The ACT Reading section is no longer 40 questions in 35 minutes. ACT retired that format in the 2025 redesign, and since the rollout reached state and district testing in spring 2026, every live administration uses 36 Reading questions in 40 minutes.
One figure almost no prep site prints sits in ACT's own section table: of those 36 Reading questions, 27 are scored. The remaining 9 are embedded field-test items that look identical to the real ones.
So the 35-minute, 40-question figure is not a myth. It is two years out of date.
Is ACT Reading Still 40 Questions?
No. Forty questions in 35 minutes describes the legacy ACT, the version students sat through the end of 2024. The replacement arrived in three phases, which is why the old number survived so long in circulation.
National online Saturday testing switched first, in April 2025. All national Saturday testing, paper included, followed in September 2025. State, district, and international administrations converted in spring 2026.
That last phase is what closed the question. There is no longer a form anywhere with 40 Reading items.
Reading is the only section that lost questions and gained time. Every other section shed minutes along with items, which makes Reading the single biggest pacing beneficiary of the redesign: 14.2 extra seconds per question, a 27% increase.
How Many Reading Questions Actually Count?
Twenty-seven. ACT publishes both counts in the same table, and the gap between them changes the arithmetic students use to set targets.
Your raw Reading score therefore runs from 0 to 27, not 0 to 40, and a form-specific equating table converts it to the 1–36 scale. The 9 unscored items are distributed inline and cannot be identified, so treating any question as skippable is a guess against yourself.
Compare that with English, which packs 50 items into 35 minutes at 42 seconds each. Students who assume Reading is the tightest section have it backwards. Our full breakdown of ACT test-day timing covers the whole clock, and the ACT English guide in the Explore library handles the faster half of the English and Reading pair.
What Does the Current Section Contain?
Every scored Reading question falls into one of three reporting categories, and ACT publishes each as a percentage band rather than a fixed count. Key Ideas and Details takes 44–52% of the section, roughly 12 to 14 of the 27 scored items.
Craft and Structure covers 26–33%, or about 7 to 9 items: word meaning in context, text structure, author purpose, point of view. Integration of Knowledge and Ideas covers 19–26%, about 5 to 7 items, and it is where argument analysis and cross-text comparison live.
The passage structure deserves a caveat competitors skip. ACT's current official description does not promise four passages of ten questions. It describes a section built from parts of varying length, some a single long prose passage and some shorter paired passages, with questions that draw on both.
Released forms and prep sources, including the ACT section guides in the Explore library, consistently describe four passages carrying nine questions each: Literary Narrative, Social Science, Humanities, Natural Science, with one slot given to a paired set. Treat that as the reliable working model, not a guarantee.
One more conditional feature: since 2021, a single passage may arrive with a graph, figure, or table attached. Some forms carry one. Some carry none.
How Should You Pace 40 Minutes?
Not by the question. Sixty-seven seconds is an average, not a plan, and nobody scoring well in this section watches a per-item clock.
The governing unit is the passage. Four passages at roughly 10 minutes each fills the 40-minute window exactly, and every real pacing decision happens inside one of those four budgets.
The endgame row is not filler. ACT applies no penalty for wrong answers, so a blank is a guaranteed zero while a random four-option guess averages 0.25 points. Across five blanks, that is roughly one raw point donated for nothing.
The temptation when a dense passage runs long is to compress the answering phase. That is the wrong minute to cut, because every point in the budget is earned there. Borrow a minute from your strongest passage instead.
What Is a Good Reading Score?
The national mean for Reading is 20.1, against a composite mean of 19.2, on ACT's norms for tests taken between September 2025 and August 2026. Reading is the highest-scoring section on average, and also the widest.
Reading carries a standard deviation of 7.1, the widest of any section, against 5.6 for Math. That spread is what the table above is showing: the same scaled number buys a lower rank in Reading at the top of the scale and a higher one in the middle.
The strategic consequence is specific. If your Reading and Math scores are both 30, the Reading result is the weaker of the two in percentile terms, and a single Reading point at that altitude moves you further than a single Math point. Run your practice raw scores through the ACT score calculator before deciding which section to retake for.
One caveat on those norms. They rest on graduating classes of 2023, 2024, and 2025, which means the reference group largely sat the legacy four-section test. ACT has said updated norms will follow as enhanced-format data accumulates. If you are also weighing the SAT, our ACT to SAT conversion walkthrough handles the crosswalk.
How Do You Reach a 36?
A 36 in Reading sits at the 100th percentile. In practice it means all 27 scored items, or close enough that the equating table on your particular form rounds in your favour.
At that level the binding constraint stops being comprehension and becomes location discipline. Read the stem, find the lines that answer it, say the answer in your own words, and only then open the options. Reversed, every choice starts sounding plausible, because ACT builds distractors out of the passage's own phrasing.
Track misses by trap pattern rather than by question. Wrong-paragraph quotes, wrong-speaker attributions, and right-words-wrong-time swaps recur across forms, which makes them worth loading into a Flashcards deck with FSRS scheduling tuned to your test date. Fixing a pattern beats redoing a question.
For items you cannot diagnose alone, the reading tutor explains why each of the four choices survives or fails against the anchored line, which is the part a bare answer key withholds.
On that subject: the variations of this query asking for an answer key are looking for practice material, and the honest answer is that ACT publishes free official practice questions and a full practice form at act.org. The Explore library's practice set is AskSia original material written to mirror the current spec. Neither is a shortcut, and any site hosting a leaked official key is not one either.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions are on the ACT reading test?
Thirty-six appear on your form, and 27 of them are scored. ACT lists both numbers in its official section table, published June 2026. The other 9 are embedded field-test items used to calibrate future forms, and they are indistinguishable from scored items on test day, so there is no way to skip them safely. This matters for target-setting: your raw score runs 0 to 27, and a form-specific equating table converts it to the 1–36 scale, so raw-to-scaled conversions borrowed from a pre-2025 prep book will mislead you. The older figure of 40 questions applied to the legacy ACT, phased out between April 2025 and spring 2026. Check the copyright date on any practice book you own before you trust its section counts.
Is the ACT reading test still 35 minutes?
No. Reading now runs 40 minutes, up from 35 on the legacy test, and it is the only section that gained time in the redesign. English dropped from 45 minutes to 35, and Math from 60 to 50. The core test, English plus Math plus Reading, totals about 2 hours 5 minutes against roughly 2 hours 55 minutes before. Because Reading also shed 4 questions, per-item time rose from 52.5 seconds to 66.7, a 27% increase and the largest pacing gain anywhere on the test. Every administration has used this format since the spring 2026 rollout reached state and district testing. For the full test-day clock, including breaks and the optional sections, see our ACT timing breakdown.
How can I pass a reading test?
On the ACT there is no pass mark, only a 1–36 scale and a percentile. A score of 20 places you at the 55th percentile nationally, and 26 reaches the 80th, so define your target from the score ranges published by the colleges on your list rather than from a pass-fail idea. For genuinely pass-fail reading tests, such as placement or entrance exams, the mechanics still transfer: locate textual evidence before choosing, never leave a blank when guessing is unpenalised, and practise at the real time limit rather than untimed. Two weeks of timed sections usually surfaces whether your problem is comprehension or clock management, and those two failures need opposite fixes. Take one full timed section first and count how many questions you left unanswered.
How do you pass a timed reading comprehension test?
Budget by passage, not by question. On ACT Reading, 4 passages across 40 minutes gives 10 minutes each, split roughly 3 to 4 minutes skimming for structure and 6 to 7 answering the 9 questions attached to it. The skim builds an index of where claims, objections, and tone shifts sit; it is not an attempt to memorise content. Choose your passage order deliberately, taking your strongest genre first so points land while you are fresh and any time crunch falls on the passage you were least likely to finish well. Reserve the final 60 seconds to fill every blank, since an unanswered four-option item scores zero while a guess averages 0.25 points. Run one full 40-minute section in AskSia's Mock Exam mode to see where your budget actually breaks.
How do you get a 36 in ACT reading?
A 36 is the 100th percentile in Reading and effectively requires all 27 scored items. Two habits separate the 32 to 34 band from the top: anchoring every answer to a located line before reading the options, and reviewing misses by trap pattern rather than by topic. ACT constructs wrong answers from the passage's own vocabulary, so a choice that feels familiar is often quoting the right words attached to the wrong paragraph, subject, or speaker. Note also that the 36 to 34 gap in Reading is unusually shallow, with 34 already at the 97th percentile, so the last two points cost more preparation than they return for most applications. The Trap Codex in AskSia's ACT Reading Bible names the recurring patterns worth drilling first.
What is a good ACT reading score?
The national Reading mean is 20.1, so anything above 21 is above average. A 24 reaches the 75th percentile, a 28 the 85th, and a 30 the 89th. Reading carries the widest standard deviation of any section at 7.1, which means percentiles rise more slowly at the top than they do in Math, where a 30 already reaches the 96th percentile. Judge your score against your target colleges' published middle-50% ranges rather than the national figure, since a competitive score at a state flagship and at a highly selective private university can differ by 8 or more points. Bear in mind these norms draw on 2023 to 2025 graduates, who mostly sat the legacy test. Pull the current middle-50% range from each school's Common Data Set, section C9.
What This Guide Does Not Cover?
If you arrived here searching for a timed reading test that is not the ACT, the format figures above will not match yours. Nursing entrance exams, civil service tests, and English proficiency reading papers each run their own timings, and the 35-minute, 40-question combination appears in several of them.
Two limits on the ACT numbers themselves. Percentile norms currently in use are built on graduating classes who largely sat the four-section test, and the passage structure described here reflects released forms rather than an ACT guarantee.
Confirm your own administration's format with your test centre or counsellor if you are testing through a school-day programme, since contract terms vary by state.
