How often do Christians read the Bible? What the surveys say

The short answer

Between a fifth and two fifths of American adults, and a third to a half of American Christians, read the Bible at least weekly, depending on the survey. In January 2026, 25% of US adults read, listened to or prayed with it on their own at least weekly (American Bible Society). Barna found 42% of adults and 50% of Christians reading weekly in 2025; Pew's 2023–24 study found 33% of Christians reading outside services weekly. Daily reading is rarer: 31% of Protestant churchgoers read every day (Lifeway, 2025).

In this guide

1. How often Christians read the Bible: four surveys side by side
2. How many Christians read the Bible every day?
3. How many people read the Bible weekly, and is it rising?
4. Why Bible reading statistics disagree
5. How often Catholics and Orthodox Christians read the Bible
6. How many people have read the whole Bible?
7. Why people don’t read the Bible more, and what helps
8. How often should you read the Bible?
9. Questions people ask
10. Sources

Ask how often Christians read the Bible and you will find confident answers anywhere from one in five to one in two. Most of them are right about something: each comes from a real survey, but the surveys ask different people different questions. Four large American studies have measured Bible reading since mid-2023, and this page sets them side by side, with who was asked, what counted and when, using the most recent figures we could find as of October 2026.

How often Christians read the Bible: four surveys side by side

The latest surveys find that between a fifth and two fifths of American adults read the Bible at least once a week, a third to a half of American Christians do, and a little under a third of churchgoing Protestants read it every day. Almost all of the spread comes from who was asked and what counted as reading.

Read down the second column and most of the gap explains itself. Lifeway asked only people already in a Protestant church at least once a month, and it is the one survey here that publishes a daily figure; by its numbers, three in four of those churchgoers read at least weekly. Pew and the American Bible Society (ABS) asked every adult, Christian or not, and Pew also reports Christians on their own. Barna’s headline figure is for all adults, with self-identified Christians reported separately.

How many Christians read the Bible every day?

The most recent daily figure is Lifeway Research’s: in March 2025, 31% of US Protestant churchgoers said they read the Bible every day. The survey asked 2,130 Protestant and non-denominational adults who attend services at least monthly, has a margin of error of ±2.21 percentage points, and was published in February 2026.

Lifeway has asked the question for almost two decades. In 2007, 16% of churchgoers read daily and 36% read at least a few times a week. In 2012 it was 19% and 46%; in 2019, 59% read at least a few times a week; and in 2025, 31% and 61%. Scott McConnell, executive director of Lifeway Research, adds a caution: fewer Americans attend a Protestant church each month than when the series began, and those who still do are more willing to read the Bible on their own, so part of the rise may reflect a change in who is in the pews.

The public summaries of the other large surveys report weekly reading rather than daily, so there is no recent daily figure for all American Christians that we could check against its source.

How many people read the Bible weekly, and is it rising?

Weekly reading is where the surveys differ most: 42% of US adults in Barna’s 2025 data, 25% in the American Bible Society’s January 2026 survey, and 22% in Pew’s 2023–24 study.

Barna reports a sharp rise. Weekly Bible reading among US adults was 39% in 2000, fell to 30% in 2024 and climbed to 42% in 2025, based on 12,116 online interviews between January and October 2025. Among self-identified Christians it reached 50%, the highest level in over a decade. Younger adults led the change:

The American Bible Society reports something steadier. State of the Bible 2026, the Society’s 16th annual report, was fielded by NORC at the University of Chicago with a margin of error of ±2.5 points. It found 25% of adults to be Active Bible Users, who read, listen to or pray with the Bible on their own at least weekly, and 13% Occasional Bible Users, who do so somewhere between three or four times a year and monthly. The other 62% use it less often than that, or not at all. ABS says its weekly group has been stable since 2024. The rise it saw in 2025 came mostly from occasional users, and most of it was gone by January 2026. Its stricter measure, Scripture engagement (a score built from 14 questions about how often people use the Bible and how central its message is to them), went from 18% of adults in 2024 to 20% in 2025 and back to 17% in 2026, about 47 million people.

Pew Research Center asked 36,908 adults between July 2023 and March 2024. Of them, 22% read scripture outside religious services at least weekly, 7% once or twice a month, 9% several times a year, and 61% seldom or never.

So is Bible reading going up? Barna says yes, clearly, led by Millennials and Gen Z. ABS says the 2025 increase was mostly people picking the Bible up now and then, and that the weekly core has barely moved. Both are long-running surveys, their published summaries do not settle the difference, and another year of each will say more.

Why Bible reading statistics disagree

Bible reading statistics disagree because each survey defines its readers, its reading and its timing differently. Five differences matter most.

• Who was asked. All adults, self-identified Christians and monthly churchgoers are three different groups. A figure for churchgoers will run higher than one for the whole country.
• What counts. ABS counts reading, listening to and praying with the Bible; Barna, Lifeway and Pew ask about reading. ABS and Pew both leave out what happens at a church service, which matters for anyone whose main contact with Scripture is the readings at worship.
• How the question was put. Pew’s weekly figure was 35% in its 2014 study and 22% in 2023–24, but Pew says the two cannot be compared. The 2014 study was done by live interviewers on the telephone and the new one mostly online and on paper, and that change seems to affect how people answer the question about reading scripture. The 35% is still widely quoted.
• When. The fieldwork runs from mid-2023 to January 2026, a period in which Barna and ABS both saw reading rise and, in ABS’s case, fall back.
• Self-report. Every number is what people told a survey, not a record of what they read.

None of this fully explains the gap between Barna’s 42% and ABS’s 25%. ABS counts listening and praying as well as reading and still has one of the lower figures, which shows how much the exact wording and the sample matter. The two also find their respondents differently: Barna’s 2025 interviews were online, with quotas to match the country by age, gender, race, region, education and income, while ABS surveyed NORC’s AmeriSpeak panel, a probability-based panel, online and by phone. Whenever one of these numbers is quoted, the most useful thing to quote with it is who was asked, and when.

How often Catholics and Orthodox Christians read the Bible

Reading outside of church varies widely between Christian traditions. In Pew’s 2023–24 study, weekly reading outside religious services ranged from about half of evangelical Protestants to about one in seven Catholics. (Latter-day Saints, whom Pew also counts among Christians, were highest at 59%.)

By design, these figures leave out the Scripture read at worship, and for Catholic and Orthodox Christians that is a large part of how the Bible is heard. At Catholic Mass the readings follow a set lectionary. Sundays run on a three-year cycle, with Matthew read mostly in Year A, Mark (and chapter 6 of John) in Year B and Luke in Year C, while weekdays run on a two-year cycle. A Sunday has a first reading, usually from the Old Testament, a second, usually from one of the epistles, and a Gospel. The Orthodox Church likewise appoints readings for each day, which the Orthodox Church in America publishes. A Catholic or Orthodox Christian who tells a survey “seldom” may still hear Scripture read every week.

The lectionary does not include the whole Bible, as the US bishops’ own guide to it points out, so reading on your own reaches parts that are not heard at Mass. A Catholic Bible reading plan covers all 73 books at whatever pace suits you.

How many people have read the whole Bible?

About one American in five or six has read the whole Bible, by their own account. In ABS’s January 2026 survey, 17% said they had read it in its entirety and a third had read all or most of it. Half had read at least half, and only 10% had read none.

Lifeway’s August 2024 survey of 1,200 adults (margin of error ±3.3 points) comes out a little higher. It found 13% had read the whole Bible once and another 9% more than once, so 22% at least once, while 9% had never read any of it.

Churchgoing makes the largest difference. Among Americans who attend services more than once a week, Lifeway found 35% had read the whole Bible once and 24% more than once, about three in five in all. Among people with evangelical beliefs, the figures were 22% and 18%.

For scale, the 66-book Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters and takes about 52 hours to read silently at an average pace, which over a year comes to about 9 minutes a day. How long it takes to read the Bible works that out for every book and canon, and reading the Bible cover to cover describes what each stretch is like.

Why people don’t read the Bible more, and what helps

The most common reason Americans give for not reading the Bible more is that it simply isn’t a priority, ahead of not having time and feeling they have read enough of it. Lifeway asked in 2024:

• It isn’t a priority: 24%
• No time: 15%
• Already read enough of it: 14%
• Intimidated by its size: 11%
• Don’t own a copy: 10%
• Don’t read books: 9%
• Don’t agree with what it says, or don’t see how it relates to them: 8% each
• Prefer other spiritual books: 6%
• None of these: 30%

ABS sees the same thing from the other side. Its “Movable Middle”, people open to the Bible and curious about it but not regularly engaged with it, now makes up 28% of Americans, 9 million more people than in 2024. The Society’s own explanation is tentative: maybe, it suggests, they “just don’t know what to do with it because the Bible is a massive, complex book.”

How people read has shifted too. Among Americans who have read at least part of the Bible, reading through a section a little each day is one of the two most common approaches in Lifeway’s survey (34%, level with looking up verses others suggest). That is up from 22% in 2016, and among 18-to-34-year-olds it is 47%. Fewer read a big chunk at one time (19%).

In ABS’s data, 74% of people who follow a Bible reading plan have read most or all of the Bible. Readers ABS counts as Scripture Engaged are more likely to read whole chapters or stories, follow a plan, put the Bible into their regular schedule and be part of a Bible study, while Bible users in the Movable Middle more often read a few verses at a time, chosen by mood. That is a correlation, not proof that plans work: people who already read a great deal may simply be more likely to use one. If you are choosing a plan, which Bible reading plan is best sets the classic ones side by side.

How often should you read the Bible?

The Bible itself sets no quota: no verse names a number of chapters or minutes. What it describes is a rhythm. The first psalm pictures a person who meditates on God’s law “day and night” (Psalm 1:2), Joshua is told the same (Joshua 1:8), and the king in Deuteronomy is to read from the law “all the days of his life” (Deuteronomy 17:19). In Acts, the people of Berea are described this way:

Now these were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they received the word with all readiness of mind, examining the Scriptures daily to see whether these things were so.

Acts 17:11, World English Bible

Daily is the pattern these passages share, and reading a little each day is also one of the two most common ways American Bible readers go about it, in Lifeway’s survey. An ordinary daily portion adds up to more than it looks:

• 1,189chapters in the 66-book Protestant Bible
• 3¼ yearsto read them all at one chapter a day
• 3.3chapters a day to read them all in a year
• 26 monthsat five minutes a day

How often and how much are separate choices. Five minutes every day and half an hour once a week come to about the same total, and which one suits you depends more on your week than on any survey. How long to read the Bible a day shows what 5 to 30 minutes a day cover, and how to read the Bible every day covers keeping it going through a bad week. If your church or your tradition gives you a rhythm, such as the daily readings, that is a good place to start.

The surveys describe a country. The number that matters for you is a portion you could come back to tomorrow.

Questions people ask

What percentage of Christians read the Bible daily?

The most recent daily figure covers Protestant churchgoers only. In Lifeway Research's March 2025 survey, 31% of those attending at least monthly read the Bible every day and another 30% a few times a week. The large surveys of all Americans report weekly rather than daily figures in their public summaries; Pew's 2023–24 study found 33% of Christians read scripture outside services at least weekly.

What percentage of people have read the whole Bible?

About one American in five or six. In the American Bible Society's January 2026 survey, 17% said they had read the entire Bible. Lifeway's 2024 survey found 22% had read it at least once, including 9% who had read it more than once. Among people who attend services more than once a week, about three in five had.

Is Bible reading going up or down?

It depends on the survey. Barna found weekly reading among US adults rose from 30% in 2024 to 42% in 2025, led by Millennials and Gen Z. The American Bible Society found its 2025 rise came mostly from occasional users and had largely faded by January 2026, while weekly users stayed at about a quarter of adults. Among Protestant churchgoers, daily reading roughly doubled between 2007 and 2025.

How often do Catholics read the Bible?

In Pew's 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study, 14% of US Catholics read scripture outside religious services at least weekly, and 67% seldom or never. That question leaves out Mass, where the readings follow a lectionary, a three-year cycle on Sundays and a two-year cycle on weekdays. A Catholic at Sunday Mass hears a first reading, usually from the Old Testament, a second, usually from an epistle, and a Gospel.

How often should a Christian read the Bible?

No verse sets a number of chapters or minutes. Passages such as Psalm 1:2 and Acts 17:11 describe Scripture as part of every day, and reading a little each day is one of the two most common approaches among American Bible readers. One chapter takes about three minutes; three a day, around ten minutes, covers the Protestant Bible in a little over a year.

Sources

1. 16th Annual State of the Bible Report: Reading Dips but Openness to Scripture Surges, American Bible Society (April 9, 2026)
2. State of the Bible 2026: Methodology and Definitions, American Bible Society
3. America's Relationship with the Bible: It's Complicated, State of the Bible, American Bible Society (April 8, 2026)
4. Growth in Bible use reverses in 2026, but trend uncertain, Diana Chandler, Baptist Press, in the Baptist Courier (April 14, 2026)
5. How Millennials and Gen Z Are Driving a Bible Reading Comeback, Barna Group, State of the Church 2025 (November 6, 2025)
6. Lifeway Research Finds Fewer Than 1 in 3 Churchgoers Read the Bible Daily, Lifeway Research (February 10, 2026)
7. Americans Judge the Good Book More Positively, But Still Often by Its Cover, Lifeway Research (May 13, 2025)
8. Prayer and other religious practices, Religious Landscape Study 2023–24, Pew Research Center (February 26, 2025)
9. Methodology, Religious Landscape Study 2023–24, Pew Research Center (February 26, 2025)
10. 5 facts on how Americans view the Bible and other religious texts, Pew Research Center (April 14, 2017)
11. Questions about the Lectionary, United States Conference of Catholic Bishops
12. Scripture Readings, Orthodox Church in America
13. 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.
14. World English Bible, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org
15. King James Version, verse-per-line edition (public domain), eBible.org