School reading lists by the numbers: coverage, size and sources

A Figures Bureau study · Dataset snapshot: 2026-10-24 · Statistics computed 2026-10-31 · every number recomputed at build time

This corpus tracks 20,804 reading-list assignments from 50 U.S. states plus national curricula, covering 2,809 distinct books and drawn from 161 published sources. The median state contributes 229.5 assignments. California has the most list entries (1,006), West Virginia the fewest (31). 7,812 assignments (37.6%) come from national curricula rather than a single state.

"School reading list" covers several real things: state-published recommended-reading lists, state award programs (the nominee slates teachers and librarians build displays around), district lists and national curriculum exemplar lists. This page reports the size and shape of that published corpus — how many states publish, how big their lists run, which grades they target, and how many distinct sources back the data.

The ten largest state lists

#	State	Assignments	Share of state-linked
1	California	1,006	7.7%
2	Michigan	634	4.9%
3	Virginia	619	4.8%
4	Maryland	581	4.5%
5	Kansas	492	3.8%
6	Kentucky	462	3.6%
7	Pennsylvania	436	3.4%
8	Nebraska	433	3.3%
9	New Jersey	426	3.3%
10	Indiana	384	3.0%

Full 50-state table in the CSV download. List size reflects what a state publishes, not how much it reads: states with long-running award programs contribute more rows.

Which grades the lists target

Grade band	Assignments	Share
K-2	2,268	10.9%
3-5	8,064	38.8%
6-8	6,754	32.5%
9-12	3,718	17.9%

Elementary and middle grades dominate published lists — high-school assigned reading is set more often by course syllabus than by a state-published list, which is why survey-based "most taught" rankings skew older than these. See most-assigned books.

What kind of assignment

Category	Assignments	Share
recommended	20,562	98.8%
required	240	1.2%
supplementary	2	0.0%

Most published state lists are recommendations rather than mandates — "required" rows are the minority, and we label them as the source does.

Provenance

100% of assignment rows (20,804 of 20,804) carry the URL of the document they came from.
161 distinct source documents back the corpus — state education-department lists, award-program slates, curricula and district lists.
98 curricula and 21 districts are tracked as reference tables alongside 50 states and 13 grade levels.

Questions this page answers

How many states publish school reading lists?

50 of 50 states are represented in this corpus with at least one state-linked list entry. Coverage grows as new state programs are verified and added — the dataset snapshot date above tells you which vintage you're reading.

How many books are on a typical school reading list?

The median state contributes 229.5 assignments across all grades and programs. Individual lists are smaller: a single grade-level award slate is typically 10–25 titles, and states publish several per year.

Which book appears on reading lists in the most states?

Wonder by R.J. Palacio appears on state-linked lists in 32 states (163 assignments overall) — the widest state spread in the corpus.

Download the data

school-reading-list-statistics.csv All 50 states, band split, categories and provenance counts. Free, CORS-enabled, CC BY 4.0 — reuse with a link.
assigned-books.csv The full (book × state × grade) assignment join.
All data downloads →

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Method note

Counts are of assignment records (one appearance of one book on one source-verified list for one grade), snapshot 2026-10-24. State counts exclude national-curriculum rows, which are reported separately above. Full detail: methodology. The narrative companion is Reading Statistics 2026 on readinglist.school, which browses these lists state by state.

Related reference pages

Assigned books statistics The corpus in reference form.
Most-assigned books, ranked The living top-50 table.
Book length statistics Median pages by grade.

Data + analysis: bookstatistics.com, CC BY 4.0. A Figures Bureau study.