What is a good typing speed? WPM, accuracy and what jobs ask for

The number you are being compared with

When someone asks whether 45 words a minute is good, they need something to compare it with. The best yardstick I know comes from a study by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, presented at the CHI conference in 2018 as “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes” (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta). Volunteers copied short sentences in an online test, and the final dataset holds 136,857,600 keystrokes from 168,960 people.

The paper reports an average of 51.56 words per minute, with a standard deviation of 20.2. The fastest people in the data reach 120 words a minute or more. The authors also mark out the two ends: the fastest tenth of participants typed above about 78 words a minute, and the slowest tenth below about 26.

Your speed	Where it sits in the study
Under 26 WPM	The slowest tenth of participants
About 52 WPM	The average participant
Over 78 WPM	The fastest tenth
120 WPM or more	The very top of the dataset

The authors point out that their participants were self-selected: people who chose to sit a typing test online. Keep that in mind before you treat the average as everyone’s. It is also an English figure. Urdu and Arabic are counted differently, and I come back to them below.

How this site counts a word

Typing tests disagree partly because each counts a little differently, so here is exactly what our Typing Test does in English.

A word is five characters. That is the standard convention in text-entry research, and the CHI study uses it too: in its words, “one word consists of any five characters”. When you finish a word and press Space, the test compares it with the word it asked for. Only correct words count toward your speed: their letters, plus one for the space after each, divided by five and then by the minutes gone. A word with a slip in it adds nothing.

So two people who type the same number of keys in a minute can get very different scores. Every wrong word is typing time that earned nothing, and the result card counts those words for you.

Accuracy is the share of your keystrokes that matched the text at the moment you pressed them. Backspace itself is never counted as a keystroke, but the wrong letter you typed before deleting it already counted. Fix the slip before you press Space and the word still counts toward your speed. After Space, the word is final.

The clock starts with your first letter, so reading the first line before you begin costs you nothing. Besides words per minute and accuracy, the result shows correct characters a minute (spaces included), the number of correct and wrong words, and your best score for that language and length, which is kept in your browser.

What good accuracy looks like

Speed and accuracy get searched together, and accuracy is the one an employer notices first. In the CHI study, the average participant left 1.167% of the finished text wrong, and 90% of participants left under 2.66%. Most people, in other words, correct most of their mistakes.

That figure measures something different from our accuracy. The study counted errors still in the finished sentence; our accuracy counts every wrong keystroke, including the ones you deleted. A score of 96% here means four of every hundred keys you pressed were wrong when you pressed them, even if you caught every one.

The wrong-word count on the result tells you when to slow down. If it climbs past a handful in a minute, your fingers are ahead of your eyes. Speed built on wrong words does not count on this test, and it will not count in a job test either.

When a job asks for a number

Most searches for a “good typing speed” have a job behind them. The only reliable answer is the figure in that job’s advertisement, along with how the employer tests it.

The clearest published rule I have found is in US federal job advertisements on USAJOBS. A Secretary (Office Automation) posting from the US Army Recruiting Command says: “A qualified typist can type 40 words per minute based on a 5 minute sample with three or fewer errors.” A Clerk (Office Automation) posting from the Air Force Materiel Command asks for “a minimum of 40 WPM proficiency”, lets applicants self-certify it, and warns that anyone who leaves out their typing speed is ineligible.

Look at what that rule actually asks. The sample lasts five minutes, and three errors is the limit for all five. To check yourself against it, take the 5-minute test here and read the wrong-word count alongside the speed. The 10 Minute Typing Test is for exams that run longer, where the question is whether your pace holds after the first few minutes.

Data entry advertisements often quote keystrokes per hour (KPH) instead. Multiply your characters a minute by 60 for a rough hourly figure: 200 characters a minute is about 12,000 an hour. A data entry test made mostly of figures on a number pad measures a different skill from typing words, so a word test gives only a rough idea for those jobs.

For law school, the question comes from exams typed on a laptop against the clock. I have not found a law school that sets a minimum speed. What helps in a timed exam is typing fast enough that your hands never hold up your thinking, and accurately enough that you are not going back to fix things.

Programmers type brackets, symbols and long names that no word test asks for, so their speed on everyday words says little about their speed in an editor. For them the test is most useful as a check on one habit: whether they look down at the keys.

Typing speed in Urdu and Arabic

The five-character word was made for English. Urdu and Arabic letters join, short vowels may or may not be written, and a word’s length on screen says little about the effort of typing it. So our Urdu Typing Test and Arabic Typing Test count whole correct words per minute. A score in Urdu cannot be set against a score in English, and neither can be set against the 51.56 average from the CHI study, which was measured on English sentences.

Two rules keep the count fair across keyboards. An Arabic keyboard types ي ك ه where Urdu writes ی ک ہ, and the test treats each pair as the same letter, so a keyboard is never marked wrong for being the one you own. Vowel marks (tashkeel), the tatweel stretch and the invisible joining characters are ignored when two words are compared.

If you have no Urdu keyboard on your computer, switch on English keys and type by sound: each Urdu letter sits on the English key that sounds like it, with Shift for the second letter of a pair, so t gives ت and Shift with T gives ٹ. A map of the keys shows under the box while you type.

Many people in Pakistan write Urdu in Latin letters in messages (“aap kaise hain”). Turning that into Urdu script is a different job from typing it, and Roman Urdu to Urdu does it for you.

Getting faster without getting sloppy

The CHI study also looked at what separates fast typists from slow ones. Two of its findings are useful in practice.

The first is fingers. Participants reported typing with anything from one or two fingers to all ten, and speed rose with the number of fingers used: fast typists averaged 8.4 fingers, slow typists 5.3. People who had taken a typing course were on average 5 words a minute faster than those who had not, which the authors call a relatively small difference.

The second is rollover: pressing the next key before you have let go of the last one. The authors found that slow typists use almost no rollover, while most fast typists use it for 40 to 70% of their keypresses, and that it is a strong predictor of speed (a correlation of 0.73). You will not notice yourself doing it. It shows up once your hands know where the next letter is without your eyes going to the keyboard.

What I would take from that for practice:

1. Keep your eyes on the screen. Looking down breaks the flow that rollover depends on.
2. Use all your fingers, even if it makes you slower for a week or two.
3. Practise with Sentences rather than Common words once the common words feel easy. Sentences have capitals and punctuation, as real writing does.
4. Take the length of test your exam or employer uses, and watch the wrong-word count before the speed.

An employer’s test runs for its full length, so practise at a pace you can hold to the end with few wrong words. A fast first minute that fades by the third will not pass a five-minute test.