The average typing test score is about 53 WPM. See your percentile, how the largest typing study compares, and what the fastest typists do differently.
Published October 30, 2026
The average typing test score is about 53 words per minute (WPM). That is the median of the 22,148 results Human Benchmark grades its typing test against, and the most common result is 40 to 49 WPM, where 16% of players land. The HumanRank typing test measures the same thing over 30 seconds: how many correct characters you type, counted in words of five characters.
So if you type 60 WPM, you beat most people. Past 90 WPM you are in the top 10%, and past 120 WPM you are in the top 1 or 2%.
Type 60 WPM or more and you beat 60% of players.
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Percentiles from the 22,148 results Human Benchmark grades typing scores against, read on October 30, 2026. Half of all results fall between 37 and 72 WPM. 1.7% are under 10 WPM, and a handful above 200 WPM are almost certainly not typed by hand.
In 2018, Vivek Dhakal, Anna Feit, Per Ola Kristensson and Antti Oulasvirta published the largest typing dataset to date: 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 people, each copying 15 English sentences on an online typing course site. The average was 51.56 WPM, with a standard deviation of 20 WPM. The slowest 10% typed under about 26 WPM, the fastest 10% over about 78 WPM, and a few reached 120 WPM or more.
The two sources agree almost exactly on the typical typist, around 52 to 53 WPM. They part ways at the top: on Human Benchmark, the fastest 10% start 13 WPM higher. A score page attracts people who come back to beat their best, while the study measured one sitting of 15 sentences. The middle of the curve is the number to trust.
Both figures are for physical keyboards. On phones, a separate Aalto study of 37,370 users measured an average of 36 WPM, so compare a phone score with phone scores only. For averages by country, see average typing speed by country.
The 2018 study compared the fastest 10% of its typists with the slowest 10%. The differences are not where most people would guess.
From Dhakal et al. (2018), Table 3. Correction keystrokes are presses of Backspace or Delete. Finger counts are self-reported.
Fast typists do not press keys faster: both groups hold each key for about a tenth of a second. The gap is between keys. Fast typists start the next keystroke before the last one is finished, and half of their keystrokes overlap, the next key going down before the previous one comes up. They also make fewer mistakes, so they lose less time fixing them.
Formal training mattered less than you might think. People who had taken a typing course were only 5 WPM faster on average, 54 against 49 WPM. In a 2016 motion-capture study of 30 typists by Anna Feit, Daryl Weir and Antti Oulasvirta, self-taught typists averaged 58.9 WPM and trained touch typists 57.8 WPM, and some people using only one or two fingers per hand typed over 70 WPM. What the fast ones shared was consistency: the same finger for the same key every time, little hand movement, and fingers moving to the next key early. Self-taught typists did spend about twice as much time looking at the keyboard.
Experience counts more than age here: older typists in a 1984 study by Timothy Salthouse kept their speed by reading further ahead, as we cover in at what age does your brain peak.
The best-known typing record belongs to Barbara Blackburn, who used the Dvorak layout instead of QWERTY. Guinness listed her at 150 WPM sustained for 50 minutes and 170 WPM over shorter tests, and she was later reported to have peaked at 212 WPM. Her listing was dropped from the book in the mid-1980s, and the 212 WPM figure was never clearly confirmed under official conditions.
Court reporters go much faster, but not on a normal keyboard. A stenotype machine writes whole syllables and words with chords of keys pressed together. In 2004, Mark Kislingbury set the Guinness record for realtime stenotype writing at 360 WPM with 97.23% accuracy.
For the best scores on HumanRank, see the typing test leaderboard or the best human benchmark scores across all ten tests.
About 52 to 53 WPM on a physical keyboard. The median of 22,148 Human Benchmark typing results is about 53 WPM (read October 30, 2026), and the average across 168,960 typists in a 2018 Aalto University study was 51.56 WPM.
60 WPM beats 60% of Human Benchmark results, 70 WPM beats 73%, 80 WPM puts you in the top 18%, 90 WPM in the top 11%, and 100 WPM in the top 6%.
It is below average. 40 WPM beats 29% of Human Benchmark results, while the median is about 53 WPM. It is enough for everyday typing, and most people can reach 50 to 60 WPM with practice.
Yes. 100 WPM is better than 94% of Human Benchmark results. In the 2018 Aalto study of 168,960 typists, the fastest 10% started at about 78 WPM, and only a few typed 120 WPM or more.
WPM counts a word as five characters, spaces included. Both Human Benchmark and HumanRank divide the number of correct characters by five, then by the time in minutes. Wrong characters do not count.
No. In a 2016 Aalto study of 30 typists, self-taught typists averaged 58.9 WPM against 57.8 WPM for trained touch typists, and some using one or two fingers per hand typed over 70 WPM. Consistent finger use and not looking at the keyboard matter more than the method.
