Typing Test

How the typing test works

Choose a length — 30 seconds, 1, 2 or 5 minutes — and either Words (common lowercase words, easiest on a phone) or Sentences (short original sentences with capitals and punctuation). Click or tap the box under the text and start typing: the clock starts on your first keystroke, not when the page loads. Letters turn teal when they are right and red when they are wrong. A space moves you on to the next word, so a skipped letter only costs that one word instead of pushing everything after it out of line. You can backspace to fix mistakes at any time.

When time runs out you get a score card. Your score is also written into the page address, and Challenge a friend shares a link that opens the same text and length with your score shown on top. Everything runs in your browser; what you type is never sent anywhere.

How WPM and accuracy are calculated

Characters are everything in your typed text, spaces included, and a “word” is the standard five characters, so long and short words are treated fairly. Errors are the uncorrected ones: wrong, extra or skipped letters still in your text when the timer ends; each one takes a word per minute off your speed. Net WPM never goes below zero. Mistakes you fix no longer count as errors — they already cost you time — but they do count against accuracy, which looks at every letter, space and punctuation key you pressed (Backspace is not counted). Accuracy is rounded down, so 100% always means no mistakes at all.

Worked example

In a 1-minute test you type 260 characters including spaces and leave 4 wrong letters in the text. Along the way you pressed 268 character keys, 260 of them right the first time. Gross speed is 260 ÷ 5 = 52 words in 1 minute = 52 WPM. Net speed is 52 − 4 ÷ 1 = 48 WPM. Accuracy is 260 ÷ 268 = 97.0%, shown as 97%. That is the example score card above. The same typing rate over a 30-second test — 130 characters with 2 errors — gives the same result, because everything is divided by half a minute: gross 52 WPM, net 52 − 4 = 48 WPM.

What is a good typing speed?

We don’t show a percentile, because there is no public dataset of scores for a test like this one to rank you against. Instead your score card places you next to these published figures:

• 52 WPM was the average of 168,000 volunteers who took an online typing test on computer keyboards, in a 2018 study by researchers at Aalto University and the University of Cambridge. The fastest typed about 120 WPM, and professionally trained typists studied in the 1970s and ’80s typically reached 60–90 WPM.
• 36 WPM was the average of 37,370 volunteers typing on phones in a 2019 follow-up study; people typing with two thumbs averaged 38 WPM.
• 40 WPM is the typing speed the U.S. Office of Personnel Management’s qualification standard asks of federal clerk-typists.

Those studies used their own tests and scoring rules, so treat the comparison as a guide rather than a ranking. Your score card compares a phone or tablet result with the phone average, and a keyboard result with the keyboard average.

How to type faster

• Get accurate first. In the 168,000-person study the fastest typists also made the fewest mistakes. Here every error you leave costs a full word per minute.
• Keep your eyes on the text, not your hands. Looking down breaks your rhythm and hides mistakes until later.
• Let keys overlap. The same study found the fastest typists pressed the next key before releasing the last one on 40–70% of keystrokes.
• Practice little and often, and compare like with like: the same test length and text type each time. Use the 5-minute test to practice for a job test.

Want to test other skills? Try the reaction time test or the CPS test. To count the words in something you have written, use the word counter.