How Many Books Does the Average Person Read per Year?

Americans read a mean of 12.6 books per year (Gallup, 2021) – but the typical American reads about 2 to 5, and roughly a quarter read none at all. Pew's 2021 survey found a mean of ~14 and a median of 5; YouGov's December 2025 poll found a mean of 8 and a median of just 2. The average is 12. The typical person reads 2 to 5. Both are true – and the difference is the whole story.

How Many Books Does the Average Person Actually Read?

Three major surveys, three answers – and the spread is the honest finding:

The mean-median gap has a simple cause: a small tail of devoted readers. In Pew's October 2025 survey of 8,046 adults, 14% read 20+ books; in YouGov's data, 4% read 50 or more. A handful of 50-book readers pulls the average far above the middle. If you read 5 books last year, you are not below average – you are the typical American, ahead of about two-thirds of the country.

One methodological note that most roundups skip: self-reports flatter reading. Phone surveys (Gallup, Pew) produce higher numbers than online panels (YouGov), and both run far above what people actually log in federal time-use diaries. Also mind the precision: Gallup's 12.6 comes from 811 respondents with a margin of error of about ±1.9 books – "about 12–13" is the honest phrasing.

How Do You Compare to Other Readers?

The freshest large-sample distribution comes from Pew's October 2025 survey (n=8,046):

YouGov's percentile math turns that into a ranking: reading just 1 book put you ahead of the 46% who read none in their 2023 poll; 5 books puts you ahead of roughly two-thirds of Americans; 10 books lands around the 79th percentile; 20+ books puts you in the top 12%. "Well-read" starts lower than most people think.

Are People Reading Fewer Books Than Before?

Yes – by about a third since the peak. Gallup's series runs 15.3 books (1990), 18.5 (1999), 15.6 (2016), 12.6 (2021) – the 2021 figure is the lowest they have ever measured. The federal NEA survey confirms the direction: 48.5% of adults read any book in 2022, down from 54.6% in 2012, with fiction reading (37.6%) the lowest on record.

Gallup's nuance is the interesting part: the share of non-readers barely moved. The decline came from heavy readers reading less – the share reading 11+ books fell from 35% to 27% between 2016 and 2021. And the most objective data, federal time diaries analyzed in iScience (236,270 diaries, 2003–2023), shows daily reading-for-pleasure participation nearly halved, from 28% to 16% – while Americans logged about 15–16 minutes of daily reading against roughly 2¾ hours of TV.

The counterintuitive kicker from the same study: people who still read now read longer per sitting than in 2003 – 1h37m versus 1h23m per day. Reading isn't dying; it's polarizing into devotees and abstainers, which is exactly the mean-versus-median story again. The pattern isn't uniquely American either: The Reading Agency found only 50% of UK adults read regularly in 2024, down from 58% in 2015, with 24% of Britons aged 16–24 saying they have never been readers.

Who Reads the Most Books?

Education divides readers more sharply than anything else, with gender and age close behind:

One subtlety from Pew's non-reader analysis: gender does not significantly predict whether someone reads at all – the male-female gap is in volume and in fiction, not in touching a book. Education and income are the strongest predictors of not reading, and only 7% of American readers belong to a book club.

What Share of People Read Zero Books?

Somewhere between one-quarter and four-in-ten Americans read no books at all last year – and the honest answer really is a range, because the number depends heavily on how you ask. Pew's surveys find 23% (2021) creeping to 25% (2025). YouGov's online panels find 40–46%. The NEA's stricter federal question – which excludes reading for work or school – finds a majority, 51.5%, read no book in 2022.

Any article quoting a single zero-book number without the survey-mode caveat is cherry-picking. Online panels consistently find more non-readers than phone interviews (people admit more to a screen than to a human), and narrower questions find fewer readers than broad ones.

Print, E-Books, or Audiobooks?

Print still dominates. Among US adults in Pew's October 2025 survey:

The trendlines are slow: e-books went from 25% (2019) to 30% (2021) to 31% (2025), while audiobooks are the fastest grower, from about 20% to 26% over the same window. Print has barely moved. Most digital readers are format-mixers – in Pew's 2021 data, 33% of adults read both print and digital, against just 9% who went digital-only.

Does the Average CEO Really Read 60 Books a Year?

No – that statistic does not exist. The "average CEO reads 60 books a year" claim is usually attributed to "a Fast Company survey" or "a study," but no such study can be found; the citation chain dead-ends in motivational blogs and social media posts. It is repeated because it flatters a productivity narrative, not because anyone measured it.

The Warren Buffett version is a traceable double misquote. Per Quote Investigator, Buffett told Columbia students around 2002 to "read 500 pages like this every day" – holding up company reports and trade publications, not books. His deputy Todd Combs, who was in the room, clarified in 2023 that the realistic figure was 500 pages a week: "500 a day is a little over the top."

The one famous-reader figure worth citing – carefully – is Bill Gates: he told The New York Times in 2016 that he reads "about 50 books" a year. That is self-reported, not independently counted, but even taken at face value it means Gates reads roughly 4× the American mean and 10–25× the median – which says more about how low the typical bar is than about superhuman reading.

How Much Time Would 12 Books a Year Take?

Less than you'd guess: about 13 minutes a day. A typical novel runs 80,000–100,000 words (see how many words are in a novel); at the measured average silent-reading speed of 238 words per minute (see average reading speed), a 90,000-word book takes about 6.3 hours. Gallup's 12.6 books × 6.3 hours ≈ 79 hours a year ≈ 13 minutes a day.

That derived figure almost exactly matches the 15–16 minutes per day Americans actually log in federal time-use diaries – the self-reports and the stopwatch data reconcile. The other benchmarks: a book a week (the Gates pace) costs about 54 minutes a day, while the median American's 2–5 books amount to 13–32 hours of reading a year – less than two weeks of average TV time. For how long any given book takes, see average book length.

Sources

1. Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past (Dec 2021 poll, n=811) — Gallup, 2022
2. Three-in-Ten Americans Now Read E-Books (Jan–Feb 2021 survey, n=1,502) — Pew Research Center, 2022
3. Who Doesn't Read Books in America? — Pew Research Center, 2021
4. Americans Still Opt for Print Books Over Digital or Audio Versions (Oct 2025 survey, n=8,046) — Pew Research Center, 2026
5. 54% of Americans Read a Book This Year (Dec 2023 poll, n=1,500) — YouGov, 2024
6. Most Americans Didn't Read Many Books in 2025 (Dec 2025 poll, n=2,203) — YouGov, 2026
7. A Time of Hope and Worry – Responses to the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts — National Endowment for the Arts, 2023
8. Federal Data on Reading for Pleasure: All Signs Show a Slump (ATUS/BLS analysis) — National Endowment for the Arts, 2024
9. The Men-Women Split in Reading Is Real (SPPA analysis) — National Endowment for the Arts, 2025
10. The Decline in Reading for Pleasure Over 20 Years of the American Time Use Survey (Bone, Bu, Sonke & Fancourt; n=236,270) — iScience, 2025
11. The British Reader Is in Decline (Censuswide survey, n=2,003) — The Reading Agency, 2024
12. Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic (Rosman) — The New York Times, 2016
13. Read 500 Pages Like This Every Day – Quote Origin Trace — Quote Investigator, 2018
14. Todd Combs Q&A Transcript ("500 a day is a little over the top") — Kingswell, 2023

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