29 October 2026 · 5 min read

How to plan a khatm in Ramadan, or in any month

A khatm in a month is twenty pages a day. Knowing that, and a little more arithmetic, turns a big intention into a plan you can actually follow.

Start with the number of pages

Most people read from a printing of the Madani mushaf, which has 604 pages divided into 30 juz. Those two numbers are all the planning needs. Reading the whole mushaf in a month means reading 604 pages in that month, and how many that is each day depends only on how many days you give it.

• 30 days: 604 ÷ 30 = 20.13 pages a day, about one juz.
• 29 days: 604 ÷ 29 = 20.83 pages a day, so most days are 21.
• 25 days: 604 ÷ 25 = 24.16 pages a day.
• 60 days: 604 ÷ 60 = 10.07 pages a day, about half a juz.
• A year: 604 ÷ 365 = 1.65 pages a day, so two pages a day finishes in 302 days.

A juz is the unit people often plan by, and "a juz a day" is a good way to remember a 30-day plan. But juz are not exactly equal in pages — in the Madani mushaf most run about 20 pages, the first 21 and the last 23 — so counting pages keeps each day the same size. The khatm planner does this for any number of days or any end date, and lists the pages for each day.

Plan for 29 days in Ramadan

A Hijri month has 29 or 30 days, and in many places you will not know which until near the end. If you plan for 30 and the month has 29, the last day's pages have nowhere to go. Planning for 29 costs less than one extra page a day — 20.83 instead of 20.13 — and if the month runs to 30, you simply have a free day at the end.

To know when the month is likely to begin, the hijri date converter shows the dates on the Umm al-Qura calendar. Where a community begins the month by sighting the moon, its first day can be a day either side, so treat the calculated date as an estimate and adjust the plan once the month is announced.

Turn pages into minutes

Pages a day is only half of a plan. The other half is how long a page takes you, and that varies widely between people and between days. Before the month starts, time yourself reading three pages at your normal pace and divide by three. That is your minutes a page.

Multiply it by the pages in your plan. At two minutes a page, a 21-page day is 42 minutes. At three minutes a page it is 63 minutes. Knowing the real number before you start lets you check the plan against your days honestly: if your evenings are full, an hour of reading needs to come from somewhere, and it is better to find that out in advance than on day four.

Split the day into sittings

Twenty pages in one go is hard to fit into a working or studying day. Twenty pages in five sittings is four pages at a time, which can fit into gaps that already exist. Some ways people divide it:

1. 1Five sittings of four or five pages, spread through the day at fixed points in your routine.
2. 2Two longer sittings of ten or eleven pages, one early and one late.
3. 3A larger morning sitting and a few short ones to finish the day's pages.

Whatever the split, tie each sitting to something that already happens every day, so it is triggered rather than remembered. how to read a little every day goes into building that kind of routine, and the planner can divide each day's pages by the number of sittings for you.

Leave room, and catch up calmly

Some days will not go to plan. A useful habit is to plan to finish a few days early: a 25-day plan inside a 29-day month is about 24 pages a day instead of 21, and it gives you four spare days for the evenings that get taken by something else.

When you do fall behind, resist doubling the next day's pages. Instead, take the pages you have left and divide them by the days you have left. If you have read up to page 300 with 14 days to go, that is 304 pages over 14 days — about 22 a day, only slightly more than before. Recalculating spreads the difference thinly, where doubling up concentrates it into one heavy day that is easy to put off again.

Protect the time from the phone

The sittings in a plan like this are often lost to small things: a message that turns into a scroll, a video that plays the next one. A month is long enough for that to add up. If you want to see how much time your usual scrolling takes over a month or a year, the screen time to reading calculator shows it as pages. And if one app keeps winning, its guide among the app guides shows how to put a limit on it for the month.