Behind on Your Bible Reading Plan? How to Catch Up

The plan says Day 58. Your ribbon is at Day 41. You missed a few days, then a week, and now the gap is the first thing you see every time you open it.

So you are weighing three bad ideas: read a week in one night, start again at Genesis 1, or quietly wait for January. There are better choices than those, and they start with a number.

How far behind are you, in minutes?

“Seventeen days behind” sounds like a verdict. It is really a sum, and the sum is smaller than the feeling.

A one-year plan through the Protestant Bible covers 724,811 words in 365 days. That is 1,986 words a day, or about nine minutes at 220 words a minute. We walk through that sum in how long it takes to read the Bible in a year. So each day you missed is about nine minutes of reading. Seventeen days is about 153 minutes. Two and a half hours, spread however you like.

Read the right-hand column. A week behind is two extra minutes a day for a month. Even a month behind is one extra reading a day for a month. Those are not small, but they are sizes you can look at and decide about.

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles are longer, so each day carries a little more.

If you want your own numbers, our free Bible reading plan calculator takes a finish date and a reading speed and gives you minutes a day.

Why cramming a week in one sitting backfires

The usual fix is the worst one. You wait for a free evening, sit down, and try to read seven days at once to get back to the date on the plan.

Look at what that asks. Seven days is about 63 minutes of steady reading, at the end of a day, in books you may be finding hard. This next part is our own observation, not a study: most people get halfway, stop, and now they are behind and they have a bad memory of the last time they tried. The backlog grows by one more day while they recover.

There is also a quieter cost. Nine minutes of Leviticus read slowly can be taken in. An hour of it read against the clock mostly cannot. You would be trading reading for finishing.

Option one: pick up where you left off and move the finish line

This is the simplest choice. Open to Day 41, read Day 41, and tomorrow read Day 42. You add nothing. You finish seventeen days later than the plan first said.

What it costs: nothing per day. The same nine minutes.

What you give up: the calendar match. A plan that started on January 1 will now end in mid-January. If you are reading with a group or a podcast that follows the dates, you will be out of step with them.

If the dates matter because you read with others, there is a second way to do this. Jump to today’s reading and stay with the group. Read the missed chapters later, on a slow Saturday, as reading and not as repayment. That is what we suggest in what to do when you miss a day, and both ways are honest. One keeps the order. The other keeps the company. If you skip, read the chapter headings of what you passed so the story still joins up. And if you do not have a group to read with yet, the church finder lists churches by city.

Option two: spread the missed readings over the next few weeks

Elsewhere on this site we say not to catch up, and for a missed day or two that still stands: let it go and read today’s portion. This option is for a narrower case. You are more than a few days out, and the original finish date matters to you.

If so, close the gap slowly. Pick a window, then add a small, fixed amount to each day until it is gone. That is a different thing from doubling up in one sitting, which is the fix we warn against.

• A week behind: two extra minutes a day for 30 days, or four and a half for 14 days.
• Two weeks behind: four extra minutes a day for 30 days.
• A month behind: nine extra minutes a day for 30 days. That is two readings a day for a month, which sits right at the edge of the rule below.

Here is a rule for when not to double up. If the extra would more than double your daily reading for longer than two weeks, choose another option. The rule is ours, a judgment and not a finding. It is there because a plan that needs eighteen minutes from someone who was missing nine will likely be missed again.

Option three: change the pace of the whole plan

The third choice is to stop treating the gap as a separate debt and fold it into everything that is left.

Take the reader from the top of this page. They have finished 41 readings, so 324 remain. The calendar says Day 58, so 307 days are left in the year. Spread 324 readings over 307 days and each day is about 2,096 words, or roughly nine and a half minutes. Half a minute more a day, and the plan lands on its first date with no catch-up at all.

You can also go the other way. If nine minutes was the thing you kept missing, stretch the plan. A Bible finished in fourteen months was still finished. We wrote about what it takes to finish a Bible reading plan, and changing pace is on that list as a way of staying in.

What a missed stretch does and does not do to the habit

The fear under all of this is that the gap wiped out the habit, and you are back at zero.

The research we have points the other way, with limits. In a paper in the British Journal of General Practice, Gardner, Lally and Wardle describe a study in which a new daily behaviour grew more automatic until it “slowed to a plateau after an average of 66 days,” with wide variation between people. They report that “missing the occasional opportunity to perform the behaviour did not seriously impair the habit formation process.” We look at that study more closely in how long it takes to build a habit.

Two honest limits. That study was about everyday health behaviours like eating, drinking and activity. It did not study Bible reading. And it speaks to an occasional miss, not a three-week gap. What it does tell you is that the weeks you did read were not erased.

It also helps to know how normal this is. In a Lifeway Research study published in February 2026, among U.S. Protestant churchgoers who attend at least monthly, 31% said they read the Bible every day. Another 30% read a few times a week, 14% once a week, and 11% a few times a month. Missing days is what most churchgoers do.

Finishing is rare too. When Lifeway Research surveyed 1,000 Americans for a report published in 2017, one in five had read through the whole Bible at least once: 11 percent once and 9 percent more than once. Among reasons for not reading, 27 percent said they do not prioritize it and 15 percent said they do not have time. And the wish is common. The American Bible Society’s State of the Bible 2025, from 2,656 online interviews with U.S. adults, found that 51% say they wish they read the Bible more.

When to restart, and when not to

Starting over at Genesis 1 feels clean. It is rarely the best choice, because it throws away reading you have done and sends you back through the same chapters. For the reader at Day 41, a restart means about six hours of reading over again. Closing the seventeen-day gap is two and a half.

Restart only if one of these is true:

• You are a few days in and the plan itself was the wrong fit. Then choose a different plan, not the same one again.
• It has been so long that you no longer remember what you read, and you want the story fresh.

Otherwise, keep your place. And do not wait for January. The date on a plan is a convenience. It helps a group stay together. It was never the point.

Scripture is gentle about beginning again. “His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22–23, NIV). And Paul writes, “Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9, NIV). Neither verse mentions a deadline.

So choose one of the three, tonight, in about a minute. Then read the next reading. If the miss itself is what stings, why streaks make people quit is about that.

Frequently asked questions

Should I skip the readings I missed or go back and read them?

Either is sound. If you read alone, pick up where you left off and let the finish date move; you lose nothing but the calendar match. If you read with a group or a dated podcast, jump to today's reading so you stay with them, and read the missed chapters later as reading, not as repayment. The only choice to avoid is reading a whole week in one sitting to get back to the date.

How do I catch up on a Bible reading plan without burning out?

Turn the gap into minutes, then spread it. One missed day on a one-year Protestant plan is about nine minutes, so seven days behind is about 63 minutes. Spread over 30 days, that is about two extra minutes a day. If catching up would more than double your daily reading for longer than two weeks, move the finish date or change the pace instead.

Is it okay to take longer than a year to read the Bible?

Yes. One year is a convenient pace, not a rule. A one-year Protestant plan is about nine minutes a day at 220 words a minute; reading for less time each day simply moves the finish date. In a Lifeway Research survey of 1,000 Americans, one in five had read through the whole Bible at least once, so finishing at any pace is uncommon.

How many days behind is too many to catch up?

There is no fixed number, but the arithmetic helps. Thirty days behind on a one-year Protestant plan is about four and a half hours of reading, or nine extra minutes a day for 30 days, which doubles your daily reading for a month. Past that point it is usually kinder to keep your place and finish later, or to re-pace the rest of the plan.