What Is a Good Typing Speed? Average WPM Explained
Around 40 words a minute is typical for someone comfortable with a keyboard. 60 to 70 is genuinely fast, and sustained speeds above 90 are rare. But the number on its own is close to meaningless without the accuracy beside it.
What the numbers actually mean
Words a minute is not counted in words. The convention is that a "word" is five characters including spaces, so typing 200 characters in a minute is 40 words a minute regardless of whether those characters formed long words or short ones. This is why your speed on ordinary prose and your speed on a list of long technical terms come out closer than they feel.
The figure most sites report is net speed: correct characters only, or gross speed with errors deducted. It matters which, because a run typed at 70 words a minute with one mistake every line is slower in practice than a steady 55 with none — every error costs you the time to notice it, delete it and retype.
| Words a minute | What it means |
|---|---|
| Under 20 | Hunting and pecking, looking at the keyboard |
| 20–35 | Learning touch typing; the fingers know roughly where to go |
| 35–45 | Typical for someone comfortable at a keyboard |
| 45–60 | Comfortably above average; writing keeps pace with thinking |
| 60–80 | Fast. Common among people who write for a living |
| 80–100 | Very fast, and usually the result of deliberate practice |
| Over 100 | Rare, and almost always sustained only in short bursts |
Accuracy is the number that moves your speed
Most people trying to get faster try to move their fingers faster, and plateau. The reliable route is the other way round: type accurately at a speed you can hold, and the speed rises on its own as the movements stop needing thought.
The arithmetic is unkind to errors. Noticing a mistake, reaching for backspace and retyping costs roughly three keystrokes’ worth of time — so a 2% error rate is not a 2% slowdown, it is closer to 6%. At 5% errors you are losing around a seventh of your effort to correction.
Why one number hides the problem
An average is the wrong shape for diagnosing typing, because typing speed is not evenly distributed across your hands. Almost everyone is fluent on the home row and the common letters, and slow on a handful of specific keys — often the outer reaches: P, Q, Z, the semicolon. Those few keys drag the average down while the rest of the keyboard looks fine.
That is why a speed alone does not tell you what to practise. What tells you is a per-key record: which letters you miss, which you hesitate on, and what those few are costing you.
Try it
Take a one-minute typing test to see where you are, or drill the keys costing you the most time.
More: How to type faster · Practice for beginners · Typing speed by age · Common typing mistakes · The home row explained