ACT and SAT Time Budgeting Breakdown

17 June 2016

Time management is an essential skill for both the ACT and SAT. Without a successful time management strategy, you risk spending too much time on a single passage or question and running out of time before you can complete the rest. To help you budget your time more effectively, we’ve created this handy chart. Each section of the ACT and SAT is broken down by how much time you should spend on each task.

A few notes before we get to the charts themselves. First, the time breakdowns strive to strike a balance between accuracy and speed. They provide just enough time to complete a given task and still maintain a high score. Second, we’ve rounded down any time breakdowns that did not produce whole numbers. If you plan to practice your time budgeting before the exam (and you should), it is better to practice with slightly less time than slightly more time. Finally, not all columns are applicable to all exam sections. The Math sections, for example, do not have “passages” in the same way that the English, Writing and Language, and Science sections do.

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