Average typing speed by age

The phone study was published in 2019. Its volunteers copied English sentences on their own phone, with autocorrect, word suggestions and swipe typing allowed, and a word was counted as five characters^[1]. Speed fell with every decade of age. Teenagers were the fastest, even though they were not the group who said they spent the most time typing on a phone.

How you hold the phone matters as much as age. Over 82% of the volunteers typed with two thumbs, which was the fastest way, at 38 words per minute; typing with the index finger of one hand averaged 26.7^[1].

The largest study of keyboard typing, published in 2018, recorded 136,857,600 keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers who copied sentences on a typing website^[2]. They averaged 51.6 words per minute, with a spread of about 20.2 either side. Typing on a phone was, on average, about 15 words per minute slower than this^[1].

The study does not split keyboard speed by age, and its volunteers were mostly young adults who had come looking for a typing test, so they are probably a little faster than people in general. It does show how wide the range is: the slowest tenth typed under about 26 words per minute, the fastest tenth over about 78, and the fastest typists passed 120^[2].

The keyboard study compared its fastest tenth, who averaged 89.56 words per minute, with its slowest tenth. Three things stood out^[2].

• Rhythm. The fastest typists pressed a key about every 120 ms, very evenly; the slowest took over 480 ms between keys.
• Overlap. The fastest pressed the next key before letting go of the last one in 49.9% of key pairs, the slowest in 7.6%.
• Fingers. The fastest group said they used about 8.4 fingers, the slowest about 5.3.

Two things did not matter much. How long a key was held down hardly changed between fast and slow typists, at about 116.2 ms on average. And people who had taken a typing course were only about 5 words per minute faster than those who had not^[2]. Speed comes from moving smoothly from one key to the next, more than from pressing each key fast.

Court reporters write down speech as it is spoken, on a stenotype: a machine on which several keys pressed together spell a whole syllable or word. To earn the Registered Professional Reporter certificate of the National Court Reporters Association, a reporter takes down three five-minute passages, at 180, 200 and 225 words per minute, with at least 95% accuracy on each^[3]. Those speeds are only possible because each stroke writes more than one letter.

Guinness World Records keeps records for short bursts rather than for words per minute. The fastest time to type the alphabet on a keyboard is 3.25 seconds, set in February 2024^[4]. A burst like that shows how fast fingers can move over a known sequence; it says little about typing ordinary text, where you have to read, think and correct.

On phones, the fastest volunteers in the large study passed 80 words per minute, while three in four stayed below 43.98^[1].

Words differ in length, so typing tests do not count real words. Both studies on this page, like most typing tests, count every five characters as one word, and divide by the minutes taken^[2]. A speed in words per minute is therefore a speed in characters per minute divided by five.

Tests differ in what they do with mistakes. Raw speed counts everything you typed; net speed counts only what you typed correctly, so it reads lower for anyone who makes errors. Our test shows net speed first, counting only words typed correctly with their spaces, and gives the raw speed beside it. A score from a site that reports raw speed is not directly comparable with ours.

The length of the test changes the result too. Our default test lasts 60 sec, and longer runs of 180 sec or more show whether you can keep a speed up rather than reach it for a moment. That is why a result from a short test and one from a long test should not be compared with each other.

A phone keyboard has small keys under your thumbs, no feel of a key edge and no home row to rest on, so every letter needs a look or a guess. Phones also fix some of that for you: the volunteers in the phone study could use autocorrect and word suggestions, and still left more mistakes uncorrected than the keyboard volunteers, 2.34% against 1.17%^[1]. Correcting a word on a phone is slow, so people leave more of them.

• On a computer, around 51.6 words per minute is average for people who take typing tests.
• On a phone, expect to be slower than on a keyboard, and faster with two thumbs than with one finger.
• Accuracy counts too: the keyboard volunteers left about 1.167% of characters wrong, the phone volunteers about 2.34%.
• A test of a minute or less measures a burst. Longer tests, such as three or five minutes, show the speed you can keep up.

Our typing test counts words the same way as the studies, as five characters, and compares an English result on a physical keyboard with the keyboard study. The guide to typing faster explains how to practise without losing accuracy.

Reading is much faster than typing: see reading speed for what research says about words per minute when you read.