How the 30 Juz Divide the Quran

Blog · Structure · 9 min read · Published 31 August 2026 · Updated 5 September 2026

A juz is one of 30 roughly equal parts of the Quran, measured by quantity of text rather than by surah. Read one a day and the whole book takes a month. The divisions ignore surah boundaries: juz 2 opens at 2:142, deep inside Al-Baqarah. In the 604-page Madinah mushaf, a juz averages 20.13 pages.

To turn the juz structure into a dated schedule, the khatm calculator prints every day’s page range and its opening ayah.

Key facts

• 30 juz cover 114 surahs and 6,236 ayat.
• The Quran runs 77,429 words, so a juz averages 2,581 words.
• 604 pages in the Madinah mushaf, 610 in IndoPak, 612 in Naskh. Averages: 20.13, 20.33 and 20.4 pages per juz.
• Only 9 of 30 juz begin at the first ayah of a surah. The other 21 start mid-surah.
• 27 of 30 juz begin at the top of a Madani page. Three (juz 7, 11 and 26) begin partway down one.
• Word counts per juz range from 2,308 (juz 30) to 2,774 (juz 7), a spread of about 20 percent.
• Ayah counts per juz range from 110 (juz 6) to 564 (juz 30), a spread of more than five times.

What a juz actually is

A juz is a length, not a theme. The book is cut into 30 portions of near-equal size, and the cut lands wherever the arithmetic puts it. Nothing about a juz claims that its opening ayah begins a new subject or that its closing ayah ends one.

This is why the numbers behave the way they do. Word counts stay tight, between 2,308 and 2,774, because words are what the division is balancing. Ayah counts swing wildly, from 110 in juz 6 to 564 in juz 30, because ayah length varies enormously across the book. Juz 30 holds 37 surahs and 564 ayat, and still carries the fewest words of any juz, since its ayat are short.

The plural of juz is ajza, though most readers say “juz 5” and leave it there.

Why 30

Thirty is a calendar number. A lunar month runs 29 or 30 days, so a juz a day finishes the Quran in a single month. That is the practical appeal of the count, whatever its origin. Any scheme that carves a book into equal daily portions has to pick a portion size, and 30 maps onto a month.

The daily arithmetic is the useful part:

• 6,236 ayat ÷ 30 = 207.9 ayat a day
• 604 pages ÷ 30 = 20.13 pages a day
• 77,429 words ÷ 30 = 2,581 words a day

Twenty pages a day is the round number to work with, because 20 splits cleanly: four pages after each of the five daily prayers. The pages do not divide evenly: juz 30 spans 23 Madani pages, juz 1, 7, 11 and 25 span 21 each, and the remaining 25 span 20.

Juz boundaries versus surah boundaries

These two systems were never meant to line up, and mostly they do not.

Nine juz open on a surah’s first ayah: juz 1 (1:1), 14 (15:1), 15 (17:1), 17 (21:1), 18 (23:1), 26 (46:1), 28 (58:1), 29 (67:1) and 30 (78:1). The remaining 21 open inside a surah already in progress. Juz 2 starts at 2:142, with 144 ayat of Al-Baqarah still ahead. Juz 3 starts at 2:253. Al-Baqarah alone spans three juz.

Long surahs get split, short surahs get grouped. Al-Baqarah, at 286 ayat and 6,116 words, cannot fit in one juz at any sensible portion size. The 37 surahs of juz 30 together carry 2,308 words, less than half of Al-Baqarah.

Where each juz starts

Boundaries below are the app’s verified table, which follows the same v4 content API that Quran Foundation documents and that quran.com serves. You can check the mapping yourself: the public juzs endpoint gives juz 2 the verse mapping 142 to 252 of surah 2, which is the row below, and it was fetched on 7 September 2026. Madani page is the page of the 604-page Madinah mushaf on which that ayah begins. Ayat and words are computed by summing every ayah in the range; the 30 rows total exactly 6,236 ayat and 77,429 words, which is the check that the table is not quietly dropping or double-counting anything.

The three juz that start mid-page

Most juz open at the top of a page, which is what makes a page-based reading plan line up so neatly with juz boundaries. Three do not:

• Juz 7 starts at 5:82, on page 121, below 5:77.
• Juz 11 starts at 9:93, on page 201, below 9:87.
• Juz 26 starts at 46:1, on page 502, below 45:33.

This matters for anyone building a reading tracker. Deriving a juz start from a page-to-juz table gives the wrong ayah for these three. Juz 26 is the clearest case: the page-derived answer is 46:6, five ayat late. A juz boundary is an ayah boundary, so it has to be stored as one.

One boundary is worth naming because published tables disagree about it. Juz 4 starts at 3:92, at the top of page 62, and 3:92 is the ayah the juz is traditionally named after: “lan tanalu”, its opening words. Some tables give 3:93 instead. 3:93 is where the text carries the rub-el-hizb sign, the ornate circle that marks a quarter of a hizb, and a quarter mark is not a juz boundary.

That is how this site stores it. The opening ayah of all thirty juz is held as an ayah, and the page numbers are kept separately as what they honestly are: the pages a juz appears on. One consequence is visible on every juz page. Where a juz opens partway down a page, that page appears in two juz ranges, because it really does carry the end of one juz and the start of the next.

How long a juz takes

The formula is one division:

minutes = 2,581 ÷ your words per minute

• 40 words a minute: 65 minutes
• 60 words a minute: 43 minutes
• 80 words a minute: 32 minutes
• 100 words a minute: 26 minutes

Do not guess your rate. Time yourself on one full page and multiply. A Madani page averages 77,429 divided by 604, which is 128 words, so a page at 60 words a minute is a little over two minutes, and 20 pages is roughly 43 minutes. If your first page takes four minutes, a juz is closer to 80, and a month of juz-a-day reading is a real commitment rather than a small one.

Smaller units inside a juz

Each juz splits into 2 hizb, giving 60 across the book, and each hizb into 4 quarters, giving 240. The Madinah mushaf marks these in the margin. If a full juz a day is too much, a half hizb is a quarter of that, around 645 words, and 120 of them still finish the book in four months.

Reading it

Every ayah on this site sits at a stable address you can link to or come back to, in the original and in many languages. The juz table above is generated from the same verified data those pages use rather than typed by hand, which is why it totals 6,236 ayat and 77,429 words exactly.