A Catholic Bible reading plan for all 73 books, at any pace

The short answer

To read the 73-book Catholic Bible in a year, read its 1,334 chapters at 3.7 a day: four chapters on most days and three on the rest, about 12 minutes at a relaxed pace. Six months is 7.3 chapters a day (about 24 minutes), 18 months 2.4 (about 8) and two years 1.8 (about 6). Read Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach and Baruch where a Catholic Bible prints them, and the plan ends at Revelation with nothing left over.

In this guide

1. How long does it take to read the Catholic Bible?
2. Catholic Bible reading plan: choose your pace
3. Reading the Catholic Bible in a year
4. Where the deuterocanonical books fit
5. Three ways through all 73 books
6. Where to start reading the Bible as a Catholic
7. How much of the Bible you hear at Mass
8. If you fall behind on a Catholic reading plan
9. Questions people ask
10. Sources

A Catholic Bible reading plan has more to cover than the many plans built for the 66 books of a Protestant Bible. Follow one of those as a Catholic and seven books are either skipped or left over at the end. The chapters and times here are worked out from the Catholic Bible’s own 1,334 chapters, as BibleRing counts them, and from our word count of a public-domain translation, so the plan fits the Bible on your shelf at whatever pace you choose.

• 1,334chapters in the 73-book Catholic Bible
• 3.7chapters a day to read it in a year
• 12 mina day for a year, at a relaxed pace
• 60 hoursto read it all at an average pace

How long does it take to read the Catholic Bible?

The Catholic Bible takes about 60 hours to read silently at the average adult pace of 238 words a minute, and about 71 hours at a relaxed 200. By our count of the World English Bible, a modern public-domain translation, its 1,334 chapters come to about 854,000 words: 1,074 chapters and about 47½ hours in the Old Testament, and 260 chapters and about 12 hours in the New.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church counts 46 books in the Old Testament (45 if Jeremiah and Lamentations are taken as one) and 27 in the New. Set beside a Protestant Bible, the difference is 145 chapters, every one of them in the Old Testament, and a little over seven hours of reading:

Catholic Bible reading plan: choose your pace

A Catholic Bible reading plan is the 1,334 chapters divided by the days you want to take. A year is 3.7 chapters a day, about 12 minutes; six months is 7.3, about 24 minutes; two years is 1.8, about 6 minutes.

Between those, nine months is 4.9 chapters a day (about 16 minutes) and three years is 1.2 (about 4). One chapter a day takes 1,334 days, about three years and eight months.

If you would rather plan in minutes than in dates, the arithmetic runs the other way. At about 3.3 minutes a chapter:

The minutes are a planning figure, not a measure of you. Chapters vary a great deal in length, so in a one-year plan a day’s reading runs from under two minutes, on a day of short Psalms, to about 25 at an average pace.

Reading the Catholic Bible in a year

Reading the Catholic Bible in a year means 3.65 chapters a day: four chapters on 239 days and three on the other 126. That is about 2,340 words a day in a modern translation, close to 10 minutes at an average pace or 12 at a relaxed one. There are two simple ways to divide it.

Start to finish. Read the books in the order your Bible prints them, Genesis to Revelation. The first week is Genesis 1 to 25. It needs nothing but your Bible and a bookmark, but the New Testament does not begin until day 295.

Old and New together. Spread each testament over the year on its own: about 2.9 Old Testament chapters a day (three on 344 days, two on 21) and one New Testament chapter on 260 of the 365 days. The four Gospels are finished by day 125, in early May, and the Old Testament keeps moving all year.

Started on January 1, 2027, a start-to-finish year in Catholic order reaches these places:

The year is uneven. The longest day falls on May 12, four chapters of 1 Maccabees that take about 25 minutes at an average pace, while June, deep in the Psalms, averages about four and a half minutes a day. Nothing in the order is tied to January, so any start date works by day number. For a version with dates and a box for every day, our 2027 Bible reading plan comes in a Catholic edition, start to finish or Old and New together.

Where the deuterocanonical books fit

In a Catholic Bible the seven deuterocanonical books sit among the others rather than in a section of their own, so a plan that reads them in place never saves a stack of them for December. Catholics call these books deuterocanonical; Protestants usually call them the Apocrypha. The U.S. Catholic bishops list them in this order: Tobit and Judith after Nehemiah, followed by Esther and 1 and 2 Maccabees; Wisdom and Sirach after the Song of Songs; and Baruch after Lamentations.

Sirach is the long one, at 51 chapters and nearly two hours. Baruch takes about 20 minutes and Tobit under half an hour, so either fits in one sitting. Esther and Daniel also run longer in a Catholic Bible: Esther with its Greek additions, and Daniel with a longer chapter 3 and two more chapters, 13 and 14. Together that is the 145 chapters a Protestant plan does not have. Our guide to the Catholic and Protestant Bible explains where each tradition’s list comes from.

Esther’s chapters depend on your edition

BibleRing counts Esther as 16 chapters, the numbering of Bibles that follow the Latin Vulgate, such as the Douay-Rheims and the Knox. The New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE) letters the Greek additions A to F and sets them among its ten numbered chapters, and the RSV-CE and NRSV-CE place them inside the story while keeping the Vulgate’s numbers. The book is the same in each, only numbered differently: an NABRE’s ten chapters, with the lettered additions, are the whole of the 16 the plan counts.

Using a Protestant plan as a Catholic

A Protestant one-year plan already covers 1,189 of the Catholic Bible’s 1,334 chapters, nearly nine in ten. You can read the seven books and the longer Esther and Daniel at the end, which at the same 3.3 chapters a day adds about six weeks, or slot each book in where your Bible prints it and read a little more on those days.

Three ways through all 73 books

The three usual orders through all 73 books are start to finish, Old and New together, and chronological. Each reads the same 1,334 chapters; the order decides what a day feels like.

A chronological plan and a plan in the order the books were written are two different things; our guide to reading the Bible chronologically explains both.

There is also a route by ear. Ascension’s Bible in a Year podcast, hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, launched on January 1, 2021, as 365 episodes of about 20 minutes that were to cover every verse of the Bible, each one structured with Ascension’s Bible Timeline Learning System. Following it means the podcast sets the order and the day’s portion.

Where to start reading the Bible as a Catholic

A Gospel makes an easier first book than Genesis, especially if you have not read a whole book of the Bible before. Mark is the shortest, at 16 chapters and about an hour of reading. It is also the Gospel of the coming Sunday year: from the First Sunday of Advent, November 29, 2026, the Sunday cycle is Year B, in which Mark is the Gospel read on most Sundays, with John 6 taking over for five Sundays in the summer (the 17th to the 21st in Ordinary Time).

A first month that leads well into the rest:

1. Mark (16 chapters), the shortest telling of the life of Jesus.
2. Acts (28 chapters), which carries the story on from the Gospels to the first churches.
3. Genesis (50 chapters), where the Old Testament begins.

That is 94 chapters, a little over three a day for a month and about five hours of reading in all. After it, any of the plans above starts on firmer ground. Our guide to where to start reading the Bible has other first routes, by what you want to read first.

How much of the Bible you hear at Mass

A Catholic who went to Mass every Sunday and every weekday through the full cycles of readings would hear about 72% of the New Testament and about 14% of the Old, not counting the Psalms. Those are the figures Felix Just, S.J., worked out from the Lectionary, whose Sunday readings run on a three-year cycle and whose weekday readings run on a two-year one:

He leaves the Psalms out because they are used so often, and in so many ways, at Mass. So most of the Old Testament is something a Catholic meets by reading it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, at paragraph 133, urges “frequent reading of the divine Scriptures” and adds: “Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.”

Beginning from Moses and from all the prophets, he explained to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself.

Luke 24:27, World English Bible

If you fall behind on a Catholic reading plan

Carry on from the next chapter you have not read. A missed day or a missed week does not need to be made up all at once; the plan still works from wherever you are. A few ways to absorb the gap:

• Let the finish move. Each day missed moves the last day one day later, and every day stays three or four chapters.
• Spread the gap thin. A missed week of a Catholic year is about 26 chapters. Over the next six months, that is one extra chapter a week.
• Catch up where the year is light. In a start-to-finish year, the Psalms, from late May to early July, take less than half the time of an average day.
• If you jump ahead to the date, note where the gap is, so the chapters you passed can be read later.

Our guide for when you are behind on a Bible reading plan goes further into catching up without starting over.

Keeping track of 73 books

A record of chapters stays true after a missed week in a way a box per date does not. The simplest record is a sheet of paper with a box for every chapter: our printable Bible reading tracker has a Catholic edition with all 1,334, by book and division. Mark the chapter rather than the day, and a gap in the dates stops mattering.

Seventy-three books read at four chapters a day, or one, or none for a week, are still read the same way: the next chapter, whenever the next day of reading comes.

Questions people ask

Can I use a Protestant Bible reading plan as a Catholic?

Yes, as long as you add what it leaves out. A Protestant plan covers 1,189 of the Catholic Bible's 1,334 chapters. The other 145 are Tobit, Judith, 1 and 2 Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, Esther's Greek additions and Daniel 13 and 14. Read at the end, at a Protestant year's 3.3 chapters a day, they take about six more weeks; slotted in where your Bible prints them, they raise the daily reading to 3.7.

Does the Bible in a Year podcast cover the whole Bible?

When Ascension's Bible in a Year podcast, hosted by Fr. Mike Schmitz, launched on January 1, 2021, its 365 episodes were described as covering every verse of the Bible, at about 20 minutes each. Ascension is a Catholic publisher, and each episode is structured with its Bible Timeline Learning System, so the podcast sets the order of the readings.

Which Catholic Bible translation is best for reading straight through?

Any complete Catholic edition has all 73 books. Modern translations such as the New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE), the Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition (RSV-CE) and the NRSV Catholic Edition are in modern English. The Douay-Rheims, translated from the Latin Vulgate, keeps the Vulgate's names and order, so Chronicles is Paralipomenon and Ezra and Nehemiah are 1 and 2 Esdras. The one you will open every day is the right one.

Why does Esther have 10 chapters in my Catholic Bible and 16 in the plan?

The book is the same; the numbering differs. Vulgate-based Bibles such as the Douay-Rheims print Esther's Greek additions at the end, in chapters numbered up to 16, which is how a 16-chapter Esther is counted. The NABRE letters the additions A to F and sets them within the story among its ten numbered chapters, so its ten chapters and the lettered passages are the whole of the 16.

Where should a Catholic start reading the Bible?

With a Gospel. Mark is the shortest, 16 chapters and about an hour of reading, and it is the Gospel of most Sundays in the liturgical year that begins on November 29, 2026. Acts, which carries the story on, and Genesis make a good next pair. Those three books are 94 chapters, a little over three a day for a month.

Sources

1. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 120, Holy See
2. Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 131 to 133, Holy See
3. Books of the Bible (canonical order), United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
4. Felix Just, S.J., Lectionary Statistics, Catholic Resources
5. Felix Just, S.J., Calendar of Lectionary Cycles, Catholic Resources
6. Felix Just, S.J., Lectionary Readings from Mark's Gospel, Catholic Resources
7. The New Enchiridion Indulgentiarum (L'Osservatore Romano, 12 December 1968), EWTN Library
8. University of St. Thomas Newsroom: St. Thomas alumnus hosts No. 1 podcast in U.S.
9. Book of Esther, Wikipedia
10. Douay–Rheims Bible, Wikipedia
11. 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.
12. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
13. King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org