What Is a Good Typing Speed?

Find your speed in the left column. The middle column is the label our own typing speed test gives that score, so the two always agree. The right column estimates what share of typists you'd be ahead of in a 2018 Aalto University study of 168,960 online typists. Treat it as a rough guide: it's calculated from the study's published average (51.56 WPM) and spread (20.2 WPM), and that group was younger and more practiced than the general public, so against people in general you'd rank higher than it shows.

30 WPM is a workable speed but below average. It's typical of people who mostly type with two or three fingers or who still look at the keyboard. The good news is that 30 is the easiest place to improve from: most people at this level are held back by a single habit, usually looking down, and fixing that alone often moves them into the 40s within a few weeks.

Yes, 40 WPM is a solid everyday speed. It's the figure most often quoted as the adult average, it passes most general office screenings, and it's fast enough that typing doesn't slow down writing an email. It sits just under the middle of heavy typists, though, so if you type all day there's comfortable room to grow into the 50s.

Yes. 50 WPM is above the general adult average and right around the average of people who take typing tests for fun. At 50 your fingers usually keep up with your thoughts, which is the point where typing stops feeling like a bottleneck. If you scored 48 or 52, the same answer applies: a one-minute test swings by about five WPM either way, so those are the same speed on different days.

Yes. 45 WPM is above the classic average and comfortably clears the 35-45 WPM range most office jobs ask for. If you're at 45 with 97%+ accuracy, you type well enough that speed isn't what limits your work. The next step up, to 55-60, is mostly about consistency: fewer hesitations on awkward letter pairs and less time spent correcting.

60 WPM is fast. It meets the bar for most assistant and transcription roles and puts you ahead of roughly 66% of the already fast study group. Most people who reach 60 got there by typing a lot, not by any trick. Pushing further is mostly about accuracy and endurance: can you hold 60 for five minutes instead of one?

These are expert speeds. The fastest 10% of the study typed above 78 WPM, and their average was 90. At 100 WPM you're in a small group; the fastest participants passed 120. At this level a test measures consistency as much as speed, and competitive typists usually track their five-minute scores rather than one-minute bursts.

Phone speeds run lower, so judge them on their own scale. A 2019 Aalto University study of 37,370 phone typists found an average of 36.2 WPM, 38 WPM for people typing with two thumbs, and a fastest participant at 85 WPM. On a phone, 40 WPM is quick and 50+ is exceptional. Don't compare a phone score with a keyboard test, or either one with the chart above.

Programmers ask this a lot, and the honest answer is that raw WPM matters less for code than for prose. Code is full of brackets, symbols and names that no typing test uses, and most of a developer's time goes on thinking, not typing. That said, a comfortable 50-60 WPM with accurate symbols helps with everything around the code: documentation, reviews, messages. If symbols are what slow you down, the Punctuation workout set in our paragraph practice is the closest thing to it.

Speed with errors isn't really speed. Every mistake costs a backspace, a retype and a moment of lost rhythm, and employment tests subtract errors from your score. In the 2018 study, 90% of participants left fewer than 2.66% of their characters wrong, and they still spent 6.3% of their keystrokes on corrections. So aim for 95% accuracy as a minimum and 98% as the target. If your accuracy is below 95%, a lower speed at higher accuracy is the better score, whatever the WPM says. How errors change the math is explained in our guide to what WPM means.

Students: 30-40 WPM makes essays painless. Anything above that is a bonus. See typing speed by age for younger children.

Office work: 40-50 WPM with high accuracy is comfortable. Most screenings ask for 35-45.

Writers, programmers, support agents: 60+ WPM pays off every day, because you type for hours.

Gamers and competitive typists: 80+ is where leaderboards start. Our leaderboard shows where you'd land.

Most people move up one band in a month of short daily practice. Our how to type faster guide has a four-week plan. For the daily practice itself, pick a game that measures you as you go: Typing Racer if you like chasing a target, the space typing game if you want pressure, or paragraph practice if accuracy on real sentences is what's holding you back. Adults who want the whole collection sorted by WPM target should start with our typing games for adults.