Does typing speed decrease with age?

Yes, but the clearest evidence comes from phones. In a large phone study, people aged 10 to 19 typed fastest, and speed fell group by group until the fifties. On a computer keyboard the evidence is thin and points in two directions, so a keyboard decline with age has not been measured in a large study.

Phone typing speed falls from the teens into the fifties

Phone speed is highest in the teenage years and lower by the fifties. Participants aged 10 to 19 averaged 39.6 words per minute on a phone ¹. Those aged 50 to 59 averaged 26.3 words per minute ². That is a drop of about 33.6 percent between the fastest and slowest of those groups ³.

In the full sample, each older group is slower than the one before it. The groups from under 10 to 50 to 59 are in the guide to average typing speed, which also covers how the phone test worked. The phone data are one large study, so treat the exact figures as the study's, not a universal rule for every phone or every person.

The phone study stops at 59, so later life is not measured

The phone study left out older participants from its age analysis. It excluded 0.2 percent of the sample, those older than 60 ⁴. That is a small share, but it means the study says nothing directly about typing speed after 60. Anyone who says phone typing falls steadily to 70 or 80 is going beyond the measured data.

Keyboard evidence is thin, and it points in two directions

We found no large keyboard study that reports typing speed by age group, so the phone pattern cannot simply be assumed for keyboards. Two smaller studies point in different directions.

The 1984 study by Timothy Salthouse is the classic one. Its older typists were slower at basic tapping and in choice reaction time, but they were not slower at typing ⁵. Salthouse suggests the reason: older typists were more sensitive to characters farther ahead in the text than younger typists ⁶. That lookahead is the proposed reason older typists kept their speed even when each key took longer. The study is from the 1980s, on keyboards of that time, and it is small.

A 2015 study by Yoram Kalman and colleagues used writing tasks, not copying, with 19 younger adults and 19 older adults. The study found that the speed of typing, measured as the time to type each key, was much higher in the younger group ⁷. The same study found that older adults spent about 70 percent of their time actually typing, while younger adults spent about half of their time on it ⁸. That matters for reading the per-key result. Per-key speed alone does not show the speed of the whole session, because the older group spent more of its time typing and less of it pausing, planning or editing.

A study like this cannot separate age from cohort effects, meaning the habits of people who grew up with different technology.

It depends on the device, the task and the age you measure

Four things change the answer.

• The device. Phone speed and keyboard speed come from different studies with different tasks. The phone decline is the one with clear data.
• The task. Copying a sentence measures transcription speed. Composing your own text adds thinking, choosing words and correcting, so it will be slower for everyone. The 2015 study shows that per-key timing and whole-task speed can tell different stories.
• The age range. The clearest phone data run from 10 to 59. For anyone over 60, the data are missing from the phone study, and the keyboard studies are too small to give a reliable rate.
• The person. Age is one factor among many, and practice changes speed at any age. Age sets a starting point, not a ceiling.

What to do if you think your typing has slowed with age

1. Compare with the right group. Use phone figures for phone typing and keyboard figures for keyboard typing. The guide to average typing speed gives the phone groups.
2. Check what the score counts. A slower score can come from a different test, not from a slower you. Read gross vs net WPM before comparing numbers, and check whether the test deducts for errors.
3. Measure the whole task. Time a real piece of writing, including corrections, rather than only a copying test. The 2015 study shows that time per key can mislead when pauses and edits are part of the work.
4. Practice if you want a faster score. Age is fixed, but skill is not. Touch typing and how to type faster cover what to practice.
5. Get a rank, not just a number. To see where a score sits among all typists, read what percentile your typing speed is.

If your typing has changed quickly, or it hurts, a doctor is the right person to ask, not a speed test.

For the full picture of typing speed by age, phone and keyboard, see the guide to average typing speed. For the age groups in one place, see average typing speed by age, and for the whole subject, start with the typing speed overview. Words per minute is defined in the glossary.