Bible reading plan generator: a plan that fits your days

The short answer

A Bible reading plan generator divides your Bible's chapters by the days you have and shares them out in order. Choose a Bible (66 to 80 books), an order and a start date, then a day to finish by, a number of chapters a day or a number of minutes a day. A year of the 66-book Protestant Bible is 1,189 chapters over 365 days, three or four chapters a day, or about 11 minutes.

In this guide

1. How the Bible reading plan generator calculates each day
2. Equal chapters or equal minutes?
3. Choose your Bible: 66, 73, 76, 78 or 80 books
4. Choose an order: start to finish, Old and New together, or the order written
5. What happens when you miss a day?
6. Print your plan or save it as a spreadsheet
7. How to create a Bible reading plan by hand
8. Questions people ask
9. Sources

A printed reading plan is written for one Bible, one start date and one length of time, and it seldom matches all three of yours. This Bible reading plan generator starts from your own: pick your Bible, an order and a pace, and it lays out every day’s reading with a date beside it. It counts from the same book table as the BibleRing app, from the 1,189 chapters of the 66-book Protestant Bible to the 1,564 of the 80-book Ethiopian Bible.

How the Bible reading plan generator calculates each day

The calculator divides your Bible’s chapters by the number of days, then hands them out in order as evenly as whole chapters allow. A chapter is never split, and a day can run from the end of one book into the next, as “Genesis 49–50; Exodus 1–2” does in the one-year plan.

There are three ways to set the pace:

• Finish by. Give a last day, and the calculator counts the days from your start, both ends included. The default is a year from today: 365 days, which for the Protestant Bible is 3.3 chapters a day, three on most days and four on 94 of them.
• Chapters a day. Give a number, and the calculator works out how many days it takes, rounded up to a whole day. Three a day finishes the Protestant Bible in 397 days, and ten a day in 119.
• Minutes a day. Choose from 5 to 60 minutes, and the calculator turns the minutes into chapters at about 3.3 minutes a chapter, the same rate the app uses. Fifteen minutes is about 4.5 chapters, which finishes in 262 days.

The 3.3 minutes is a relaxed figure on purpose. By our count an average Protestant chapter is 631 words in the World English Bible, a modern public-domain translation. That takes about 2.7 minutes at 238 words a minute, the average adult pace for silent reading of non-fiction found by a 2019 review of reading-rate studies, and 3.2 minutes at a relaxed 200. Allowing 3.3 leaves a little room for wordier translations and for chapters that ask to be read slowly.

Here is what each minutes setting comes to:

Ten minutes a day is the setting closest to a year, and runs about four weeks over. Five minutes a day takes a little over two years, and an hour a day a little over two months.

Equal chapters or equal minutes?

Equal chapters do not make equal days. A chapter can be 2 verses long, like Psalm 117, or 176, like Psalm 119, so a plan that hands out the same number of chapters every day hands out very different amounts of reading. We timed every day of the calculator’s one-year, start-to-finish plan of the Protestant Bible from our word count of the World English Bible:

At that average pace, 54 days take less than five minutes, 38 of them in the Psalms and most of the rest in the short prophets and letters. Fifteen take more than a quarter of an hour, in the narratives and laws from Genesis to Kings, in Jeremiah and Ezekiel, and in Mark and Luke.

That spread is the price of keeping chapters whole, and it is usually worth paying. Chapters are where a Bible’s own divisions fall, they are what you tick off, and a short day in the Psalms leaves time to read slowly. A long day can simply be split: read the fourth chapter the next morning, and the plan is none the worse for it.

If you would rather have days of more even length, John Dyer’s Bible Reading Plan Generator can divide the reading by words per chapter as well as by number of chapters (or by pericopes, passages that belong together), and lets you choose which days of the week to read.

Choose your Bible: 66, 73, 76, 78 or 80 books

Choose the Bible you read from, because its length sets the daily load. The calculator knows the five canons the BibleRing app counts against, and the New Testament is the same 27 books and 260 chapters in all of them, so the difference lies entirely in the Old Testament.

• Protestant (66 books, 1,189 chapters). 39 books in the Old Testament and 27 in the New.
• Catholic (73 books, 1,334 chapters). Also includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees, with the longer Greek forms of Esther and Daniel. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical, and Protestant Bibles that print them call them the Apocrypha. A year is about 3.7 chapters a day, or 12 minutes; our Catholic Bible reading plan guide takes the 73 books at every pace.
• With Apocrypha (76 books, 1,360 chapters). The Catholic books plus 1 and 2 Esdras and the Prayer of Manasseh, as Anglican Bibles print the Apocrypha.
• Orthodox (78 books, 1,386 chapters). The books above, with 3 and 4 Maccabees and Psalm 151 as well. Orthodox Bibles vary a little in which of these books they print.
• Ethiopian (80 books, 1,564 chapters). The Old Testament of the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, which includes Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and the three books of Meqabyan (these stand in place of 1 and 2 Maccabees), with the 27-book New Testament. The church itself counts 81 books, dividing some differently: Proverbs, for one, counts as two. A year is 4.3 chapters a day.

Choose an order: start to finish, Old and New together, or the order written

The order changes what each day holds, not how long the plan takes: every order reads the same chapters over the same number of days. Here is how each begins and ends as a one-year plan of the Protestant Bible:

Start to finish reads the Bible as it is printed, Genesis through Revelation. It is the easiest order to follow with a Bible open on the table, and it brings the laws of Leviticus and Numbers early, on days 28 to 47.

Old and New together spreads each testament across the whole plan on its own, so most days carry some of each in proportion to its length. Over a year that is about two and a half Old Testament chapters a day and a New Testament chapter on 260 of the 365 days. Matthew begins on day 2, and Malachi and Revelation both finish on the last day. Days vary a little more in this order, from two chapters to four.

In the order written follows roughly when each book was composed, not when its events took place. Job comes first, then Genesis; the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs follow 2 Samuel, the prophets follow Kings, and Chronicles comes near the end of the Old Testament. The New Testament opens with James and Galatians, puts Mark before Matthew, and closes with John’s Gospel, his letters and Revelation. In the wider canons the deuterocanonical books, and the Ethiopian Bible’s own, come after Chronicles. Dates of composition are debated, so treat this as one reasonable arrangement rather than a settled timeline. It is also different from a chronological plan, which arranges passages by the order of events; our guide to reading the Bible chronologically explains both.

If you are unsure which to choose, our comparison of the best order to read the Bible sets these routes beside the others.

What happens when you miss a day?

A dated plan assumes every day gets read, so when one doesn’t, either the chapters or the dates have to move. Either is fine, and neither needs a fresh start.

• Move the dates. Every row carries a day number as well as a date. Read the next numbered day when you come back, and the plan finishes one day later for each day away.
• Spread the gap. A week away from a one-year plan of the Protestant Bible is about 23 chapters. If that week falls at the end of March in a plan begun on January 1, the 275 days left absorb it at one extra chapter about every 12 days.
• Plan again from where you are. Divide the chapters you have left by the days you have left. The calculator always plans a whole Bible, so for a Bible you are partway through, this is the step to do by hand.

Our guide to being behind on a Bible reading plan goes through each of these in more detail.

Print your plan or save it as a spreadsheet

The calculator shows the first week of your plan under the figures, Show all lists every day, and two buttons take the plan away with you.

• Print opens the whole plan as a page to print: a box to tick, the day number, the date and the reading for every day, under a heading that names your Bible, the order and the dates.
• Download CSV saves the plan as a spreadsheet file, with columns for the day, the date, the reading and the number of chapters, and an empty Done column to fill in. It opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.

The calculator does not save your plan. There is no account, and reloading the page starts over, so print or download the plan you want to keep.

For a ready-made year, the 2027 Bible reading plan has dated plans from January 1 to December 31, 2027, as two-page PDFs with a box for every day. They cover the Protestant Bible start to finish, Old and New together or in the order written, and the Catholic Bible start to finish or Old and New together.

How to create a Bible reading plan by hand

A plan on paper takes five steps and one division.

1. Count the chapters you mean to read: 1,189 for the Protestant Bible, 1,334 for the Catholic, 260 for the New Testament alone.
2. Count your reading days, from the first to the last, including both. For weekdays only, a year is 52 weeks of five days, or 260 days; our 5-day Bible reading plan is built that way.
3. Divide the chapters by the days. For the Protestant Bible over 260 weekdays that is 4.6 chapters a day. Round up to finish a little early, or mix two counts to finish on the day: five chapters on 149 days and four on the other 111.
4. Write the days out in order. Start at the first chapter of your order and give each day the next few, carrying on into the next book when one ends.
5. Number the days as well as dating them, so a missed day moves the dates instead of leaving a gap.

A plan only has to answer one question, which chapters to read today, and a good one is the one whose days still fit an ordinary week.

Questions people ask

How do I make my own Bible reading plan?

Count the chapters in your Bible (1,189 in the 66-book Protestant Bible), count the days you have, and divide. Then write the days out in order, taking that many chapters each day. A year comes to three or four chapters a day, and six months to six or seven. Number each day as well as dating it, so a missed day moves the plan rather than breaking it.

How long will it take to read the Bible at 10 chapters a day?

119 days for the Protestant Bible's 1,189 chapters, just under four months, at about 33 minutes of reading a day. The 73-book Catholic Bible's 1,334 chapters take 134 days, and the New Testament alone, 260 chapters, takes 26 days.

How many chapters a day do I need to finish the Bible by a certain date?

Count the days from your start to your finish, including both, and divide your Bible's chapters by that number. Starting on November 1, 2026 and finishing on December 31, 2027 is 426 days, so the Protestant Bible's 1,189 chapters come to 2.8 a day. Three a day would finish about four weeks early.

Can I make a Catholic or Orthodox Bible reading plan?

Yes. Choose the Catholic Bible (73 books, 1,334 chapters), the Bible with the Apocrypha (76 books), the Orthodox Bible (78 books, 1,386 chapters) or the Ethiopian Bible (80 books, 1,564 chapters), and the plan reads all of its books. A year of the Catholic Bible is about 3.7 chapters a day, and of the Orthodox about 3.8.

Is there a Bible reading plan generator that works by minutes a day?

Yes. In the calculator on this page, choose Minutes a day and pick from 5 to 60, and it turns the minutes into chapters at about 3.3 minutes a chapter, a relaxed reading pace. Ten minutes a day finishes the Protestant Bible in 393 days, fifteen in 262 and twenty in 197.

Can I create a plan that skips the books I've already read?

The calculator on this page always plans a whole Bible. For a partly read one, add up the chapters of the books still to read, divide by the days you have, and work through those books in your chosen order. In the BibleRing app, books and chapters marked as read before count toward your progress, and the plan hands out only what is left.

Sources

1. Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
2. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
3. King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
4. John Dyer, Bible Reading Plan Generator
5. Deuterocanonical books, Wikipedia
6. Articles of Religion (Article VI), Book of Common Prayer, Church of England
7. Old Testament Canon, OrthodoxWiki
8. Orthodox Tewahedo biblical canon, Wikipedia