number for the selected profile, with images and code included when the profile is an on-screen one. It is what you use to answer "how much of my reader's time does this take". It is an estimate of commitment, not a promise: nobody reads an article end to end at the steady pace of a metronome.

Text only is the part of the calculation that depends purely on words. Compare the two numbers when you want to know how much of your page weighs in elements that are not text. An article where images account for a third of the total time is not a long article, it is an illustrated one, and that changes how it should be written.

Ready-made label is the string that goes at the top of the article, already rounded to minutes. It exists because that is the most common reason somebody opens a reading time calculator, and there is no point in making them round it in their head.

Fits in is the planning column. It answers the question that shows up when the time is fixed and the text does not exist yet: a 90 second video, a 20 minute slot at an event, a 40 minute episode. Write aiming at its number and leave a little room, because everybody speaks slower than they planned, never faster.

Known limits

Reading speed is not a constant of the person, it is a variable of the situation. The same reader who flies through a newsletter at 300 words per minute on the train drops to 150 on a contract, and lower still on a technical text with terms they have to reread. Treat the profiles as bands, not identities: if your content is dense, plan with the careful profile even when your audience is fast in other contexts.

The word count in paste mode follows the same rule as our counter: a run of letters or digits, with apostrophes and hyphens counting as part of the word. It does not know what is an image caption, what is a subheading and what is a footnote, because everything arrives as plain text. If you need precision on a page full of captions, paste only the article body and declare the rest in the image field.

The image and code values are conventions, not measurements of your audience. If you have real time-on-page data from your analytics, it beats any estimate here. And the estimate knows nothing about the quality of the text: a confusing paragraph gets reread, and rereading shows up in no words-per-minute calculation.

From estimated time to measured result

Reading time is a promise your page makes. What it delivers afterwards is measured another way:

• If you came here for the article label, the next step is checking whether the title survives Google's cut in the SERP preview.
• With the title and description settled, generate the tags in the meta tag generator.
• If the text has to work a specific term, check the keyword density before publishing.
• If it has to be quoted by AI assistants, run the paragraphs through the citability checker.
• And if it is a landing page rather than an article, score it in the landing page grader first.

FAQ

How do you calculate reading time?

Divide the number of words by the reading speed in words per minute. A 1,000 word text at 220 words per minute takes 1,000 divided by 220, which is 4.55 minutes, or 4 minutes and 33 seconds. That is the whole formula. What changes from tool to tool is the speed picked and what each one does with everything that is not running text: here images add screen time on a decreasing model, 12 seconds for the first one down to a floor of 3, and every line of code adds 3 seconds.

How many words per minute does a person read?

The Brysbaert meta-analysis from 2019 pooled almost two hundred studies and landed on roughly 238 words per minute for silent reading of non-fiction in English, against roughly 183 words per minute reading out loud. This calculator uses 220 as the silent default, a deliberately conservative figure for blog text on a screen, and offers 150 for careful reading and 300 for skimming. None of these numbers is law: the pace field is editable precisely because your audience may be slower or faster than the average.

How long does it take to read 1,000 words?

At 220 words per minute, the default on this page, 1,000 words take 4 minutes and 33 seconds. A careful reader at 150 words per minute takes 6 minutes and 40 seconds. A skimmer at 300 takes 3 minutes and 20 seconds. Read out loud at 160 words per minute, those same 1,000 words become 6 minutes and 15 seconds of audio. The gap between the slowest and the fastest reader is more than three minutes on the same text, which is why the table shows six profiles instead of a single number.

How many words fit in a 10 minute presentation?

At the stage pace used here, 130 words per minute, 1,300 words fit in 10 minutes. Stage pace is deliberately slower than narration pace, because a live speaker pauses, breathes, looks at the room and reacts to it. Use the time available field to run that math for any duration: the last column of the table answers how many words fit in the time you have, for each of the six profiles.

Do images count towards reading time?

They count for on-screen reading and they do not count for speech. The model used here is the one Medium made popular: the first image costs 12 seconds, the second 11, the third 10, and so on down to a floor of 3 seconds per image from the fifth onwards. The logic is that the first images get examined and the later ones get glanced at. In the spoken profiles, read aloud, video and presentation, images and code are ignored on purpose, because scripting speech is about words and not about screen time.

Why does my blog show a different reading time?

Because almost every publishing system uses a fixed speed you never see. WordPress, Ghost, Medium and most off-the-shelf themes assume somewhere between 200 and 265 words per minute, round the result up and ignore images and code blocks. Set the pace field to whatever your system uses and the numbers line up. If you do not know that value, find it backwards: take an article you already published, look at the label your site prints and try paces until you reproduce the same number.

How is this different from a word counter?

A word counter analyses text you already have and answers what is inside it: words, characters, sentences, paragraphs, vocabulary and repeated terms. This calculator is a planning tool and works with no text at all, because it accepts a bare word count. It answers three things the counter does not: how the same text behaves across six reading and speaking profiles, how many words fit in the time you have, and what label to print on the page.

Is the text I paste sent to a server?

No. The count runs in JavaScript inside your own browser, with no network call at all: the text never leaves your machine, is never stored and is never logged anywhere. You can confirm it by opening the network tab and typing, because no request fires while the numbers change. That matters when the material is confidential, unpublished or belongs to a client.

Keep going

To understand what time on page really says about your content, read CRO vs SEO, what changes in each, the guide to GEO in 2026 and how to build quotable blocks in FAQ content for AI citation.