Average Typing Speed

Typing speed by experience level

Published figures line up into a rough ladder. Two-finger, hunt and peck typists commonly sustain about 27 WPM when copying text and about 37 WPM on text they already know by heart. In the 2018 dataset, people who had never taken a typing course averaged 49.0 WPM and those who had averaged 54.4 WPM. Professional typists are usually quoted at 43 to 80 WPM, older research on trained professionals put them at 60 to 90 WPM, and some advanced typists work above 120 WPM, level with the fastest of the 168,000 participants.

The widest gap on that ladder sits between two-finger typing and everybody else. The gap between self-taught and course-trained typists is only about 5 WPM. If you are still looking at the keys, learning to stop is worth more than any amount of further practice in the old style.

What typing speed do jobs require?

Employers set their own bars, so requirements vary, but one widely used benchmark is public. The US Office of Personnel Management qualification standard for clerical and administrative support positions asks 40 words per minute of clerk-typist and office automation roles, based on a 5 minute sample with three or fewer errors. The error limit matters as much as the speed: at 40 WPM for five minutes, three errors is an accuracy of about 99.7 percent.

Numeric data entry roles are more often stated in keystrokes per hour, and 8,000 or 10,000 KPH is a common requirement. With the usual conversion of WPM times 300, that is roughly 27 to 33 WPM, although keypad work on figures is not directly comparable with typing prose. Court reporting is a separate discipline altogether: it runs on chorded stenotype machines rather than a keyboard, so its speeds cannot be compared with any typing test.

How does typing speed change with age?

The 2018 keyboard study does not answer this. It records participant age only as a demographic, a mean of 24.5 years, and never breaks typing speed down by age group. The figure everyone quotes comes from a different piece of work: a separate Aalto study of 37,000 volunteers published in 2019, which found that people aged 10 to 19 typed about 10 words per minute faster than people in their forties.

Two caveats come with it. That study measured typing on mobile devices, not on a physical keyboard, so it is a smartphone finding and not an age curve for desktop typing. And the researchers describe it as a generation effect rather than a skill effect: somebody in their forties has almost certainly typed more words in their life than a teenager has, but the teenager grew up on touchscreens.

Does taking a typing course make you faster?

Less than the effort implies. Over 70 percent of the 168,000 participants had taken a typing course, and the researchers report that those who had showed very similar typing behaviour to those who never had. The speed gap was real but small: trained typists averaged 54.4 WPM against 49.0 for untrained, about 5 WPM, which the paper itself calls a relatively small difference.

Finger count cuts the other way from the popular version of this. Fast typists in the data used more fingers than slow typists, 8.4 against 5.3 on average, and the authors conclude that the self-reported number of fingers is a predictive factor for speed. What the data does not support is the strict rule: the fastest typists averaged 8.4 fingers, not a disciplined ten. What they did share was mechanical. They made fewer errors, and they used rollover typing, pressing the next key before releasing the previous one, in 40 to 70 percent of keystrokes.

Why is my real typing at work slower than my test score?

Because a typing test measures transcription, and most real work is composition. In a 1999 CHI study of text entry, Karat and colleagues measured average keyboard rates of about 33 words per minute for simple transcription but only about 19 words per minute when participants had to compose the text themselves.

That is a drop of roughly 40 percent, and it comes from thinking, not from typing. When you write an email you pause to choose words, reread, and change your mind, and none of that happens when you are copying a passage off a screen. So a 60 WPM test score does not mean you produce 60 words of finished writing per minute. It means your hands are not the bottleneck, which is the useful thing to know.

This is also why chasing an ever-higher test score has diminishing returns for most desk work. Once your transcription speed comfortably exceeds your thinking speed, the next gain comes from elsewhere.

What is a good typing speed?

Against the measured evidence: below 30 WPM you are slower than the majority of computer users and there is a lot of easy room to improve. From 30 to 60 WPM you are inside the band the 2018 study describes as covering most people. Above 60 WPM you are faster than the 52 WPM study average. Above 80 WPM you are approaching the range that trained professional typists reached in the research of the 1970s and 1980s, which the Cambridge summary puts at 60 to 90 WPM. At 120 WPM you match the fastest participants in the 168,000-person dataset.

Accuracy belongs in the same sentence as any of those numbers. The 2018 study found faster typists generally make fewer errors, so speed and accuracy are not a trade-off you have to pick between at ordinary speeds; they tend to arrive together. A score of 70 WPM at 88 percent accuracy is worse in practice than 55 WPM at 99 percent, because every error costs a keystroke to make, one to delete and one to retype.

What is the difference between gross and net WPM?

Gross WPM counts everything you typed: total characters divided by five, divided by the minutes elapsed. Net WPM subtracts your mistakes, and it is the figure that means something. The standard formula is gross WPM minus the number of uncorrected errors divided by the minutes elapsed.

The five-character convention matters here too. Every WPM figure on this site and on every other typing test defines a word as five characters including the space that follows it, rather than counting real words, so that scores are comparable no matter which passage you happen to type. It comes from early typewriter-era testing, and it is why 300 correct characters in a minute is reported as 60 WPM.

What is the fastest typing speed ever recorded?

The most cited claim belongs to Barbara Blackburn, an American clerical worker who used the Dvorak layout. Guinness listed her under Typing, Fastest from 1976 to 1986 as able to attain 170 WPM and maintain 145 WPM for 55 minutes, and her own claimed peak was 212 WPM for a brief burst.

The caveat is part of the fact: Guinness removed keyboard typing speed records from the 1987 edition onward, citing concerns about verifying them. So 212 WPM is best described as a claimed record from a category that no longer exists, not a currently verified world record. For comparison, the fastest of the 168,000 participants in the 2018 study, measured under identical conditions, reached 120 WPM.

What the research actually measured

Every figure below is traceable to a specific published study or press release, listed under Sources at the end of this page. Nothing here is an estimate.

Typing speed by experience level and job requirement

The follow-up questions to an average: where a beginner, a trained typist and a professional sit, and what an employer can actually ask of you.

How WPM converts into real output

Arithmetic, not a claim: a WPM word is five characters including the following space, so these follow directly from the definition.

Gross versus net WPM, worked through

Gross WPM is every character you typed divided by five, per minute. Net WPM then subtracts uncorrected errors divided by minutes elapsed. TypeBurst reports a third variant: correct characters only, divided by five, per minute.

Sources

1. Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson & Oulasvirta, Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes, CHI 2018
2. The traits of fast typists discovered by analysing 136 million keystrokes, Aalto University
3. What makes a faster typist?, University of Cambridge
4. Smartphone typing speeds catching up with keyboards, Aalto University (source of the age comparison, measured on mobile devices)
5. Karat, Halverson, Horn & Karat, Patterns of Entry and Correction in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems, CHI 1999
6. Barbara Blackburn (typist), including the withdrawal of the Guinness category
7. Words per minute, on the five-character word convention, two-finger and professional typing speeds and KPH requirements
8. US Office of Personnel Management, Qualification Standards for Clerical and Administrative Support Positions (typing proficiency)

Method: every figure above is quoted from published research, not measured by TypeBurst. TypeBurst measures one thing itself, the score of the test you take on this page, as correct characters divided by five divided by the minutes elapsed, and it stores that score only in your own browser. It collects nothing, so it publishes no averages of its own and no percentile. Read the full measurement methodology.