The average typing speed is roughly 40 words per minute; among people who take online typing tests it's about 52 WPM. 60–80 WPM is good, and 100+ is professional territory.
Test Your Typing SpeedWPM uses a standard convention: one "word" equals five characters, so scores are comparable across tests and languages. Where you land:
| Level | Typical WPM | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner / hunt-and-peck | 10–25 | Eyes on the keyboard; typing is the bottleneck for everything |
| Average | ~40 | Functional for everyday email and documents |
| Good | 60–80 | Comfortably above average; typing rarely slows you down |
| Fast | 80–100 | Professional level; thoughts flow to the screen |
| Competitive | 100–150+ | Top tier of typing-test takers; contest territory |
Sources: a 2018 study of 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 volunteers on an online typing test measured an average of ~52 WPM (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson & Oulasvirta, CHI 2018); earlier lab research on everyday computer users found ~40 WPM for transcription and ~33 WPM when composing text (Karat et al., CHI 1999). Online-test samples skew toward people who practice, which is why the two averages differ.
Commonly cited working ranges from industry surveys — treat them as rough guidance rather than job requirements; individual speeds vary widely with experience and practice:
| Role | Typical WPM |
|---|---|
| Office worker (general) | ~40 |
| Data entry clerk | 50–60 |
| Software developer | 60–70 (lower on symbol-heavy code) |
| Writer / journalist | 70–80 |
| Transcriptionist | 80–100 |
| Competitive typist | 120+ |
Developers reading their 60–70 with suspicion: code WPM genuinely runs 30–50% below prose because of symbols and shifted characters — see code typing practice for why, and how to train it.
A WPM score without its accuracy is close to meaningless: 80 WPM at 90% accuracy produces slower, messier real-world output than 65 WPM at 98%. When you benchmark yourself, record both numbers — and if the gap between your raw and net WPM is large, work through the typing accuracy test before chasing speed. When you're ready to improve, the 8-week guide to typing faster lays out the practice plan.