How to finish IELTS Reading in 60 minutes

Most candidates who run out of time in Reading do not read too slowly. They read too carefully in the wrong places, spend ten minutes on one stubborn question, and reach the last passage, the hardest one by IDP’s account, with a fraction of the time it needs. Timing is a skill you can train, and it is separate from your English.

This guide gives the facts IELTS publishes about the clock, the advice IDP gives, and a plan you can practise. The plan is a suggestion for practice, not a rule of the test. For the structure of the paper itself, see the guide to the Academic Reading format and question types.

What IELTS publishes about the time

IELTS.org’s Academic Reading format page lists the test as 60 minutes, with three sections and 40 questions, and says each correct answer receives one mark. It does not say how to divide the hour, and it does not say how many questions come with each passage.

The format page also describes no separate period for copying answers. The ten minutes of transfer time that IELTS.org gives for Listening exist only on paper, and paper-based IELTS is being withdrawn market by market from mid-2026, so where it is still offered that is the only place it applies. In Reading, treat the 60 minutes as all the time you have for reading, answering and checking.

The arithmetic is worth holding in your head. Sixty minutes divided by 40 questions is a minute and a half each. But the passages total 2,150 to 2,750 words, according to IELTS.org, and that reading comes out of the same hour. Some questions will take thirty seconds and others four minutes, so the average only helps if you notice when a question is going over.

What IDP advises

IDP’s Reading time-management article gives a short list, and the pieces fit together.

• Spend no more than 20 minutes on each part of the Reading test.
• Skim the passage, looking at headings, subheadings and main points, rather than reading every sentence in detail.
• Have a quick look at all the questions first, because they come in groups.
• Answer every question, even if you cannot find the answer or option.
• Identify and highlight keywords in the questions and the passage.
• Note that the passages get progressively harder, so manage your time accordingly.

Twenty minutes times three is the whole hour, so IDP’s figure is a ceiling, and you only have time to check if you come in under it on some passages. That is why IDP’s note about difficulty matters: finishing the first passage in 15 minutes gives you a cushion for the third.

The order that saves time

Read the question group first

The questions for each passage arrive in groups, each with its own instruction. Look at the instruction and the questions before you read the text. You learn which question type you are doing, which word limit applies, and which topics to look for. Reading the passage first means reading it twice.

Skim for structure

Spend the first minute or two on the title, the opening sentence of each paragraph and the last paragraph. The aim is a map: which paragraph is about causes, which about results, which about a disagreement. IDP also notes that the author’s viewpoint is often in the introduction and conclusion. The map is what lets you jump straight to a question’s paragraph later.

Search by keyword, then read closely

For each question, pick one or two keywords that cannot easily be paraphrased, such as a name, a number or a technical term, and scan for them. Read closely only around the match. IELTS.org says that for multiple choice, short-answer and sentence completion questions the answers follow the order of the text, so your search moves forward through the passage and you seldom need to go back to the top.

When to leave a question

A question that has used two minutes without a result is costing you marks on other questions. The rule of thumb is to make a provisional answer, mark the question number, and move on. Choose the most likely option, or write your best guess for a completion gap.

When you come back, you come back with a fresh read and, often, with the answer to the next question in view, which tells you where in the text you should not be looking. Tasks that send you across the whole passage, such as matching headings, can take longer per question, so leave those for the end of a passage if you are short on time. The guide to matching headings covers a method that keeps them fast.

Never leave a blank. IELTS.org says each correct answer receives one mark, so a wrong answer costs nothing more than a blank does, and IDP advises answering every question.

Three habits that waste time

• Reading every sentence. Close reading is for the few sentences that decide an answer. Everywhere else, you are building the map.
• Highlighting the whole paragraph. Mark keywords, not sentences. A page that is all highlighted shows you nothing.
• Perfecting one answer. A question you are fairly sure about is finished. Move on, and come back only if time remains at the end.

None of these is a failure of English. Each is a habit, and habits change when you time yourself and look at where the minutes went.

A minute-by-minute plan to practise

Here is one plan. It is an illustration built on IDP’s 20-minute ceiling, and you should adjust it to your own pace.

Two features of the plan matter more than the exact minutes. The first passage has a fixed cut-off, so a slow start cannot eat the whole hour. And the last three minutes are kept for blanks, which is where an unanswered question can still earn a mark.

Practise under real timing

The plan only works if you have felt it. A passage that feels comfortable in 25 minutes is a different exercise from three passages in one hour, and the only way to learn your real pace is to sit whole papers under a timer. In IELTS Mentor AI, a full three-passage Reading paper can be run under exam timing for 60 minutes, and it submits itself when the time ends, so you learn what you can do by the point the clock stops.

After each paper, look at where the minutes went. Note the passage you finished last, the question types you marked and returned to, and whether any lost marks were simply questions you never reached. If a passage regularly runs over, the cause is usually one question type; the guide to True, False, Not Given is a good place to start if that type is the culprit. The answer on how long the Reading test is gives the format facts in brief, and the guide to getting from band 6 to band 7 shows how these habits turn into marks.