Average typing speed by age, job and device

The research, side by side

Read the right-hand column first. The spread from 33 to 90 reflects who was measured, and whether they were copying, composing or typing for a living.

Dhakal's study is the biggest by far, and its own summary puts the shape plainly: the majority type around 30 to 60 WPM, and some reach over 120. The mean of 51.56 sits toward the top of that band because the volunteers were young (three quarters between 11 and 30) and reported typing 3.2 hours a day. The study also computes WPM from the length of the transcribed text and reports uncorrected errors separately, which puts its figure closer to our raw WPM than our net one. See why your WPM differs between sites for what that does to a comparison.

Karat's lab figure is the closest thing to an ordinary office worker. Its participants split into fast, moderate and slow groups averaging 40, 35 and 23 WPM. Composing ran at 19, which is worth remembering when a job advert's figure seems high: almost every test measures copying.

So which average is yours? Never practiced: Karat's 33. Typing all day and keen to improve: Dhakal's 52. Typing for a living: the 60 to 90 of trained professionals.

Our own numbers, and why there aren't any yet

Our percentile label uses our own result population once a mode, duration and language bucket has 10,000 results. Until then it shows a labeled reference drawn from millions of results on public typing tests, and the label names the population every time. We tried a bare "you're faster than 71% of people" first. At a few hundred results it was meaningless: the number jumped every time a fast friend of ours ran ten tests in a row.

We expect our eventual medians to land above Karat's office users. A site with a settings page this deep attracts enthusiasts first.

What is the average typing speed by age?

There is no large dataset of keyboard typing speed by age. Dhakal's paper collected ages but reports no analysis of age against speed, so any per-decade desktop figure you see attributed to it didn't come from the paper.

The best large age data we found is for phones. Palin and colleagues reported mean speed by age group for their 37,370 mobile typists:

Speed falls with each decade after the teens; children under 10 were slowest at 24.3 WPM. These are phone figures from a young sample (75% under 28), so the older rows rest on fewer people.

Keyboards tell a different story, at least for skilled typists. Timothy Salthouse studied typists aged 19 to 72 in 1984, ranging from 17 to 104 net WPM. Older typists were slower on simple tapping and reaction-time tasks, yet typed just as fast. His explanation was that they looked further ahead in the text, preparing keystrokes earlier to offset slower movements. The caveat is that the older typists may simply have been faster when young, so the study shows skill can be kept, not that everyone keeps it.

What the large dataset does show is that training and technique matter more than birthdays. Dhakal's volunteers who had taken a typing course averaged 54.35 WPM against 49.00 for those who hadn't, about 5 WPM. Those who reported using more fingers were faster, with a correlation of 0.38 between finger count and speed. And in Feit's motion-capture study, self-taught typists using fewer fingers reached speeds comparable with touch typists; what predicted speed was a consistent finger for each key and keeping the hands still.

Teens often look slow on a keyboard because keyboard instruction is patchy. New Zealand's RNZ reported in February 2026 that schools there did not commonly teach typing, even as national exams move online.

We don't ask for a birthday, so we have no age data of our own.

What is a normal typing speed for jobs?

Most job figures are hiring thresholds. They still tell you what employers expect.

General office work. The US federal qualification standard for clerk-typist and office automation jobs asks for 40 WPM, measured on a five-minute sample with three or fewer errors, and a 2026 federal job posting we checked quotes it word for word. Five minutes at 40 WPM is about 1,000 characters, so three errors is roughly 99.7% clean text. The speed is modest; the accuracy is not. Data transcriber jobs ask for 20 or 25 WPM depending on grade.

Indian government jobs. The SSC's clerical typing test asks for 35 WPM in English or 30 in Hindi over 10 minutes, which it equates to 10,500 and 9,000 key depressions per hour. Our SSC CHSL practice test runs that format.

Data entry. Measured in keystrokes per hour (KPH) rather than WPM; Wikipedia notes many jobs ask for 8,000 or 10,000, roughly 27 to 33 WPM. The SSC's data entry test asks for 8,000 key depressions per hour in most departments and 15,000 for the Comptroller and Auditor General's office. Accuracy with numbers and punctuation is the whole job, and our exam practice pages cover these formats.

Transcription. Wikipedia's summary of the literature gives 43 to 80 WPM for professional typists, with some positions requiring 80 to 95. Accuracy matters more than speed there, because every error in a transcript is a correction someone else pays for.

Court reporting. This is a different machine. Court reporters write on a stenotype, and the National Court Reporters Association's RPR certification tests 180, 200 and 225 WPM in five-minute dictations, at 95% accuracy on each. Our court stenographer practice page covers the typed transcription side.

Programming. Most of a programmer's keystrokes go on symbols, navigation and short identifiers, with long pauses between bursts, and prose WPM barely predicts any of that. More in touch typing for programmers.

What is the average typing speed on a phone?

The average typing speed on a phone is about 36 WPM: 36.2 in Palin's study, with 2.3% of characters left wrong. Against Dhakal's 51.56 on physical keyboards, from volunteers recruited the same way, that's about 70% of keyboard speed. The authors put it as roughly 15 WPM slower.

How you hold the phone matters. Two-thumb typists were fastest at 38.0 WPM; one-finger typists averaged 29.2. Autocorrect users were faster, at 43.4 WPM. People who used only word prediction averaged 32.8, below the 34.8 of people using no aids, and gesture (swipe) typists averaged 32.2, though the authors note the swipe samples were small.

We treat phones separately. A touch-screen result records whether autocorrect was used, an autocorrect replacement counts as one keypress, and phone results stay off the public leaderboards.

Many people plug a physical keyboard into a phone or tablet, which is why the exam pages here work that way too.

Laptop versus desktop matters less than people expect. Dhakal's timing data singles out rollover, pressing the next key before releasing the last: 25% of keystrokes on average, 40 to 70% among fast typists, on any keyboard that registers overlapping keys. More on that in the keyboards article.

Is 40 WPM a good typing speed?

Yes. A target that makes sense for most adults is 40 WPM at 97% accuracy on a one-minute test. That's the US federal bar for typing jobs, above the 33 of Karat's office users, and enough for everyday work without thinking about it. It sits about 0.6 standard deviations below Dhakal's volunteer mean, which says more about those volunteers than about you.

60 WPM at the same accuracy is about 0.4 standard deviations above Dhakal's mean, at the bottom of the trained-typist range and a realistic base for transcription work. 80 is about 1.4 standard deviations above it. Past 100, you're among the small group the study describes as reaching over 120.

Compare against the right crowd and the same test length. Short tests tend to give higher numbers than long ones, because nobody holds a sprint pace, so a 50 over two minutes can be the better result than a 60 over 15 seconds. Accuracy is the other half; what typing accuracy really measures explains why 97% beats 90% by more than it looks. To find your own number, take the 1-minute typing test three times and keep the median.

If you want to raise the number, the 40 to 80 WPM practice plan is the plan we'd follow ourselves, and the practice drill builds from the keys you miss.

Frequently asked questions

What is the average typing speed for adults?

About 40 WPM, with most people between 30 and 60. Ordinary office users in a lab averaged 33 copying text; self-selected online volunteers in the largest study averaged 52.

Do younger people type faster?

On phones, yes: Palin's data falls from 39.6 WPM among teens to 26.3 in the 50s. On keyboards, Salthouse found skilled older typists kept their speed by reading further ahead.

What typing speed do employers ask for?

Usually 40 WPM for office and clerical roles, with very few errors. Data entry is measured in keystrokes per hour, commonly 8,000 to 10,000.