What is a good typing speed? Average WPM and percentiles

What is the average typing speed?

The clearest numbers come from a 2018 study by Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge. They logged 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 people who took an online typing test, and found:

• an average of 51.56 WPM, with a standard deviation of 20.2 WPM, so most people fall somewhere between about 30 and 70 WPM;
• a slowest 10% under about 26 WPM and a fastest 10% over about 78 WPM;
• a top end of 120 WPM or more.

The distribution leans slightly to the right: a few very fast typists pull the average up, so the typist exactly in the middle (the median) types a little slower than the average, at about 50 WPM.

On phones, people are slower. A follow-up study by the same group, with 37,370 volunteers typing on mobile devices, measured an average of 36.2 WPM.

How does your speed compare?

The study published its average, spread and shape but not a full table of percentiles, so we estimated one from those numbers. The estimate reproduces the two percentiles the paper does report (26 and 78 WPM) to within about one WPM. It’s the same model behind the percentile on our typing test.

Read it as a rough guide, not a ranking. The people in the study chose to take a typing test, most of them were young and in the US, and 72% had taken a typing course, so they may be a little faster than the population as a whole.

What WPM puts you in the top 10%?

Turning the same estimate around gives the speed you need to reach each band:

So a typing speed of 60 WPM is above average, 80 WPM is fast, and 100 WPM or more is rare: fewer than 2 typists in 100 reach it.

Is 60, 70, 80 or 100 WPM good?

Yes, all four are good. Here’s how each one compares with the 2018 study, with 40 WPM for reference:

• 40 WPM is faster than about 31% of typists. It’s below average, but it meets the requirement for typing jobs in the US federal government (more on that below).
• 60 WPM is faster than about 68% of typists: comfortably above average.
• 70 WPM is faster than about 82%.
• 80 WPM is faster than about 91%, which puts you in the top 10%. The study’s “fast typists”, its top 10%, averaged 89.6 WPM.
• 100 WPM is faster than about 98% of typists.

For a sense of history: professional typists in the classic typewriter studies worked at around 60 to 75 WPM, according to the 2018 paper’s review of that research. A modern 70 WPM is a professional speed.

What typing speed do jobs ask for?

The clearest published standard is the US government’s. The Office of Personnel Management’s qualification standard for clerical positions asks clerk-typists and office automation clerks for 40 words per minute, measured on a 5-minute sample with no more than three errors.

Private employers set their own bars, and job ads rarely say how they measure. If a posting asks for a speed, check whether it means gross WPM (every character you type) or net WPM (with mistakes taken off), and practice on a test of the same length: holding your speed for five minutes takes practice of its own.

Does accuracy matter as much as speed?

It matters more than most people expect, because errors cost time twice: once to make and again to fix. In the 2018 study, typists in the fastest 10% pressed Backspace or Delete on 3.4% of their keystrokes, against 9.1% for the slowest 10%. Faster typists simply made fewer mistakes.

Different tests also treat mistakes differently, which is why the same person can get different numbers on different sites:

• Our WPM counts only the characters that are correct in the end, spaces included, divided by 5 per word, per minute.
• Raw speed counts every character you typed, mistakes included.
• Accuracy is the share of keystrokes that hit the right key. A mistake you go back and fix still counts against it.

A result like “60 WPM at 98% accuracy” is a strong one. If your accuracy is much below 95%, slowing down a little will usually raise your WPM, as our accuracy guide explains.

Does age change what counts as good?

There’s no good research norm for typing speed by age. The 2018 study’s typists were mostly between 11 and 30, so its percentiles are a fair rough guide for teenagers and adults alike. On phones, the mobile study found that people aged 10 to 19 typed fastest.

Getting older doesn’t have to mean typing slower. In a classic study of experienced typists, Salthouse (1984) found no drop in typing speed with age, even though the older typists had slower reaction times. They seemed to make up for it by looking further ahead in the text.

How to read your own number

A single test is a snapshot. A few things move it:

• Test length. 15- and 30-second tests swing more than 1-minute tests. Take a few and look at the average.
• The text. Common words are faster than sentences with punctuation and capitals, and much faster than random letters: in one lab study, typing random letter strings cut people’s speed by about half.
• The scoring. Some tests count every character you type, others only the correct ones. Ours counts only correct characters, so it reads a little lower than a gross-WPM test.

If you want a number to compare with the table above, take a few 60-second tests with common words and use the average.