What Is a Good Typing Speed? WPM Benchmarks Explained
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The average adult types at roughly 40 words per minute. That figure gets quoted constantly, and on its own it is close to useless, because it averages together touch typists and people prodding at the keyboard with two fingers. What matters is where you sit relative to what you actually need.
Benchmarks that mean something
| Speed | Level | Who types at this rate |
|---|---|---|
| Under 20 WPM | Beginner | Hunt-and-peck typists, and anyone in their first week of learning touch typing. |
| 20–40 WPM | Below average | Self-taught typists who look at the keyboard. The largest single group. |
| 40–55 WPM | Average | Competent office workers. Enough for most jobs that involve typing incidentally. |
| 55–70 WPM | Good | Trained touch typists. The point where typing stops being a bottleneck on thinking. |
| 70–90 WPM | Fast | Writers, developers, support staff who type all day. Comfortably above hiring requirements. |
| 90–120 WPM | Very fast | Transcriptionists, court reporters using standard keyboards, competitive typists. |
| Over 120 WPM | Exceptional | A small minority, usually after years of deliberate practice. |
What employers actually ask for
Most job listings that mention typing speed at all ask for somewhere between 40 and 60 WPM. Data entry and administrative roles cluster near the top of that band, occasionally asking for 65. Transcription and captioning work is the genuine outlier, often requiring 75 or more with very high accuracy.
Two things are worth knowing about these requirements. The first is that they are usually specified with an accuracy floor, commonly 95 or 98 per cent, and the accuracy is the part candidates fail. The second is that most such tests are conducted on unfamiliar text under time pressure, so your practised speed on comfortable material will overstate your test result by roughly ten per cent.
Speed by age
Typing speed rises through the school years and then plateaus wherever a person’s habits leave it, which is why so many adults are stuck in the twenties and thirties.
| Age | Typical speed |
|---|---|
| 7–10 | 10–15 WPM |
| 11–13 | 20–30 WPM |
| 14–17 | 30–45 WPM |
| Adult, self-taught | 30–45 WPM |
| Adult, trained touch typist | 55–80 WPM |
The gap between the last two rows is the entire point. It is not explained by age, talent or hand size. It is explained by whether somebody spent a few weeks learning the correct method.
Why the number is smaller than you think
Words per minute is not counted in actual words. The standard convention defines one word as five characters, spaces included, because real words vary in length and character count is comparable across texts and languages.
So 60 WPM means 300 characters per minute, or five characters per second. Two figures usually get reported. Gross WPM ignores mistakes. Net WPM subtracts a penalty for each uncorrected error, and it is the only one that reflects usable output. A test result of 80 gross and 55 net describes someone who types fast and fixes a lot.
A practical way to place yourself: your sustained speed on ordinary prose over several minutes is a truer number than your best result on a fifteen-second burst. Short tests reward luck and familiar words.
Which number should you aim for
For most people the useful target is 60 to 70 WPM at 97 per cent accuracy. Below roughly 50, typing is slow enough that it interrupts your thinking: you lose the end of a sentence while your hands catch up. Above roughly 80, further gains stop mattering for ordinary work, because the limiting factor becomes how fast you can decide what to write.
The exception is anyone paid by throughput, such as transcriptionists and captioners, for whom every additional ten words per minute is directly money.
Take the speed test on this site on a few different days rather than once. Single results vary by ten per cent or more depending on the text, your fatigue and how recently you warmed up, and a single number is a poor basis for judging yourself.