Average Typing Speed: WPM by Age, Gender and Device

The average typist types about 52 words per minute ¹ on a computer keyboard and about 36 words per minute ² on a phone. Those are two large measured averages: an online keyboard study of 168,960 people ³ and a phone study of 37,370 volunteers. Neither sample is a random sample of adults. The keyboard sample is mainly young and largely trained ^{4 5}, so the average for all adults is probably somewhat lower. Speed also varies widely. Teenagers type fastest on phones, men and women type at about the same speed, and the way a test counts words can change the score.

This guide gives the figures behind those numbers, says where each comes from, and marks where a figure is weaker than it looks. For how speed is calculated, see how typing speed is measured. For the bigger picture, start with our typing speed overview.

Keyboard typists average about 52 words per minute, but the online figure runs high

A large keyboard study measured 136,857,600 keystrokes from 168,960 people who took an online typing test ³. Their average was 51.56 words per minute ¹, which is the figure behind "about 52" in this guide.

The two studies below are the main sources for the rest of this guide. Both are large, but both used volunteers who chose to take a typing test.

How the keyboard study was run

Each participant transcribed 15 English sentences ⁶, and most finished all of them ³. The authors also compared fast with slow typists, and slow typists left significantly more errors uncorrected ⁷. The full paper is open in the Cambridge repository, and it is the best place to check any figure in this guide.

The keyboard figure is high for the general public, for reasons covered in the section on online tests. The authors describe their sample as people "interested in testing and developing their typing skills" ⁸.

Typing speed spreads widely, and the fastest keyboard typists pass 120 WPM

An average hides a lot of variation. In the online keyboard study, the standard deviation was 20.2 words per minute around a mean of 51.56 ⁹. With a standard deviation that large, many typists sit well above or well below the mean.

The top of the range is high. The fastest typists in the online study reached 120 words per minute or more ¹⁰. Speed is also linked to training. Typists who had taken a typing course were on average about 5 words per minute faster than those who had not ¹¹, a gap the authors describe as relatively small.

Training is only part of the story. Even among typists with the same training, speeds spread by about 20 WPM ¹¹, which is why a single average says little about any one person.

To see where your own speed falls within these spreads, read what percentile your typing speed is. For what counts as a good score, see what is a good typing speed.

Phones are slower, at about 36 WPM, and two-thumb typing is the fastest method

The phone study covered 37,370 volunteers ² who typed in a web-based transcription task on mobile devices. Their average was 36.2 words per minute ². Three quarters of phone typists, 75 percent, typed below 43.98 words per minute ¹².

The authors summarize the gap in one sentence: with only one or two fingers, people type about 70 percent as fast on a phone as on a full keyboard ¹³. The method matters more than the device alone. Typing with two thumbs was the fastest way to enter text in the phone study, at a mean of 38.02 words per minute ¹⁴. For a deeper look at phone speed, see phone typing speed.

What the phone study measured

Participants read each sentence and memorized it before typing it ¹⁵, so the 36.2 figure measures transcription speed, not composing speed. Composing includes thinking, choosing words and correcting, so a person writing their own message will not type at the copying rate. The study's project page describes the test as supporting the main mobile operating systems and browsers, and it links the full dataset for anyone who wants to check the results.

Speech is faster than phone typing, and the gap is large

Speech changes the picture on phones. In a controlled study on an iPhone, English text entered by speech reached 153 words per minute, against the built-in keyboard's speed in the same study ¹⁶. Mandarin Chinese showed the same pattern, at 123 words per minute by speech against 43 with the Pinyin keyboard ¹⁷. The study used short phrases in a laboratory, and it counted the finished text without measuring the time spent editing a dictated draft afterwards ¹⁶. We return to speech in the section on reading and conversation.

Language experience is linked to phone speed

Language experience is linked to phone speed in the phone data. Native speakers of English were the fastest group by this measure, at 37.8 words per minute ¹⁸. Participants who never type in English were the slowest, at 25.6 ¹⁹. Both figures are self-reported, and they show an association rather than a cause. They are a reminder that a phone average depends on who is typing and in what language.

Teenagers type fastest on phones, and speed falls with age

Phone speed is highest in the teenage years and falls with age. Participants who were 10 to 19 years old typed the fastest of all groups, at a mean of 39.6 words per minute ²⁰. The youngest group, under 10 years old, was the slowest at 24.3 ²¹. The later groups were slower again: 36.5 for ages 20 to 29 ²², 32.2 for 30 to 39 ²³, 28.9 for 40 to 49 ²⁴ and 26.3 for 50 to 59 ²⁵.

The keyboard evidence on age is older and smaller, and it does not show the same decline. A 1984 study of typists aged 19 to 72 ²⁶ found that older typists were slower at tapping and reaction tasks but were not slower in speed of typing ²⁷. The study is small and dates from the 1980s ²⁷, so it cannot settle the question. It does show that the phone pattern is not a law that applies to all typing.

The phone data also cannot separate age from other differences between generations, such as how much time people spend on their phones ²⁸. The data are a single snapshot of people of different ages, not one group followed over time. For the question in full, see average typing speed by age.

Men and women type at nearly the same speed

The phone study compared men and women directly. The authors also analyzed a U.S. subsample of 1,475 participants ²⁹. In that subsample, women averaged 34.6 words per minute ³⁰ and men averaged 37.4 ³¹. That gap is only a few words per minute, and across the full sample both typed at about 36 WPM ³².

We did not find a keyboard study that reports speed by gender at this scale, so the gender answer rests on the phone data. For a direct answer, see do women type faster than men.

Online test averages overstate the population because frequent typists take them

Online tests attract people who want to measure or improve their typing. That shapes the averages in two ways.

First, the sample chooses itself. The keyboard study's authors describe their volunteers as people interested in testing and developing their typing skills ⁸. Seventy-two percent had taken a typing course ⁵. Training is linked to speed, with trained typists about 5 words per minute faster than untrained ones ¹¹. A sample that is mostly trained will show a higher average than the public.

Second, the sample is young. The mean age in the keyboard study was 24.5 years ³³. Phone speed is highest in the teenage years and falls with age (see the age section), so a young sample may also lift the keyboard average, although the keyboard evidence on age is thinner.

Neither effect is small enough to ignore. Use online test results to compare yourself with people who take online tests, not as a survey of everyone.

How a test counts words changes its score, so averages differ by test

A words-per-minute score depends on a convention. Mackenzie's note on text-entry speed defines a "word" as five characters, and that count includes spaces, punctuation, or other characters in the text ³⁴. Under that rule, the count of words is set by characters, not by the words a typist meant to write.

Tests also differ on where timing starts and stops, and on whether corrections and the final Enter keystroke count. Some tests report "net" words per minute. The State of Iowa's typing test, for example, deducts one point for each error ³⁵, and those scores will not match gross online scores. When you read a study, check which measure it uses before comparing it with another.

The practical rule is simple. Compare scores only when they come from the same kind of test, with the same text, the same error rule and the same timing. For a fuller comparison of test methods, see how typing speed is measured and typing research.

Reading and conversation run faster than the average keyboard typist

Typing is slow compared with speech. Adults read silently at an average of 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction, according to a meta-analysis of English reading studies ³⁶. Reading rates are lower for children, for older adults and for people reading in a second language ³⁷, so the figure is an average, not a target.

Conversation is also faster than typing. In large corpora of conversational telephone speech in English and Chinese, the overall average rate was 196 words per minute ³⁸. Speaking rate is not the same as dictation speed, but it shows the scale. Set against the keyboard average, silent reading of non-fiction is about 4.6 times faster ³⁹ and conversation about 3.8 times faster ⁴⁰. These ratios compare different samples, so read them as approximate.

Speech input is where the gap matters most in practice, but dictating text is not the same as talking. Composing by speech software ran at 8 to 15 words per minute in an earlier study ⁴¹, far below normal speaking speed. Speed depends on the recognizer and on how you correct errors. Yap, which we make, is an on-device dictation app for Mac and Windows, so we have a stake here. The comparison that matters for you is your own text. For that, see dictation vs typing and how accurate speech recognition is.

How to read these averages without misreading them

Five habits will keep you from drawing the wrong conclusion from a typing average.

1. Match the device. A phone average and a keyboard average come from different samples and different tasks. Compare a phone score with phone data, and a keyboard score with keyboard data.
2. Match the test. Check how the test counts words and errors before comparing two scores. A gross score and a net score are not the same measure.
3. Use the group that fits you. For a teenager or a person in their fifties, the age group is a better reference than the overall average. The phone data give means for each ten-year group from 10 to 59.
4. Treat the online keyboard figure as a high reference. Its volunteers were people interested in typing, and 72 percent had taken a course ⁵, so it describes practicing typists more than the general public.
5. Separate typing from drafting. Dictation can be faster than typing for a first draft, but the time spent correcting it belongs in the comparison. Composition by speech in an earlier study was far below normal speaking speed.

Where to go next

If you want a single number to check your own speed against, start with what is a good typing speed, then read how to type faster if you want to raise it. Touch typing, which is typing without looking at the keys, is covered in touch typing, and the guide on phone typing speed goes deeper on mobile.