What is a good typing speed? Is 40, 60, 80 or 100 WPM good?

Typing speed chart: where each speed ranks

The keyboard column is our arithmetic on the largest typing study published so far; the phone column uses its mobile follow-up. Both are explained next, and neither should be read to the decimal point.

Where these benchmarks come from

In 2018, researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge (Dhakal and colleagues) analysed 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 online volunteers. The mean was 51.56 WPM with a standard deviation of 20.2. The paper itself marks two cut-offs. Its "fast typists" are the top 10%, above about 78 WPM. Its slow typists are the bottom 10%, under about 26 WPM.

The paper doesn't publish a full percentile table, so we estimated the rest from the mean and standard deviation. The estimate passes a sanity check: a normal curve with those numbers puts the 90th percentile at 77.4 WPM and the 10th at 25.7, almost exactly the paper's own 78 and 26. The authors note a slight positive skew, which means the fast tail is a little longer than a normal curve predicts, so treat the top rows as conservative.

Two caveats before you compare. These volunteers were young and typed a lot, so they are keener than the general public, and beating half of them is a better result than beating half of everyone. The study also computed speed from the length of the typed text, which sits closer to raw WPM than to the net WPM our results screen leads with. If you compare a net score against these figures, you're giving away a few words. Why the formulas differ is in why your WPM differs between sites.

For phones, the same group's 2019 study (Palin and colleagues) measured 37,370 people typing on touch screens: a mean of 36.17 WPM, standard deviation 13.22. Three quarters typed below 43.98 WPM, and the fastest went over 80.

Is 40 WPM good?

Yes, for everyday and office use. It meets the 40 WPM standard US federal clerical jobs use, and it's faster than roughly 28% of the study's keen volunteers, so you're below the enthusiast middle but above the bar most employers set. At 95% accuracy or better it's a working speed; at 90% you lose too many words to corrections for it to count.

Is 50 WPM good?

Yes. 50 WPM sits almost exactly at the research mean of 51.56, which makes it a solid average among people who type every day. With accuracy at 97% you'll pass any typing requirement short of transcription work.

Is 60 WPM good?

60 WPM is good: faster than about two thirds of the volunteers and enough for the 55 to 60 net WPM that some legal and transcription postings ask for. 60 WPM with 98% accuracy is a strong result, because at that accuracy most of your words come out clean the first time.

Is 70 WPM good?

70 WPM is very good, faster than roughly four in five keen typists. It is above every typing requirement we found in official postings except court reporting, which is a different skill done on a stenotype machine.

Is 80 WPM good?

80 WPM is excellent and just past the study's "fast typist" line of about 78, so you're in the top tenth. Accuracy matters more here than at 40: the study's fast typists left only 0.71% of errors uncorrected, against 1.78% for the slowest group.

What is the top 1% of typing speed?

About 100 WPM. On the normal-curve estimate, the 99th percentile of the 2018 volunteers is 98.6 WPM, and because the real distribution leans slightly toward the fast end, the true cut-off is probably a little above that. Call it 100 WPM sustained for a minute with high accuracy.

Is 100 WPM good, then? It is a top 1% speed on a keyboard and far beyond any job requirement for typing prose.

Is 120 WPM good? It's rarer still. The curve puts 120 at roughly one typist in 3,000, though that estimate is the least reliable figure on the page, since tails are where real data departs from a smooth curve. The paper only says its fastest typists reached 120 WPM or more. At that speed, test length matters a lot: a 120 on a 15-second test and a 120 held over five minutes are different achievements, and our post on the fastest typists in the world covers how records handle that.

How accuracy changes the answer

Speed without accuracy is a misleading number. A common word plus its space is about six keystrokes. If errors land at random, the chance a word comes out clean is accuracy to the sixth power:

At 90%, almost half your words need fixing, and each fix costs a backspace, a retype and a pause. That's why we treat 95% as the floor for calling a speed good and 97% as the target. A 60 at 98% is a better result than a 70 at 90%, and on a net-WPM test it usually produces the higher score anyway. The full arithmetic is in what typing accuracy really measures.

Employers build accuracy into the standard. The US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) measures its 40 WPM on a five-minute sample with three or fewer errors. A five-minute sample at 40 WPM is 1,000 characters, so if each error is a single character, three errors leaves about 99.7% of the finished text right.

Good for what? Official typing requirements

The numbers employers actually write down are lower than most people expect:

So the honest answer to "is my speed good?" depends on what it's for. 40 WPM at high accuracy covers the large majority of typing requirements. 60 covers nearly all of them. Job-by-job detail, with the source for each figure and keystroke-per-hour conversions, is in typing speed requirements by job.

What is a good typing speed on a phone?

Lower than on a keyboard, and that's expected. Palin's phone typists averaged 36 WPM, about 15 WPM slower than keyboard typists recruited the same way. On a phone, 40 WPM is above average, 44 WPM puts you in the top quarter, and anything over 60 is rare. Typing with two thumbs averaged 38 WPM against 29 for one finger, and people who used autocorrect averaged 43.4 WPM. Practical settings are in how to type faster on your phone.

Don't compare a phone score with a keyboard chart. Our results screen labels phone results, and they stay off the public leaderboards, for that reason.

How to get a number worth comparing

One test is a noisy sample. Take the 1-minute typing test three times and keep the median, not the best. Look at accuracy before speed. If it's under 95%, your good number is the speed you can hold at 97%, which is usually a few WPM lower and far more useful.

If the number is for a job application, take the 5-minute test instead. Five minutes is the length OPM and several state employers use, and short tests read higher than long ones for nearly everyone.

Once our own results reach 10,000 in a given mode, length and language, the results screen shows your percentile against real results from this site. Until then it shows a labeled reference drawn from millions of results on public typing tests, and it always names the group you're compared with.

Frequently asked questions

What WPM is top 1%?

About 100 WPM on a keyboard, held for at least a minute with high accuracy. That is our estimate from the 2018 study of 168,960 typists, whose mean was 51.56 WPM with a standard deviation of 20.2.

Is 70 WPM with two fingers good?

Yes. In a 2016 Aalto University study of 30 everyday typists, people who didn't touch type averaged 58.9 WPM against 57.8 for touch typists. Speed depended more on pressing each key consistently with the same finger than on using all ten. The cost of two-finger typing is that you look at the keyboard more.

How fast should a 20 year old type?

There's no age-specific standard for keyboards. On phones, Palin's study found 20 to 29 year olds averaged 36.5 WPM. On a keyboard, 40 WPM at 95% accuracy is a sensible bar at any age, and 50 puts you at the research average.

What about 60 WPM with 98% accuracy?

Yes, it's a strong result. It beats about two thirds of keen typists, and at 98% accuracy roughly nine words in ten come out right first time, so your net and raw scores stay close together.