Study & writing
Pages per day calculator
Enter how many pages the book has, when you start and when you want to finish; get the daily page target and how long it takes.
Set the speed to 0 to skip the reading-time lines. Time yourself on 10 pages to find your real pages per hour.
How the daily page target is worked out
Pages per day is the number of pages divided by the number of reading days between the start date and the finish date. The calculator counts the start day and not the finish day, so starting today and finishing in 30 days gives 30 reading days. Because nobody reads two-thirds of a page, the headline is rounded up. Reading time per day is pages per day divided by your pages per hour.
Example: a 320-page novel over 30 days is 320 ÷ 30 = 10.7 pages, so 11 pages a day. At 40 pages an hour that is 10.7 ÷ 40 × 60 = about 16 minutes a day, and the whole book takes 8 hours of reading. The checkpoint table shows which page you should have reached each week, which makes it easy to notice early if you are slipping.
| Book length | 2 weeks | 1 month (30 days) | 3 months (90 days) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 pages | 15 a day | 7 a day | 3 a day |
| 320 pages | 23 a day | 11 a day | 4 a day |
| 450 pages | 33 a day | 15 a day | 5 a day |
| 600 pages | 43 a day | 20 a day | 7 a day |
| 1,000 pages | 72 a day | 34 a day | 12 a day |
Making the plan realistic
Pages per hour varies far more than people expect. A light paperback novel with lots of dialogue may go at 50 pages an hour, while a dense textbook, a classic with long paragraphs or a book in a second language can drop to 15 or 20. Time yourself on ten pages of the actual book and multiply by six to get your speed, instead of guessing.
Build in slack. If you know some days will be lost to travel or work, move the finish date a week earlier in the calculator and treat the extra days as a buffer. For a book club, start from the meeting date and leave the last two or three days free for catching up.
For study reading, a page target is only half the job: you also need time to take notes or review. A useful habit is to keep the daily reading session short enough that you finish it, because a missed day doubles the next one. If the result asks for more than an hour or two a day, a later finish date is usually the better fix than speed-reading.
Frequently asked questions
How many pages a day to read a book in a month?
Divide the page count by 30. A 300-page book needs 10 pages a day, a 450-page book 15 pages a day and a 600-page book 20 pages a day.
How many pages can I read in an hour?
Many adults read about 30 to 50 pages of an ordinary paperback novel per hour, and fewer for textbooks or technical books. Time yourself on ten pages of the book you are reading for a real figure.
What if I fall behind my reading plan?
Enter the pages you still have left as the book length, set today as the start date and keep the same finish date. The calculator gives the new daily target needed to catch up.