Average Typing Speed: WPM Benchmarks and a Calculator

By Eduard-Dragos Condria · Published October 10, 2026 · 6 min read

What counts as slow, average and fast typing, with figures from a 168,000-person study and a words-per-minute calculator.

"What is a good typing speed?" has a reasonably firm answer, because one large study measured it directly. This page gives the benchmarks, explains how speed is counted, and includes a calculator for converting characters and time into words per minute.

The benchmark data

Dhakal and colleagues (2018) recorded 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers who typed on their own keyboards. They found:

• Average speed: about 52 WPM (standard deviation about 20 WPM).
• Average uncorrected error rate: about 1.2%.
• The slowest 10% typed at less than about 26 WPM; the fastest group exceeded about 78 WPM; the quickest typists in the dataset reached 120 WPM or more.

Earlier studies of typewriter-era typists observed around 60–75 WPM, and typing on a flat touchscreen is much slower, around 30 WPM in the work the 2018 paper cites.

Speed bands

These bands are the ones our typing speed test uses. They are approximations built on the data above, not an official standard.

How WPM is counted

• A "word" is 5 characters, including spaces and punctuation. This is a long-standing convention so that speeds do not depend on word length.
• Gross WPM counts everything typed. Net WPM counts only correct characters, which is fairer: mistyped characters add nothing.
• Accuracy is the percentage of typed characters that are correct.

Formula: WPM = (characters ÷ 5) ÷ minutes.

Other languages and scripts

The 5-character convention suits English and similar languages. Chinese and Japanese are typed through input methods, and Korean and Thai have many characters per word, so these languages are usually measured in characters per minute against their own scales. Our test applies separate reference curves for them.

What speed do you need?

For most office work, 40–60 WPM at high accuracy is plenty, because thinking and composing take more time than typing. Faster typing helps transcription, coding and writing at length, and it reduces effort. A modest improvement in accuracy often saves more time than a speed gain, because corrections cost time.

Improving your speed

See how to type faster for a method based on accuracy first, then speed. Take the test under the same conditions each time, with the same keyboard.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good typing speed for a job?

Requirements vary and employers set their own. For general office work, 40–60 WPM with high accuracy is usually enough. Specialised transcription or data-entry jobs may ask for more. Check the specific job listing.

Is 40 WPM slow?

It is below the 52 WPM average found in the largest study, but well within the normal range and perfectly usable for most work. Accuracy matters at least as much as speed.

Is 100 WPM fast?

Yes. It is well above the roughly 78 WPM threshold for the fastest tenth of typists in the 2018 data. Reaching it consistently takes sustained practice.

Why does my speed differ between tests?

Passage difficulty, punctuation, capital letters, keyboard, mood and warm-up all change the result. Compare results from the same test and keyboard, and take the average of several attempts.

Does the keyboard layout matter?

QWERTY users type fastest on QWERTY, and the evidence that other layouts make you faster in the long run is weak. Switching costs weeks of lost speed, so it is rarely worth doing for speed alone.

Sources

• Dhakal, V., Feit, A. M., Kristensson, P. O., & Oulasvirta, A. (2018). Observations on typing from 136 million keystrokes. Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. (project page)
• Salthouse, T. A. (1986). Perceptual, cognitive, and motoric aspects of transcription typing. Psychological Bulletin, 99(3), 303–319.