What Is a Good Typing Speed?

Every typist eventually asks the same question: is my number good? The honest answer is that "good" depends entirely on what you type all day — but the ranges are well established, and knowing where you sit tells you whether practice is worth your time or whether you've already crossed the line where faster stops mattering.

The short answer

The average computer user types around 35–45 WPM. Above 50 WPM, typing stops being a bottleneck for ordinary office work. At 70 WPM you're distinctly fast — quicker than the large majority of people you'll ever share a document with. Past 100 WPM you're in the top few percent of typists, and further gains are mostly a hobby rather than a productivity upgrade. Professional typists — transcriptionists, captioners, court reporters using standard keyboards — commonly work in the 70–90 WPM range, with the best sustaining more.

Two caveats before you compare yourself to those numbers. First, they describe sustained, accurate typing — a 15-second sprint at 95 WPM with sloppy accuracy is not the same skill as holding 70 WPM through a full page. Second, scores vary by test: common short words score faster than text full of punctuation and rare words, so the fair comparison is always against your own history on the same test, not against a number someone posted from a different one.

Good for what, exactly?

Typing speed only matters up to the speed of the task feeding it. That's why the useful question isn't "what's a good speed?" but "what's a good speed for the work I do?"

• Email, chat, and browsing: 40 WPM is genuinely fine. Most casual writing is limited by deciding what to say, not by fingers.
• Office and admin work: 50–60 WPM keeps typing invisible. Below that, long documents and heavy email days start to feel like typing tasks instead of thinking tasks.
• Writing-heavy roles — journalists, support agents, students in exam season: 60–80 WPM pays off daily, because these jobs regularly involve transcribing thoughts that are already fully formed and waiting on the fingers.
• Transcription and captioning: natural speech runs around 130–160 words per minute, faster than almost anyone types. That's why professional transcription is built around playback control and why 70+ WPM with excellent accuracy is the practical entry bar.
• Programming: raw WPM matters less than symbol fluency and accuracy — a topic big enough that we wrote a separate guide on it.

Why the average is lower than you'd guess

People who seek out typing tests are already unusual — they care about typing, they practice, and they skew the numbers you see posted online. The broader population includes everyone who types with two fingers while watching their hands, everyone who mostly types on phones, and everyone who never had a reason to improve past "functional." Against that field, 45 WPM without looking at the keyboard is already above average, and the leap from 40 to 60 moves you further up the distribution than the leap from 80 to 100 does.

Accuracy changes what your number means

A speed figure without an accuracy figure is nearly meaningless. Sixty WPM at 98% accuracy is a better real-world typist than 75 WPM at 90%, because every error in real work costs the wrong keystroke, the backspace, the retype, and a broken train of thought. When you compare your score to the benchmarks above, assume they mean clean typing — above roughly 97% accuracy. If your accuracy is below that, treat your effective speed as lower than the WPM figure shows, and train accuracy first; speed built on top of it sticks.

What should you aim for?

If you're below 40 WPM and type daily for work or study, getting to 60 is the single best return on practice time — it's very achievable within a couple of months of short daily sessions, and it upgrades every hour you spend at a keyboard. If you're at 60–70 already, be honest about your motive: pushing to 90 is a satisfying skill goal, but the practical gains shrink, because at that point you're usually waiting on your thoughts, not your hands. And if you're past 90, you're chasing mastery for its own sake — a perfectly good reason, as long as you know that's the game.

Find your real number

One test tells you very little — scores on identical tests swing by five WPM or more with warm-up, fatigue, and plain luck of the words. Take five or six 30-second runs across a couple of days, ignore the best and worst, and call the middle your real speed. That's the number worth comparing to the benchmarks — and the baseline worth beating next month.