Can you read the Bible in a month? What 30 days takes
Reading the whole Bible in 30 days takes about 40 chapters and 1¾ to 2 hours a day. A 30-day schedule split by length, and the load for 40 days in every canon.
The short answer
Yes. The 66-book Protestant Bible has 1,189 chapters and about 750,000 words, so reading it in 30 days means about 40 chapters a day, roughly 1¾ hours of silent reading at an average pace and over two hours at a relaxed one. Forty days brings it down to about 30 chapters and 80 to 95 minutes a day. Split the days by length rather than by chapter count, or some days run to about 2¾ hours and others under one.
In this guide
- Can you read the whole Bible in a month?
- How many chapters a day to read the Bible in 30 or 40 days
- Why 40 chapters a day isn’t always 40 chapters
- A 30-day Bible reading plan split by length
- How to get through a month of Bible reading
- If a month turns into six weeks
- Reading the Bible in 40 days
- Smaller things to read in a month
- Questions people ask
- Sources
You can read the Bible in a month, and people do. A 30-day plan usually hands you about forty chapters a day and leaves you to find out how long forty chapters take. We counted the words in every chapter of the World English Bible to answer that, and the answer depends less on how many chapters you read each day than on which forty they are.
- 40chapters a day to finish in 30 days
- 1¾ hoursa day, read silently at an average pace
- 30chapters a day to finish in 40 days
- 25,000words a day for a 30-day read
Can you read the whole Bible in a month?
Yes, if you can give it about an hour and three quarters a day. The Protestant Bible (66 books) has 1,189 chapters, and by our count the World English Bible’s text of it runs to 750,220 words. Spread over 30 days, that is 39.6 chapters and about 25,000 words a day.
How long 25,000 words takes depends on how you read. A 2019 review of 190 reading-rate studies put the average adult’s silent reading speed for non-fiction at 238 words a minute, which makes a day’s reading about 105 minutes. At a relaxed 200 words a minute, it is about 125. Either way it is about twelve times what a one-year plan asks.
For scale: at the start of 1966 the Voice of Prophecy radio broadcast read the whole Bible aloud without a break. Its speaker, H. M. S. Richards, and 71 other men read in half-hour shifts from Genesis 1 at the turn of the new year to Revelation 22 on Tuesday, January 4, and the reading ran 84 hours, 38 minutes and 15 seconds. A month of silent reading covers the same ground in thirty sittings of under two hours each at an average pace.
How many chapters a day to read the Bible in 30 or 40 days
Finishing in 30 days takes 39.6 chapters a day and finishing in 40 takes 29.7, which plans round to 40 and 30. Here are the short spans side by side:
| To finish in | Chapters a day | About |
|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 39.6 | 131 min a day |
| 40 days | 29.7 | 98 min a day |
| 60 days | 19.8 | 65 min a day |
| 90 days | 13.2 | 44 min a day |
1,189 chapters in the Protestant Bible, divided by the days. Minutes assume about 3.3 minutes a chapter, a relaxed reading pace; chapters vary from a few verses to 176.
The minutes in that table assume about 3.3 minutes a chapter, a deliberately unhurried pace, so they err on the long side. By word count, 30 days comes to 105 to 125 minutes a day and 40 days to 79 to 94, depending on your speed.
A wider Bible asks for more. The Catholic Bible (73 books) also includes Tobit, Judith, Wisdom, Sirach, Baruch and 1 and 2 Maccabees, which Catholics call deuterocanonical and Protestants the Apocrypha, along with longer texts of Esther and Daniel. The Orthodox and Ethiopian canons are longer still:
| To finish in | Protestant (1,189) | Catholic (1,334) | With Apocrypha (1,360) | Orthodox (1,386) | Ethiopian (1,564) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30 days | 39.6 | 44.5 | 45.3 | 46.2 | 52.1 |
| 40 days | 29.7 | 33.4 | 34.0 | 34.7 | 39.1 |
Each canon’s chapter total divided by the days.
How many hours a day it really takes
Read silently at an average pace, the Protestant Bible in 30 days is about 1 hour 45 minutes a day, and the Catholic Bible about two hours. Here is every canon we could count, timed from its words rather than its chapters:
| Bible | 30 days | 40 days |
|---|---|---|
| Protestant, 66 books | 105–125 min a day | 79–94 min a day |
| Catholic, 73 books | 120–142 min a day | 90–107 min a day |
| With Apocrypha, 76 books | 124–148 min a day | 93–111 min a day |
| Orthodox, 78 books | 127–151 min a day | 95–113 min a day |
The lower figure is silent reading at 238 words a minute and the higher one at 200, both from our word count of the World English Bible. The Ethiopian canon is left out because six of its books (Enoch, Jubilees, 4 Baruch and the three books of Meqabyan) are not in the World English Bible, so we have no word count for them.
Reading aloud is slower. The same review found adults read aloud at about 183 words a minute, which puts a modern translation at about 68 hours, or about 2¼ hours a day for a month. An audio Bible lands somewhere near that, though recordings vary with the narrator and the translation.
Why 40 chapters a day isn’t always 40 chapters
A plan that shares out the chapters evenly gives days that differ in length by a factor of almost four. We split the 1,189 chapters into 30 piles of 39 or 40 and timed each pile by its words:
| Day of an even-chapters plan | Reading | Words | Silent reading time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Day 8 | 2 Samuel 11 – 2 Kings 4 | 39,224 | about 2 hours 45 minutes |
| Day 25 | Matthew 23 – Luke 17 | 37,976 | about 2 hours 40 minutes |
| Day 14 | Psalms 38–76 | 10,988 | about 46 minutes |
| Day 16 | Psalm 117 – Proverbs 6 | 10,655 | about 45 minutes |
Twelve of the thirty days run over two hours at an average pace, and four come in under one. Worse, the heavy days come together: eight days in a row, from Genesis 40 to 1 Chronicles 18, all take more than two hours, and they arrive in the first week and a half, when a reader is still finding the rhythm.
The reason is that chapters are not units of length. Psalm 117 is two verses and Psalm 119 is 176. An average chapter in the Protestant Bible is about 631 words, but a chapter of 1 Kings or Luke averages over 1,000 and a psalm about 275. Forty chapters of story and forty chapters of song are very different afternoons.
A 30-day Bible reading plan split by length
Splitting by words instead keeps every day within a few minutes of the others. This schedule divides the Protestant Bible at the chapter closest to each day’s share of the words, and ends the Old Testament on day 23 so the New starts fresh:
| Day | Reading | Chapters | Minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Genesis 1–36 | 36 | 104 |
| 2 | Genesis 37 – Exodus 20 | 34 | 106 |
| 3 | Exodus 21 – Leviticus 12 | 32 | 104 |
| 4 | Leviticus 13 – Numbers 11 | 26 | 109 |
| 5 | Numbers 12 – Deuteronomy 5 | 30 | 105 |
| 6 | Deuteronomy 6 – Joshua 5 | 34 | 103 |
| 7 | Joshua 6 – Judges 12 | 31 | 105 |
| 8 | Judges 13 – 1 Samuel 20 | 33 | 108 |
| 9 | 1 Samuel 21 – 2 Samuel 21 | 32 | 102 |
| 10 | 2 Samuel 22 – 1 Kings 22 | 25 | 106 |
| 11 | 2 Kings 1 – 1 Chronicles 5 | 30 | 106 |
| 12 | 1 Chronicles 6 – 2 Chronicles 15 | 39 | 104 |
| 13 | 2 Chronicles 16 – Nehemiah 4 | 35 | 105 |
| 14 | Nehemiah 5 – Job 30 | 49 | 104 |
| 15 | Job 31 – Psalm 71 | 83 | 106 |
| 16 | Psalm 72 – Proverbs 7 | 86 | 105 |
| 17 | Proverbs 8 – Isaiah 10 | 54 | 106 |
| 18 | Isaiah 11–58 | 48 | 106 |
| 19 | Isaiah 59 – Jeremiah 29 | 37 | 105 |
| 20 | Jeremiah 30 – Ezekiel 3 | 31 | 105 |
| 21 | Ezekiel 4–36 | 33 | 106 |
| 22 | Ezekiel 37 – Hosea 8 | 32 | 103 |
| 23 | Hosea 9 – Malachi 4 | 59 | 107 |
| 24 | Matthew 1 – Mark 3 | 31 | 105 |
| 25 | Mark 4 – Luke 11 | 24 | 103 |
| 26 | Luke 12 – John 14 | 27 | 106 |
| 27 | John 15 – Acts 24 | 31 | 106 |
| 28 | Acts 25 – 2 Corinthians 6 | 42 | 104 |
| 29 | 2 Corinthians 7 – Hebrews 7 | 56 | 104 |
| 30 | Hebrews 8 – Revelation 22 | 49 | 106 |
Minutes are silent reading at 238 words a minute, from our word count of the World English Bible; at a relaxed 200, add about a fifth. Other translations differ in length by a few percent, which shifts every day by about the same amount.
The chapter count now swings from 24 on day 25 to 86 on day 16, but the time hardly moves: every day falls between 102 and 109 minutes. To put dates on a plan, or to spread a wider canon over a span of your own, the Bible reading plan generator builds a day-by-day schedule you can print. It shares out the chapters evenly, so over a month its longest days fall in Samuel and Kings and in the Gospels.
How to get through a month of Bible reading
A month-long read works best when it is planned like a commitment of time rather than of chapters. A few things help.
- Split the day in two. Two sittings of about 50 minutes, morning and evening, are easier to protect than one of an hour and three quarters.
- Read the stories in long runs. Genesis, Samuel, Kings, the Gospels and Acts are narrative, and a long stretch of narrative reads more easily in one go than in pieces.
- Let some of it be listening. A commute, a walk or the dishes can carry part of a day, and the chapters count the same.
- Keep questions for later. A month is a survey of the whole Bible rather than a study of any part of it. Jot down what puzzles you and carry on; the questions make a good list for a slower reading afterward.
- Know where the dense reading is. Leviticus and Numbers fall on days 3 to 5 of the schedule above, and the Prophets run from late on day 17 through day 23.
- Leave a spare day. A 30-day plan in a 31-day month gives you one, and reading the whole month instead is 38.4 chapters and about 102 minutes a day.
If a month turns into six weeks
A month that becomes six weeks is still the whole Bible. Plans for 30 days assume every day goes to plan, and most months contain at least one that doesn’t. When a day passes without reading, the simplest thing is to carry on from the chapter you reached rather than reading two days at once to catch up with the calendar.
If the pace itself turns out to be too much, slowing down keeps everything you have read. Moving the rest onto a 90-day pace brings the daily reading down to about 40 minutes, and the chapters already behind you stay read.
Reading the Bible in 40 days
Planned from the start, forty days is the gentler version of the same challenge: 29.7 chapters and about 18,750 words a day, which comes to 79 minutes of silent reading at an average pace and 94 at a relaxed one. Split by length the same way, every one of the forty days falls between 77 and 81 minutes.
That extra ten days takes about half an hour off each day, which for many schedules is the difference between one sitting and two. Forty days is also the traditional length of Lent, and if that is why the number appeals, our Lent Bible reading plan is built around the season.
Beyond forty days the load falls quickly. Sixty days is about 20 chapters and 53 to 63 minutes a day; ninety days is about 13 chapters and 35 to 42 minutes.
Smaller things to read in a month
A month is a good length for a part of the Bible too, and most parts take a fraction of the daily time:
| To read in a month | Chapters a day | Minutes a day |
|---|---|---|
| The Old Testament (929 chapters) | 31 | about 81–96 |
| The New Testament (260 chapters) | 8.7 | about 24–29 |
| The four Gospels (89 chapters) | 3 | about 11–13 |
| Psalms (150 chapters) | 5 | about 6–7 |
| Psalms and Proverbs in 31 days (181 chapters) | about 6 | about 8–9 |
The New Testament in a month takes under half an hour a day, and our guide to how long it takes to read the New Testament goes into it further. Psalms with a chapter of Proverbs each day takes under ten minutes, and reading the Psalms and Proverbs in a month has a guide of its own.
Whichever you choose, a month read quickly shows you the shape of the whole, and the same chapters will still be there for a slower reading afterward.
Questions people ask
Can you read the whole Bible in 40 days?
Yes, at about 30 chapters a day. By our word count of a modern translation that is 79 minutes of silent reading a day at an average 238 words a minute, or about 94 minutes at a relaxed 200. Split by length rather than by chapter count, every one of the 40 days comes to between 77 and 81 minutes at the average pace.
How long would it take to read the Catholic Bible in a month?
The 73-book Catholic Bible has 1,334 chapters and, in the World English Bible, about 854,000 words, roughly 14% more than the Protestant 66. Over 30 days that is 44 or 45 chapters a day, about two hours of silent reading at an average pace and around 2 hours 20 minutes at a relaxed one.
How long does it take to read the Bible out loud?
About 68 hours for a modern translation at the average reading-aloud rate of 183 words a minute, which over 30 days is about 2¼ hours a day. When the Voice of Prophecy radio broadcast read the whole Bible aloud without a break in January 1966, with H. M. S. Richards and 71 other men reading in half-hour shifts, it took 84 hours and 38 minutes.
Can I listen to the Bible instead of reading it in 30 days?
Yes. An audio Bible is read aloud, so expect a time nearer the reading-aloud figure than the silent one, somewhere around 70 hours for a modern translation, or a little over two hours a day for a month. Recordings vary with the narrator and the translation, so check the running time of the one you choose.
What if I don't finish the Bible in 30 days?
Then you have read a good part of the Bible in a month, and the rest is still there. Carry on from the chapter you reached rather than doubling up to meet the date. A month that turns into six weeks covers exactly the same 1,189 chapters, and nothing about the reading is lost.
Sources
- 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
- “Voice of Prophecy” Conducts Bible-Reading Marathon, Columbia Union Visitor, February 17, 1966
