Surprising Typing Speed Statistics
A few typing speed numbers, gathered together, tend to be more useful than any single benchmark on its own. Here’s a collection worth knowing.
The general population average is lower than most people guess
Most studies and typing platforms put the general adult average somewhere around 38-40 WPM. People often assume the average is higher because the typists they notice, in videos or competitions, are the fast outliers, not a representative sample.
The gap between average and professional is enormous
Professional typists and transcriptionists commonly sit in the 65-75 WPM range, nearly double the general average, and elite competitive typists regularly exceed 120 WPM in sustained tests. The distance between “average” and “very fast” is much bigger than the distance between “slow” and “average.”
Accuracy drops faster than most people expect under pressure
A large share of typing errors, in casual testing, come from rushing rather than not knowing where a key is. It’s common for accuracy to drop several percentage points the moment a countdown timer becomes visible, even for otherwise steady typists, which is part of why consistency scoring reveals more than a single WPM number.
Typing speed doesn’t reliably correlate with age past young adulthood
Once someone reaches their twenties, typing speed tends to track with practice and habit far more than age. Long-time touch typists in their fifties and sixties commonly out-type younger people who never properly learned finger placement, regardless of how quickly younger generations grew up around screens.
Where you fit into these numbers
Benchmarks are only useful once you know your own number. Run a test to see exactly where you land against these figures.
