Typing Speed Test: Check Your WPM

How the typing test works

Choose 30 seconds, 1 minute or 2 minutes, click in the box and start typing the passage. The timer starts with your first key. Correct letters turn white, mistakes turn red, and a cursor shows where you are. You can use Backspace to fix mistakes. When the time is up, the test stops and shows your score. Press Restart for a new passage. Pasting is switched off, so scores stay honest.

What the scores mean

WPM, words per minute, counts only correctly typed characters, divided by five (the standard length of a word) and by the time taken. Raw WPM counts every character you typed, right or wrong, so the gap between the two shows how much your mistakes are costing you. Accuracy is the share of keystrokes you got right first time, so it still counts mistakes you later corrected. Errors is the number of wrong characters left in your text.

Your best score is saved on your device, so you can track progress over weeks of practice.

What is a good typing speed?

The average adult types around 40 words per minute on a computer keyboard. Between 50 and 70 WPM is comfortably fast for office work, and many jobs that involve a lot of typing, such as transcription or data entry, ask for 60 to 80 WPM with 95% accuracy or better. Competitive typists reach well over 120 WPM. On a phone, most people manage 30 to 40 WPM with two thumbs.

How to type faster

• Learn the home row. Rest your left fingers on A S D F and your right on J K L ;. Each finger covers the keys above and below its home key.
• Stop looking at the keyboard. It feels slow for a week or two, then speed climbs past where you started.
• Accuracy first. Aim for 95% or better before pushing for speed. Fixing mistakes is slower than avoiding them.
• Practise little and often. Ten or fifteen minutes a day beats an hour once a week.
• Keep a steady rhythm rather than racing through easy words.

Typing tests for job applications

Employers often test with a one or five minute passage and report net WPM, which subtracts errors. Our WPM figure works the same way, since it counts only correct characters. Practise with the 2 minute test for a realistic result, because short tests flatter fast starters. Use the keyboard you will use at work if you can, since laptop keyboards often slow people down by a few WPM.