How much of the Bible have I read? A checker by book, every canon
How much of the Bible have you read? Tick the books you have finished to see your percentage in any of five canons, with the chapters and hours still to go.
The short answer
Add up the chapters of every book you have finished and divide by your Bible's total. The 66-book Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters, so about 12 chapters make one percent; the 73-book Catholic Bible has 1,334. The New Testament alone, 260 chapters, is 21.9% of a Protestant Bible and 19.5% of a Catholic one. For a book read only in part, add just the chapters you read. A larger canon gives a smaller percentage for the same reading.
In this guide
- How much of the Bible have I read? Check it book by book
- How the percentage is worked out
- How to count books you have only partly read
- Why the percentage changes from one Bible to another
- Which parts of the Bible you have read
- How much of the Bible most people have read
- What is left, and how long it takes
- Questions people ask
- Sources
If you are asking how much of the Bible you have read, you are probably not starting from zero. There is a Gospel read with a group, Genesis begun twice, the Psalms returned to for years, and no clear sense of what it all adds up to. The way to find out is to count chapters rather than books, against the Bible you actually read from. The checker below does that for whole books in any of five canons, and the rest of this page covers what it cannot see.
- 1,189chapters in the 66-book Protestant Bible
- about 12chapters make 1% of it
- 21.9%of it is the New Testament, 260 chapters
- 1,334chapters in the 73-book Catholic Bible
How much of the Bible have I read? Check it book by book
Tick every book you have read all the way through and choose your Bible: the checker shows your share of its chapters, the chapters still to go and roughly how long they take to read.
0 of 1,189 chapters
0 books · 1,189 chapters to go
About 65 hours of reading left
Ticks stay on this page and are never sent anywhere. For a book you have only partly read, leave it unticked.
A few things about how it counts:
- Tick only the books you finished, however long ago. A book you read in part stays unticked for now; the section on partly read books shows how to add it.
- Two buttons fill in common starting points: the four Gospels, or all 27 books of the New Testament. Clear takes every tick off.
- Changing the Bible keeps your ticks. Books that Bible does not have leave the list and the count, and the books it adds appear in their places.
- The percentage holds at both ends. It shows 100% only when every chapter is ticked and at least 1% once anything is, so 1,185 of 1,189 chapters reads 99% rather than announcing a finish that has not happened.
- Time left assumes 3.3 minutes a chapter, a relaxed pace of about 200 words a minute. At that pace the whole Protestant Bible comes to about 65 hours.
How the percentage is worked out
Your share of the Bible is the number of chapters you have read, divided by the number of chapters in your Bible, times 100. The Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters, so each one is a little under a tenth of a percent and about 12 chapters make one percentage point. In the Catholic Bible’s 1,334 chapters it takes about 13.
Chapters are the fairest unit because books differ so much in size. Counted as books, the four Gospels are 4 of 66, about 6%; counted as chapters they are 89 of 1,189, or 7.5%. Obadiah and Psalms are one book each, but one has a single chapter and the other has 150. Reading plans and references are written in chapters too, so a percentage in chapters can be set beside any plan. Our guide to how many chapters are in the Bible gives every book’s count in every canon.
Here is where some common starting points leave you, with the reading still ahead at the checker’s pace:
| What you have read | Chapters | Protestant (1,189) | Catholic (1,334) | Left in a Protestant Bible |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| The 13 letters that carry Paul’s name | 87 | 7.3% | 6.5% | about 61 hours |
| The four Gospels | 89 | 7.5% | 6.7% | about 61 hours |
| Genesis and the four Gospels | 139 | 11.7% | 10.4% | about 58 hours |
| The Psalms | 150 | 12.6% | 11.2% | about 57 hours |
| The New Testament | 260 | 21.9% | 19.5% | about 51 hours |
| The New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs | 441 | 37.1% | 33.1% | about 41 hours |
| All of that, and Genesis | 491 | 41.3% | 36.8% | about 38 hours |
Counting in words instead
A share counted in words can come out quite differently, because a chapter is not a fixed amount of text. Psalm 117 has two verses and Psalm 119 has 176, and each is one chapter. By our count of the World English Bible, an average chapter of the Protestant Bible is about 630 words, but an average chapter of the Gospels is about 900.
| Part of the Protestant Bible | Share of the chapters | Share of the words |
|---|---|---|
| The Psalms | 12.6% | 5.5% |
| The four Gospels | 7.5% | 10.7% |
| The 21 letters, Romans to Jude | 10.2% | 8.0% |
| Genesis | 4.2% | 4.8% |
| The New Testament | 21.9% | 23.3% |
Neither figure is wrong. The share of chapters is the one the checker, printed charts and most plans use, and the one used on the rest of this page; the share of words says more about the hours behind it.
How to count books you have only partly read
Leave a partly read book unticked, then add the chapters you did read to the checker’s count and divide by your Bible’s total again. Someone who has read the New Testament and the first 11 chapters of Genesis has read 271 chapters, which is 22.8% of the Protestant Bible. As a rule of thumb, every 12 extra chapters adds about a point.
The harder part is deciding what to count. A few cases come up again and again:
- Read long ago. It counts. A chapter read twenty years ago was read, and whether you remember it is a separate question that a reread can answer in a few minutes.
- Half remembered. If you cannot say whether you finished a book, leave it out. That keeps the figure one you can trust, and the book can be ticked once you have read it again. If you are coming back after years away, our guide to starting to read the Bible again starts from the same question of what you have already read.
- Read in pieces. A book read over several years, out of order, or across two or three plans counts once every chapter has been read. The order makes no difference to the total.
- Psalms here and there. If you have read psalms one at a time and out of order, count the ones you are sure of; in the Protestant Bible, every 12 psalms is about a point.
- Listened to. An audio Bible covers the same chapters. If listening counts as reading for you, count it here too.
Why the percentage changes from one Bible to another
The same reading gives a smaller percentage in a larger Bible, because the chapters you have read are divided by a bigger total. Christian traditions hold different canons. Protestant Bibles have 66 books. The Catholic Church receives 73, including seven books that Catholics call deuterocanonical and Protestants often call the Apocrypha, and the Eastern Orthodox churches and the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church receive more again. Every extra chapter is in the Old Testament; all five canons counted here share the same 27-book New Testament.
| Canon | Books | Chapters | Old + New Testament |
|---|---|---|---|
| Protestant | 66 | 1,189 | 929 + 260 |
| Catholic | 73 | 1,334 | 1,074 + 260 |
| With Apocrypha | 76 | 1,360 | 1,100 + 260 |
| Orthodox | 78 | 1,386 | 1,126 + 260 |
| Ethiopian | 80 | 1,564 | 1,304 + 260 |
So one reader’s record comes out as five different percentages:
| What you have read | Protestant | Catholic | With Apocrypha | Orthodox | Ethiopian |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The four Gospels | 7.5% | 6.7% | 6.5% | 6.4% | 5.7% |
| The New Testament | 21.9% | 19.5% | 19.1% | 18.8% | 16.6% |
| The New Testament, Psalms and Proverbs | 37.1% | 33.1% | 32.4% | 31.9% | 28.3% |
The last row counts Psalm 151 in the Orthodox and Ethiopian Bibles, where Psalms has 151 chapters. Choose the Bible you read from, or the one whose books you mean to read: all 66 Protestant books are in each of the other four, so none of your chapters drops out when you choose a wider one. Our guide to the differences between Catholic and Protestant Bibles explains where the seven books came from and why the two traditions read them differently.
Esther and Daniel in a wider Bible
Every Bible here except the Protestant includes the Greek additions to Esther and Daniel, which the checker counts as 16 and 14 chapters instead of 10 and 12. If you read those two books in a Protestant Bible and count against a wider one, the checker includes eight chapters you have not read yet, so take them off by hand. The Ethiopian Bible has no 1 and 2 Maccabees; the three books of Meqabyan stand in their place.
Which parts of the Bible you have read
A single percentage hides where the reading is, and the eight divisions show it. The Prophets alone are 250 chapters, about a fifth of the Protestant Bible, so a reader who has finished everything else stands at 79%.
| Division | Books | Chapters | Share of the Protestant Bible |
|---|---|---|---|
| Law (Genesis to Deuteronomy) | 5 | 187 | 15.7% |
| History (Joshua to Esther) | 12 | 249 | 20.9% |
| Wisdom (Job to Song of Songs) | 5 | 243 | 20.4% |
| Prophets (Isaiah to Malachi) | 17 | 250 | 21.0% |
| Gospels | 4 | 89 | 7.5% |
| Acts | 1 | 28 | 2.4% |
| Epistles (Romans to Jude) | 21 | 121 | 10.2% |
| Revelation | 1 | 22 | 1.9% |
Wisdom is mostly the Psalms, which hold 150 of its 243 chapters. The 21 letters of the New Testament come to 121 chapters, fewer than Psalms on its own. The checker groups its books by these same divisions, so a division with few ticks is easy to spot.
How much of the Bible most people have read
Nine in ten American adults have read at least some of the Bible, and about one in five has read all of it. In Lifeway Research’s survey of 1,200 US adults in August 2024, 22% said they had read the entire Bible at least once, and another 30% said they had read at least half of it but not all. Half had read several passages or stories at most. The figures were close to those of Lifeway’s 2016 survey of 1,000 adults:
| How much of the Bible they have read | 2024 | 2016 |
|---|---|---|
| None of it | 9% | 10% |
| A few sentences | 12% | 13% |
| Several passages or stories | 29% | 30% |
| At least half | 18% | 15% |
| Almost all of it | 12% | 12% |
| The entire Bible, once | 13% | 11% |
| The entire Bible, more than once | 9% | 9% |
Among Protestant churchgoers who attend services more than once a week, Lifeway’s 2025 State of Discipleship survey found that 59% had read the entire Bible at least once. Our roundup of how often Christians read the Bible has the newer surveys and how their questions differ. A figure like these describes other readers; it is not a bar to clear. Your own percentage is most useful for showing what is still ahead.
What is left, and how long it takes
What is left is your Bible’s total minus what you have read, and at 3.3 minutes a chapter the checker turns it into hours. Someone who has read the New Testament has 929 chapters of the Protestant Bible ahead, about 51 hours of reading: at 10 minutes a day that is about ten months, and at three chapters a day, 310 days. At 41%, with Genesis, Psalms, Proverbs and the New Testament read, 698 chapters remain, about 38 hours, or about seven and a half months at three chapters a day.
There is no need to begin again at Genesis 1. The books still unticked are a reading list in themselves, in whatever order suits you, and how many chapters a day to read for a given finish depends only on how many are left. To keep the count going from here, our guide to tracking your Bible reading compares a printed chart, a spreadsheet and an app.
Whatever the number turns out to be, every chapter from here adds to it.
Questions people ask
How many chapters is half the Bible?
Half of the Protestant Bible's 1,189 chapters is 594½, so 595 chapters puts you just past halfway. In the Catholic Bible's 1,334 chapters, half is 667. Read from Genesis in order, the halfway point falls in the Psalms. Psalm 117 is the 595th chapter of the Protestant Bible, with 594 chapters on either side of it.
What percentage of the Bible is the New Testament?
By chapters, 21.9% of the 66-book Protestant Bible, 260 of 1,189. By words it is a little more, 23.3% in the World English Bible, because Gospel chapters run long. Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Bibles share the same 27-book New Testament, so in the 73-book Catholic Bible those 260 chapters are 19.5%, and in an Ethiopian Bible of 1,564 chapters, 16.6%.
Why does my percentage go down when I switch to a Catholic Bible?
The same chapters are divided by a bigger total. The Catholic Bible has 1,334 chapters against the Protestant Bible's 1,189, from Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch, 1 and 2 Maccabees and the longer forms of Esther and Daniel. Nothing you read is lost; there is simply more ahead. The whole New Testament goes from 21.9% to 19.5%.
Do books I read years ago count?
Yes. The count is of chapters read, not of when you read them or how much of each you remember. If you cannot say whether you finished a book, leaving it out keeps the figure honest, and a reread costs little, since an average chapter takes about three minutes to read silently.
How much of the Bible have most Christians read?
The surveys we could verify are American. In Lifeway Research's 2024 survey of 1,200 US adults, 22% had read the whole Bible at least once and half had read several passages or less. Among Protestant churchgoers who attend services more than once a week, Lifeway's 2025 survey found 59% had read the entire Bible at least once.
Sources
- Americans Judge the Good Book More Positively, But Still Often by Its Cover, Lifeway Research (May 13, 2025)
- Lifeway Research: Americans Are Fond of the Bible, Don't Actually Read It, Lifeway Research (April 25, 2017)
- Fewer Than 1 in 3 Churchgoers Read the Bible Daily, Lifeway Research (February 10, 2026)
- 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.
- World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
- King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
