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What is a good typing speed?
In one of the largest typing studies ever run, the average person typed about 52 words per minute. So if you are above that, you are doing well by that yardstick.
What the numbers say
Researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge analysed 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers who took an online typing test.
| WPM | What it represents |
|---|---|
| 52 | The average participant in the study |
| 60 to 90 | Professionally trained typists in the 1970s and 1980s, as the researchers described them |
| 120 | The fastest participants in the study |
Keep one thing in mind: these were volunteers on a typing test website, so they may well be keener and faster than people in general. Treat 52 as a useful marker, not a verdict on you.
What do fast typists do differently?
- They overlap their keys. The fastest typists pressed the next key before releasing the last one on roughly 40% to 70% of keystrokes. The researchers call this rollover.
- They make fewer mistakes. In the study, faster typists generally made fewer errors, not more. Speed and accuracy tend to arrive together.
- They do not always use ten fingers. Another Aalto study found self-taught typists can match touch typists while using fewer fingers. What mattered was pressing each letter with the same finger every time, preparing the next keystroke early and keeping the hands still.
- A course is not magic. In the large study, people who had taken a typing course typed much like those who never had, in speed, hand use and errors.
Find out your own speed
Take our free typing test, or put numbers from another test into our WPM calculator. Then read how to improve your typing speed.
Your WPM in Type Hunters will usually read lower than a typing test, because blocks and waiting for attacks to land count toward your time. Compare it with the leaderboard rather than a test score.