What is a good typing speed?

Words per minute uses the standard five-character rule: every five characters you type, spaces included, count as one “word”. The Ninja Typing speed test uses the same rule. The levels below are anchored to the spread of speeds in the largest typing study,^[1] so each one tells you roughly where you stand among real typists.

The best evidence is a 2018 study by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge, which logged 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers. Their average speed was 51.56 WPM, with a standard deviation of 20.2. In other words, most people typed somewhere between about 30 and 70 WPM.^[1]

That figure comes with a caveat the authors state themselves. The volunteers came from a typing-test website: their average age was 24.5, 68% were in the United States, and 72% had taken a typing course.^[1] That is a younger and more practised group than adults in general, so the true population average is probably lower. The figure of 40 WPM quoted on many sites is plausible, but we could not find a primary study behind it, so we treat it as a rough rule of thumb, not a measurement.

Phones are slower. A follow-up study of 37,370 people typing on mobile devices found an average of 36.2 WPM, with 74% typing with both thumbs.^[3] If your test score comes from a phone, compare it to that figure, not the keyboard one.

Does touch typing make the difference? Less than you might expect. In the large study, people who had taken a typing course averaged 54.4 WPM against 49.0 for those who had not, a gap of about 5 WPM.^[1] A separate motion-capture study of 30 typists found self-taught typists could match trained touch typists. What fast typists shared was consistency: always using the same finger for the same key, preparing the next keystroke early, and keeping hand movement small.^[2] The fastest tenth in the large study used 8.4 fingers on average, against 5.3 for the slowest tenth.^[1] Touch typing builds exactly those habits, which is why the free Learn Typing course teaches it, but it is a means to consistency, not magic in itself.

Find your speed below. The percentage is how many of the 168,960 typists in the study you would be faster than, modelled from its average and spread.^[1] The model reproduces the paper's own cut-offs (26 WPM for the slowest 10%, 78 WPM for the fastest 10%), but treat the extremes as approximate. The typing test page explains the model in full.

Two kinds of number get quoted for jobs, and it pays to tell them apart. A few are official standards, published by the body that runs the test. Most are employer conventions: ranges that commonly appear in job postings, which no industry body sets and which vary from one employer to the next. Each card says which kind it is. Either way, the figure in the actual posting or exam notice is the one that counts.

Many sites publish a neat table of typing speed by age. We have not, because we could not find a credible study that measured it for children or for adults by age band, and an invented table is worse than none. Here is what the research does tell us:

On phones, teenagers are fastest. In the mobile study, 10- to 19-year-olds typed fastest of any age group, even though they reported spending less time on their phones than people in their twenties and thirties.^[3] On keyboards, practice matters more than age. The large keyboard study was mostly teenagers and young adults (average age 24.5) and still spread from under 26 to over 120 WPM.^[1] Speed within any age group varied far more than it did between groups.

For children, the practical advice is not to chase a number at all. Correct finger habits learned early are what turn into speed later. The zombie typing game and the home row lesson are good starting points.

Speed and accuracy are usually described as a trade-off. The data says otherwise. In the 168,960-person study, the fastest tenth of typists left 0.71% of characters wrong, against 1.78% for the slowest tenth, and corrected far fewer mistakes along the way.^[1] Fast typists are fast largely because they rarely stop to fix things.

Tests reward this too. Most report net WPM, which takes errors off your raw speed. The U.S. federal standard counts only samples with three or fewer errors in five minutes,^[4] and exams such as SSC CGL and CPCT may disable Backspace so a mistake cannot be undone. The habit to build is simple: slow down until you are accurate, then let speed grow on top.

For the full method, read our guide on how to type faster. To build consistent finger habits from the ground up, work through the free Learn Typing course in order. Each stage teaches the right finger for every key, then builds toward real words and sentences:

Numbers in square brackets refer to this list. Percentages marked “modelled” are our calculation from source 1's published average and standard deviation. Ranges marked “employer convention” are not from any single source; they are the ranges commonly seen in job postings, and we say so wherever they appear.