Fact · Typing and writing speed
36.2words per minute
In an online study of 37,370 volunteers typing on their own phones, the average speed was 36.2 words per minute, with 2.3 percent uncorrected errors.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“a large-scale dataset on mobile text entry collected via a web-based transcription task performed by 37,370 volunteers. The average typing speed was 36.2 WPM with 2.3% uncorrected errors.”
How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers, Kseniia Palin et al., Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI 2019), 2019, Abstract.
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/3338286.3340120)- What it measures
- Participants copied sentences shown on screen, so the figure is transcription speed, not composing speed.
- What it does not show
- Self-selected volunteers who chose to take a typing test, which may raise the average.
Source
Used to calculate
- At 36.2 words per minute, 60 characters (12 words of five characters) take about 19.9 seconds to type on a phone.
- Average phone typing in the Palin study, 36.2 words per minute, is about 30 percent slower than average desktop typing in the Dhakal study, 51.56 words per minute.
- If speech runs at 153 words per minute, it is about 4.2 times the 36.2 words per minute average of phone typists in the 2019 online study. The two studies have different participants and tasks, so this is arithmetic, not a measured comparison.
- At the 36.2 words per minute average of phone typists, 1,000 words take about 27.6 minutes to type.
- If 2.3 percent of the characters in the final text are uncorrected errors, the accuracy of that final text is 97.7 percent.
Cited on
- Typing Speed: Average WPM and How to Type FasterTopic
- Dictation for Work: Doctors, Lawyers, Writers, StudentsTopic
- Dictation and Voice to Text on iPhone and AndroidTopic
- Average Typing Speed: WPM by Age, Gender and DeviceGuide
- What Is Dictation? Voice Typing and Talk to Text ExplainedGuide
- What Is a Good Typing Speed? WPM Levels ExplainedGuide
- How Typing Speed Is Measured: WPM, Accuracy and TestsGuide
- Typing Speed Requirements for Jobs: WPM by RoleGuide
- Speaking Speed: How Many Words per Minute People TalkGuide
- Speaking vs Typing Speed: What the Research ShowsGuide
- Phone Typing Speed: How Fast People Type on PhonesGuide
- Writing Speed: Words per Minute by Hand and per DayGuide
- Text Expanders and Autocomplete: Type Less, Not FasterGuide
- Can you type faster than you talk?Question
- Do word suggestions actually save typing time?Question
- How can you type faster on a phone?Question
- Is 40 words per minute a good typing speed?Question
- Is swipe typing faster than tapping?Question
- Is typing faster than writing by hand?Question
- Typing accuracyGlossary