What is the average typing speed?

6 minute read

"Average typing speed" is one of the most searched questions about typing, and most answers online repeat a number without saying where it came from. The figures on this page come from two peer-reviewed studies by researchers at Aalto University in Finland and the University of Cambridge. Between them they cover more than 200,000 people.

The study behind the number

In 2018, Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta published Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes at CHI, the main academic conference on human-computer interaction. Volunteers took a free online typing test. Each person copied 15 English sentences "as quickly and accurately as possible", and every keypress was logged.

• 168,960 participants were included after the researchers removed incomplete and unreliable sessions.
• They produced 136,857,600 keystrokes, about 810 per person.
• Volunteers came from 218 countries.

Average typing speed on a keyboard

The mean speed was 51.56 WPM, with a standard deviation of 20.20 WPM. That large spread means "average" covers a very wide range of typists:

For context, the Cambridge summary of the study notes that professionally trained typists in the 1970s and 1980s typically reached 60 to 90 WPM.

How accurate is the average typist?

• On average, 1.17% of characters were left wrong in the final text.
• Corrections made up 6.3% of all keypresses. Most people fix mistakes as they go.
• The time between keypresses averaged 239 milliseconds. Fast typists averaged around 120 ms, and slow typists over 480 ms.

Speed and accuracy went together. The researchers found that faster typists generally make fewer errors, not more.

Does a typing course make a difference?

72% of participants said they had taken a typing course. They averaged 54.35 WPM, compared with 49.00 WPM for those who had not, which is a small difference. The authors describe the two groups as showing very similar typing behaviour. We look at what does separate fast and slow typists in what makes fast typists fast.

Average typing speed on a phone

A 2019 follow-up by the same research group, How do People Type on Mobile Devices?, studied 37,370 volunteers typing on their phones.

The authors estimate that mobile typing is about 15 WPM slower than typing on a physical keyboard. People who used autocorrection were faster, while people who relied only on word suggestions were slightly slower (32.8 WPM) than people who used neither (34.8 WPM). The authors note that people chose their own settings, so these differences may partly reflect who uses each feature.

What these numbers do not tell you

• The people were volunteers on a typing website. They were younger than the general population: the average age in the 2018 study was 24.5, and 75% were between 11 and 30. People who choose to take a typing test may also type more than average.
• Copying is not composing. Participants copied sentences they could see. Writing your own thoughts is usually slower, because you also have to decide what to say.
• The text was English. In the mobile study, native English speakers averaged 37.8 WPM against 25.6 WPM for people who never type in English.

How do you compare?

The study used real sentences with capitals and punctuation, so the closest comparison on Keystride is the Standard test: one minute, Everyday 1k words, punctuation on. Take it three times and use your average, then compare it with the table above. Our guide to a good typing speed explains what each level feels like in daily use.