How Many Books Does the Average Person Read Per Year? (2026 Data)
Gallup says 12.6 books a year. The median American reads 2. What the data actually shows about average reading, and the 10-minute habit that beats it.
By Daniel Daneshi July 31, 2026 10 min read TL;DR: The famous number is Gallup’s 12.6 books a year (December 2021), the lowest Gallup has measured since 1990. But that is a mean, propped up by a small group of heavy readers. YouGov’s December 2025 survey found the median American read 2 books, 40 percent read zero, and the 4 percent who read 50+ books accounted for nearly half of all books read. The practical takeaway: 10 minutes a day works out to about 9 or 10 novels a year, which beats the national average from a habit most people would not even call a habit.
Ask how many books the average person reads and you will get answers from 2 to 12, all technically correct. That range is not sloppy journalism. It is what happens when a handful of voracious readers share a country with millions of people who did not open a book last year, and everyone gets averaged together.
This post pulls the actual numbers from Gallup, Pew Research Center, YouGov, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Eurostat, explains why “average” is the wrong question, and ends with the arithmetic for beating every one of these benchmarks on 10 minutes a day.
The headline number: 12.6 books, and falling
The most-quoted figure comes from Gallup’s December 2021 poll: American adults reported reading an average of 12.6 books in the past year. That was the lowest number Gallup had measured since it started asking in 1990, and the trend line only points one way.
| Year | Average books read (Gallup) |
|---|---|
| 1990 | 15.3 |
| 1999 | 18.5 |
| 2002 | 15.8 |
| 2016 | 15.6 |
| 2021 | 12.6 |
Two details in Gallup’s data matter more than the headline. First, the share of Americans reading at least one book barely moved; the decline came from readers reading fewer books, especially the group reading more than 10 a year, which shrank from 35 percent in 2016 to 27 percent in 2021. Second, the steepest drops came from the groups that historically read the most: college graduates fell from a long-run average of about 21 books to 14.6, and women from 19.3 to 15.7.
The heaviest readers are reading less. Keep that in mind, because it explains what the mean hides.
Mean vs median: why “average” is misleading
Gallup’s 12.6 is a mean. Add up every reported book, divide by every adult. The problem is that book reading is one of the most lopsided behaviors ever surveyed.
YouGov’s December 2025 survey of 2,203 US adults makes the shape of the distribution unmistakable:
| Books read in 2025 | Share of US adults |
|---|---|
| 0 | 40% |
| 1 to 4 | 27% |
| 5 to 9 | 13% |
| 10 to 19 | 9% |
| 20 to 49 | 6% |
| 50 or more | 4% |
In that survey the mean was 8 books. The median was 2.
The gap has one cause: concentration. YouGov calculates that the 4 percent of Americans who read 50 or more books accounted for 46 percent of all books read, and the top 19 percent of readers accounted for 82 percent. A few book-a-week readers pull the mean far above anything a typical person experiences.
So which number is “the average person”? Honestly, the median. Half of American adults read 2 books or fewer in 2025. The mean describes the national pile of books; the median describes your neighbor.
Two caveats worth stating plainly. Gallup and YouGov asked different people, in different years, with different question wording, so 12.6 and 8 are not the same measurement drifting down. And every one of these numbers is self-reported, and people round their reading up, not down. The true figures are probably lower.
Who reads more: education, gender, and age
The demographic splits are large and consistent across pollsters.
Education is the strongest predictor. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in October 2025 (8,046 US adults) found that 88 percent of college graduates read at least part of a book in the past year, against 60 percent of adults with a high school education or less. YouGov’s numbers agree from another angle: Americans with postgraduate degrees read a median of 5 books (mean 13.6), while high-school-educated Americans read a median of zero (mean 4.6).
Women read more than men. Pew found 78 percent of women read at least one book versus 71 percent of men. In Gallup’s count the gap is wider: women averaged 15.7 books to men’s 9.5.
Age favors the retired. In YouGov’s 2025 data, adults 65 and older averaged 12.1 books, ages 30 to 44 averaged 8.2, ages 45 to 64 averaged 6.4, and ages 18 to 29 averaged 5.8. Free evenings, it turns out, are the ultimate reading feature.
| Group | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| College graduates, read 1+ book | 88% | Pew, Oct 2025 |
| High school or less, read 1+ book | 60% | Pew, Oct 2025 |
| Postgraduate degree, median books | 5 | YouGov, Dec 2025 |
| High school education, median books | 0 | YouGov, Dec 2025 |
| Women, average books | 15.7 | Gallup, Dec 2021 |
| Men, average books | 9.5 | Gallup, Dec 2021 |
| Ages 65+, average books | 12.1 | YouGov, Dec 2025 |
| Ages 18 to 29, average books | 5.8 | YouGov, Dec 2025 |
Income data exists in some of these surveys but is tangled up with education, so we are not going to pretend it tells an independent story.
The long slide, confirmed by federal data
Polls bounce around. The federal survey record does not, and it says the same thing.
The National Endowment for the Arts runs the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, the largest recurring study of this kind. Its 2022 results found that 48.5 percent of US adults read at least one book in the year, down 6.1 percentage points from 2012. Novel and short story reading fell from 45.2 percent of adults in 2012 to 37.6 percent in 2022. Zoom out further and the NEA’s own summary of federal reading data notes that 61 percent of Americans read for pleasure in 1992, versus 48.5 percent three decades later.
Pew’s 75 percent, NEA’s 48.5 percent, and YouGov’s 59 percent look contradictory, but the question wording differs (“all or part of a book” versus stricter definitions), and that is the honest state of reading statistics: the level depends on the question, the direction does not. Down.
How Americans compare with other countries
Clean international comparisons are rare because every country asks differently, so treat cross-country numbers as directional. The best harmonized dataset is European. Eurostat’s 2022 EU-SILC survey asked the same question across the EU: did you read any books in the past 12 months?
| Country | Read at least one book (2022) |
|---|---|
| Luxembourg | 75.2% |
| Denmark | 72.1% |
| Estonia | 70.7% |
| EU average | 52.8% |
| Italy | 35.4% |
| Cyprus | 33.1% |
| Romania | 29.5% |
The EU-wide pattern mirrors the American one: 60.5 percent of European women read books against 44.5 percent of men. Set the US figures beside these with appropriate squinting (different survey, different wording) and America lands somewhere in the broad middle: above Italy and Romania, well below the Nordics and Estonia.
Print still wins, audio is the growth story
Format is the one place the data gets more cheerful. Pew’s October 2025 survey found print is still the default: 64 percent of US adults read a print book in the past year, versus 31 percent for ebooks and 26 percent for audiobooks. But the trend lines diverge sharply from 2011: print is down from 72 percent, ebooks are up from 17 percent, and audiobooks have more than doubled from 11 percent.
YouGov’s 2025 numbers rhyme: 46 percent of adults read physical books, 24 percent digital, 23 percent audio, and 29 percent mixed formats. Audiobooks are quietly rescuing reading time from commutes and dishes, which matters for the next section, because listening minutes count exactly like reading minutes.
How to beat the average: the 10-minute math
Here is the part the averages are hiding: the bar is on the floor.
Adults read silently at about 238 words per minute for nonfiction and 260 for fiction, per Brysbaert’s 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies. A typical adult novel runs around 90,000 words. Run the numbers at the conservative speed:
| Daily reading time | Words per year | Average novels per year | Where that lands |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 minutes | ~174,000 | ~2 | The US median |
| 10 minutes | ~869,000 | ~9 to 10 | Above the YouGov mean of 8 |
| 15 minutes | ~1,300,000 | ~14 | Above the Gallup mean of 12.6 |
| 20 minutes | ~1,740,000 | ~19 | Roughly the top 10% of US adults |
| 30 minutes | ~2,600,000 | ~29 | Comfortably in the top tenth |
Read that first row again. The median American reading rate is equivalent to about 2 minutes a day. Not 2 hours. 2 minutes. Which means “beating the average” is not an ambition, it is a rounding error of attention: one bus stop of reading, one coffee steeping, one less scroll before sleep.
The catch is consistency, not capacity, and consistency responds to structure. Three moves cover most of it:
- Count minutes, not books. A book count pushes you toward short books and punishes slow reading; minutes are the fair currency. Our guide to setting a reading goal you will actually hit walks through the trade-offs.
- Make the days visible. A reading streak turns “10 minutes daily” from an intention into a chain you can see, and defend.
- Fix the habit before the number. If you are currently at zero, the full playbook is in how to read more books, and if a bad book is what stalled you, quitting it is allowed.
If you want to know where you actually land instead of guessing, track it. The booksense app (free on iOS) times your sessions, feeds them into streaks and per-period goals, and shows per-book stats, so your own mean and median stop being a mystery; readers on it have logged over 480,000 minutes across more than 12,000 finished sessions, mostly in sittings of exactly the unglamorous 10-to-20-minute kind this math is built on. And if numbers like these are your idea of fun, the wider reading statistics roundup has plenty more.
One honest closing note: every survey above measures self-reported behavior in one country or bloc, over different years, with different questions. The precise averages are soft. The two facts that survive every methodology are hard: most people read very little, and a very small daily habit clears the bar by a mile.
FAQ
How many books does the average American read per year?
It depends on which average you use. Gallup’s December 2021 poll found a mean of 12.6 books per year, the lowest Gallup had measured since 1990. A YouGov survey from December 2025 found a mean of 8 books and a median of just 2, with 40 percent of Americans reading zero books that year. The median is the more honest picture of a typical reader.
Is reading 20 books a year a lot?
Yes. In the December 2025 YouGov survey, only about 10 percent of American adults read 20 or more books in the year. Reading 20 books puts you in roughly the top tenth of the country, and the time cost is smaller than it sounds: at average reading speed, about 20 minutes a day gets you there.
Why are the mean and median so different for books read?
Because reading is extremely concentrated. YouGov found that the 4 percent of Americans who read 50 or more books accounted for 46 percent of all books read. A small group of heavy readers drags the mean up, while the typical person reads 2 books or fewer. The mean describes the pile of books; the median describes the typical reader.
How many books can you read with 10 minutes a day?
Roughly 9 to 10 average-length novels a year. Adults read about 238 words per minute, so 10 minutes a day is about 869,000 words a year, and a typical novel runs around 90,000 words. That single small habit beats the YouGov mean of 8 books and is more than four times the median of 2.