What's Actually on TOEIC Reading? We Analysed 16,214 Practice Questions to Find Out

Most "what's on the TOEIC" articles guess — we counted

Search for "what vocabulary appears on TOEIC" or "most common TOEIC grammar points" and you will find dozens of lists. Almost all of them are built the same way: a teacher writes down what they remember seeing. That experience is valuable, but you cannot check it, and no two lists agree. This post takes a different route. On 10 July 2026 we exported a snapshot from the eng-test bank — 16,214 original TOEIC-style Reading questions — and counted what each one actually tests: its difficulty, the business context it is set in, the specific skill it measures, and how long it takes to answer.

Four findings stood out:

• Verb choice is the single most-tested skill: 2,597 questions (16.0% of the analysed set) hinge on picking the right verb for a business context.
• HR and recruiting is the most common scenario, appearing on 17.5% of all questions — ahead of email correspondence at 12.0%.
• Half of everything is medium difficulty: 50.6% of questions, and the ratio barely moves across the five categories.
• A reading-comprehension question costs about 3.5 times as much time as a vocabulary question (128.5 vs 37.1 estimated seconds).

Below is the full data, how we produced it, and — most importantly — the study plan it implies. If you only came for the plan, jump to the last two sections.

Methodology: inside the 16,214-question analysis

eng-test.com is a free bilingual TOEIC-style Reading practice platform built around fixed 5-question micro-sessions. Every question in the bank is an original item written by our team in modern business-English contexts — remote work, e-commerce, IT support, HR onboarding: 2022–2026 workplace style — and never copied or paraphrased from real exams. Each item passes a quality audit before going live and carries structured metadata: a category, a difficulty rating, topical context tags, a tested-skill label, and an estimated time-to-answer. That metadata is what makes this analysis possible.

The five categories are deliberately balanced — between 3,169 and 3,350 items each — so no single category distorts the overall numbers.

One thing to be clear about before the findings: this is an analysis of our question bank, which is modelled on the publicly documented style and format of the TOEIC Listening & Reading test. It is not an analysis of official ETS exam papers — those are not public, and nobody outside ETS can run this kind of count on them. For the official test format, always check ETS's TOEIC Listening & Reading page.

Finding 1: half of everything is medium difficulty

Across all 16,214 questions, 28.9% are rated easy, 50.6% medium and 20.5% hard. What surprised us is how stable that split stays inside each category:

Every category lands within about two percentage points of the same split. The practical meaning: the mid-band is where scores are decided. If your target sits in the 550–650 range — a threshold band many Thai employers commonly ask for — easy and medium items together cover roughly 80% of what you will face, so mastering them matters far more than cracking the hardest 20%. Hard items mainly separate candidates chasing 800 and above. Our TOEIC score guide breaks down what accuracy you need for each target score.

Diagnose yourself on medium questions first. If you score below about 70% on medium-difficulty items in practice, hard questions are not your problem yet — the fastest score gains come from turning medium losses into wins.

Finding 2: HR and email scenarios dominate the business contexts

Every question carries one or more topical context tags describing the scenario it is set in. The shares below are the percentage of all 16,214 questions carrying each tag; because one question can carry several tags (an HR email counts under both HR and email), the column does not sum to 100%.

More than one question in six is set in an HR scenario: job postings, applications, interview scheduling, onboarding, performance reviews, promotions. That is no accident — the TOEIC test is a workplace-English test, and hiring is the workplace situation everyone shares. If words like applicant, qualification, reference, probation and payroll are not automatic for you yet, this is the highest-value vocabulary cluster to fix first.

The second pattern is document formats. Email (12.0%), memos (7.1%) and notices (3.8%) all rank in the top ten, which means reading business correspondence fluently — subject lines, greetings, polite requests, sign-offs — is a tested skill in itself, especially in Part 6- and Part 7-style items.

Finding 3: verb choice is the most-tested skill in the bank

Each question is labelled with the specific skill it measures. Here are the ten most common labels and their share of the 16,214 questions analysed:

One question in six is a verb question

Combine the two verb-choice labels — business verb choice (1,529) and general verb choice (1,068) — and you get 2,597 questions, 16.0% of the analysed set. Viewed through skill tags instead, 2,725 questions (16.8%) carry a verb-choice tag. Either way the conclusion is identical: nothing you can study pays off like verb collocations. These questions are rarely about rare words; they are about which common verb fits the sentence — you submit a report, attend a meeting, meet a deadline, address a complaint. Our guide to vocabulary memory techniques shows how to learn collocations so they stick, and the full ranked list is in our 100 most common TOEIC words.

Reading: detail beats main idea almost 5 to 1

Questions testing detail-finding (specific detail, 1,142, plus general detail, 463) total 1,605 — nearly five times the number of main-idea questions (335). The practical lesson: scanning is worth more than gist. Train yourself to locate names, dates, prices, times and stated reasons quickly, then confirm your answer against the exact line in the passage. Our Part 6 and Part 7 tips walk through that scanning routine step by step.

Pure grammar: passive voice and prepositions of time lead

Among skills labelled purely as grammar, passive voice is the most common (323 questions), followed by prepositions of time (244). Verb-form questions — choosing the right tense or participle — carry their own tag on 591 questions (3.6% of the analysed set). If your grammar time is limited, that is your order: passive constructions first, then in/on/at/by/until with time expressions, then verb forms. Start with our Part 5 tips and the English tenses guide.

Finding 4: one reading passage question costs 3.5 vocabulary questions

Every item in the bank carries an estimated time-to-answer based on its length and complexity. The averages by category:

A reading-comprehension question costs about 3.5 times a vocabulary question. Now put that against the official clock: as of 2026, the real Reading section gives you 100 questions in 75 minutes — 45 seconds average — split into 30 Part 5 questions, 16 Part 6 questions and 54 Part 7 questions (confirm the current format with ETS before you book). One nuance: our 128.5-second estimate includes reading the passage, while on the exam one passage serves several questions, which lowers the effective cost per question — but Part 7 is still where time dies.

The arithmetic hands you a pacing plan. Average 30 seconds per Part 5 item (15 minutes) and 45 seconds per Part 6 blank (12 minutes), and you keep 48 minutes for Part 7 — about 53 seconds per question. Let Part 5 drift to 60 seconds per item instead, and Part 7 is left with roughly 33 minutes — about 37 seconds per question: the section falls apart from the back.

Train pacing, not just accuracy. Our incomplete-sentences items average 45.4 seconds — almost exactly the exam's overall average. Your goal in practice is to beat that comfortably on Part 5-style questions, because every second saved there is a second bought for Part 7.

The study plan this data implies

Converting the whole analysis into one prioritised plan for a test-taker chasing a threshold score, it looks like this:

1. 1Master business verb collocations first — they decide 16% of the questions we analysed. Build your list around the top contexts (HR, email, finance, IT, marketing) and always learn verbs with their partners, never alone; the method is in our vocabulary memory techniques guide.
2. 2Drill specific-detail scanning — detail skills cover about 10% of the questions we analysed. In every practice passage, locate who, when and how much before answering, and point to the exact line that proves your choice; see Part 6 & 7 tips.
3. 3Fix the highest-frequency grammar points in order: passive voice, prepositions of time, then verb forms. Part 5 tips covers the question patterns to expect.
4. 4Practice at medium difficulty until you hold 80% accuracy. Half the bank lives there, and so does the decisive middle of any realistic exam. Only then add hard items.
5. 5Add timed pressure with micro-sessions. A fixed 5-question session takes 3–5 minutes — the same open-decide-move-on rhythm the exam demands.

You can start right now with the free 5-question sample on the homepage — no signup, no credit card — then use the category modes to follow the plan above, or Mixed Random mode to simulate the exam's unpredictability.

Limitations — and where the official facts live

Three honest caveats. First, this is an analysis of the eng-test bank, not of official exams: the numbers describe how we model the test's documented style, because official ETS papers are not public. Second, topical tag counts are question-tag pairs — a question set in an HR email counts under both HR and email — so shares describe how often a theme appears, not exclusive slices of the bank. Third, any score you earn in eng-test practice is a readiness estimate, not a prediction of an official scaled score.

For the current official test format, fees and registration, rely on ETS and the authorised test centre in your country. eng-test.com is an independent practice platform and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, ETS. TOEIC is a registered trademark of ETS.