5 minute typing test

Why employers time five minutes

Hiring screens are commonly timed at either one or five minutes. The one-minute version is quick to administer; the five-minute version is harder to game. Over five minutes everyone's opening burst gets diluted, small lapses in attention appear, and errors accumulate. What remains is roughly what you'd deliver at a desk.

That's also why your five-minute number is likely to be lower than your 1-minute result. Short tests generally read higher. If a job asks for a specific speed, practise at the length they'll test, and plan on the longer, lower figure.

Before you sit an employer's test

Ask three questions, because the answers change what a "40 WPM requirement" means:

1. How long is the test? A one-minute and a five-minute score from the same person aren't the same number.
2. Is it gross or net? Gross (raw) counts every keystroke; net removes errors. Our headline is net, and a strict version of it, so it's a conservative reading.
3. Is it random words or a passage with capitals and punctuation? Real passages are slower. If the test uses them, switch on punctuation in the ribbon above our test or rehearse on the quotes test.

Then run this test three times over a few days at the same time of day and keep the median. That's a number you can state with a straight face.

How five minutes of typing adds up

Your character count is your WPM times 25: five characters per standard word, five minutes.

The last column uses the average length of a word on our English 1,000-word list, 5.08 letters plus a space. One word you leave wrong costs about 0.24 WPM over five minutes, so a handful of slips barely dent the score; what drags it down is a steady trickle of them, or a long stall.

What the clock does during the test

The clock starts on your first keypress and keeps running until 300 seconds have passed. It doesn't stop if you pause, so a ten-second break to shake out your hands costs you directly: at 50 WPM it's about 42 characters you didn't type, or about 1.7 WPM off the final result. When time runs out, the test ends wherever you are, and the partial last word counts.

The text is shown three lines at a time and moves on as you type, so there's no scrolling to manage. Every result is recalculated on our server from the full keystroke log, the same way at every length.

Net WPM, defined in one sentence

Net WPM is the number of characters in words you typed completely correctly, including the space after each, divided by five and then by the minutes elapsed. Raw WPM uses every character you typed. Accuracy is correct character keypresses divided by all character keypresses, with backspace not counted and a corrected wrong key still counted as one mistake. The metrics page shows a worked example.

What a good five-minute speed is

The 2018 Aalto University and University of Cambridge study of about 168,000 volunteers reported a mean of 52 WPM, with most people between 30 and 60 WPM. The same release noted that trained typists of the 1970s and 1980s typically reached 60 to 90 WPM. Against those figures, 45 to 55 net over five minutes is solid everyday typing, and 60 or more with high accuracy stands out on most office applications. For speeds by job and device, see average typing speed by age, job and device.