Work out the words per minute a paper demands, get a per-passage schedule with checkpoints, and practise against a live countdown.
Running out of time is the most common way to lose marks on IELTS Reading, and it is rarely a reading-speed problem. It is a budgeting problem: candidates spend twenty-eight minutes on the first passage because it felt manageable, then have to guess their way through the third.
The paper gives you sixty minutes for three passages and forty questions, and unlike the Listening test there is no extra time at the end to transfer answers. Whatever is on the answer sheet when the hour ends is what gets marked. That single fact should shape how you divide the hour.
This calculator turns a word count and a target time into the numbers that matter under pressure: the sustained words-per-minute you need, the seconds available per question, and the clock time by which each passage has to be finished. Then it gives you a countdown to rehearse against, because knowing the plan and executing it at minute forty-two are different skills.
Words per minute required
41
Comfortable. This is around normal careful reading speed for a fluent reader.
Seconds per question
77s
After skim time is deducted.
Per-passage plan
Passage
Skim
Questions
Check
Finish by
1
3 min
15 min
2 min
20 min
2
3 min
15 min
2 min
40 min
3
3 min
15 min
2 min
60 min
The split allocates 15% of each slot to skimming for structure, 75% to answering, and 10% to checking and transferring answers. Adjust the inputs if your paper differs from the standard format.
Practice countdown
60:00
You should be on passage 1 of 3
Passage 1by 20:00
Passage 2by 40:00
Passage 3by 60:00
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The format the numbers are based on
IELTS Academic Reading is three passages, forty questions, sixty minutes. The passages get harder as you go: the first is usually descriptive, the third is argumentative or analytical and carries the questions most candidates find hardest. Total length across the three is typically 2,150 to 2,750 words, which is why 2,450 is the default here.
IELTS General Training Reading is also forty questions in sixty minutes, but split across three sections of increasing length - short everyday texts first, then work-related texts, then one longer general-interest passage. The pacing logic is the same; only the word counts differ, so change the inputs.
There is no transfer time in Reading. In Listening you get ten extra minutes to copy answers onto the answer sheet; in Reading you do not. Write answers directly onto the sheet as you go, or reserve the check time in the plan above for the transfer.
Why an equal split beats reading until you are done
Twenty minutes per passage is the standard advice, and it is standard because the alternative fails predictably. All forty questions carry one mark. A question in passage three is worth exactly as much as a question in passage one, and passage three questions are the ones people leave blank.
Many strong candidates do better with a slightly uneven split - eighteen, twenty, twenty-two - precisely because the third passage is the hardest. What loses marks is not the split you choose but having no split at all, and discovering at minute forty-five that a third of the paper is untouched.
Set a hard checkpoint rather than a soft intention. When the clock reaches your finish-by time for a passage, move on with whatever you have, guessing the remainder. There is no penalty for a wrong answer in IELTS, so an unanswered question is a guaranteed zero where a guess is not.
What to do with the time inside each passage
Skim before you read. Two or three minutes spent on the title, the first sentence of each paragraph and the last paragraph gives you a map, and most question types - matching headings, locating information, True/False/Not Given - are answered by finding the right paragraph rather than by understanding the whole text.
Read the questions in order and answer them in order. Most IELTS question sets follow the order of the passage, so a question you have just answered narrows where the next answer can be. Jumping around throws that advantage away.
Do not re-read to be sure. Re-reading is what turns a twenty-minute passage into a twenty-eight-minute one, and the confidence it buys is usually an illusion. Mark the question, move on, and use the check minutes at the end of the passage slot if they survive.
A pace plan only helps if you have material to run it against. LingoRead generates exam-style reading passages at a level you choose, with comprehension questions attached, so you can rehearse the whole loop - skim, locate, answer, move on - instead of only the clock.