Typing speed calculator

How is typing speed measured in words per minute?

A word is counted as five characters, spaces and punctuation included, so a long word counts as more than one and a short one as less. Words per minute is the characters you typed, divided by five, divided by the minutes it took. The five-character convention is used in the 2018 study from Aalto University and the University of Cambridge that this page compares with.

What is gross speed and what is net speed?

Gross speed counts everything you typed, right or wrong. Net speed corrects it for mistakes. Here net speed is gross speed multiplied by your accuracy, so 60 words per minute at 99% accuracy is 59.4 net. Some typing tests instead subtract one word per uncorrected error from every minute; the page shows that figure as a second row so you can compare with a test that uses it.

What is an average typing speed?

In a study of 168,960 volunteers who each typed 15 sentences online, the average was 51.56 words per minute with a standard deviation of 20.2. The spread was wide: typists differ from the average by about 20 words per minute either way. The fastest reached 120 or more. The volunteers were mostly teenagers and young adults who chose to take a typing test, so they are not a random sample of everyone who types.

Do trained typists really type faster?

Yes, but by less than many people expect. In the same study, participants who had taken typing training averaged about 5 words per minute more than those who had not, and the spread inside each group was large, about 20 words per minute. Practice helps; the study also found a strong link between speed and rollover, pressing the next key before releasing the last one (a correlation of 0.73); the average typist did this on about a quarter of keystrokes.

How many errors are normal?

The average uncorrected error rate in the study was 1.167% of characters. Rates of 1% to 3.2% are reported for earlier lab studies in which people were told to type quickly and not to correct mistakes. At 99% accuracy a page of 2,000 characters has about 20 wrong characters.

How long will it take me to type a document?

Use the optional field at the bottom: enter your speed and the result adds the time for 5,000 characters, about 1,000 words. A 1,000-word essay takes 20 min 0 s at 50 words per minute, 28 min 34 s at 35 and 12 min 30 s at 80, if you are copying text and not stopping to think.

Why is my score different on other typing tests?

Tests differ in the text they use (common words or random ones), in whether capital letters and punctuation are required, in how errors are penalized, and in how long they run. A one-minute burst on easy words will beat a five-minute test on difficult text. Use the same test each time when you track your progress.

The formulas

Let C be the number of characters you typed (spaces included), t the time in minutes and E the number of wrong characters left in the final text. Gross WPM = C ÷ 5 ÷ t. Accuracy = 1 − E ÷ C. Net WPM = gross WPM × accuracy. The alternative used by some tests is gross WPM − E ÷ t, a penalty of one word for each uncorrected error. The two agree at zero errors and drift apart as errors grow, because the second punishes a single wrong character as if a whole five-character word were lost.

Worked example

You copy a passage of 1,350 characters in 5 minutes and leave 9 wrong characters in the text. Gross speed is 1,350 ÷ 5 ÷ 5 = 54.0 words per minute. Accuracy is 1 − 9 ÷ 1,350 = 99.33%, so net speed is 54.0 × 0.9933 = 53.6 words per minute. With the penalty rule, the result is 54.0 − 9 ÷ 5 = 52.2. Against the study average of 51.56, that is 2.1 words per minute above.

Common mistakes

Timing a short burst and treating it as your speed: 250 characters typed in 60 seconds is 50.0 words per minute, but few people keep that up for ten minutes, and the study measured whole sentences. Counting words instead of characters: a text of 200 long words has far more than 1,000 characters, so counting words directly overstates speed. Counting only the correct characters as "characters typed" and then applying the accuracy factor as well, which punishes errors twice. Entering a very high error count: 135 wrong characters among 1,350 would turn 54.0 gross words per minute into 48.6 net, and a count that exceeds the characters typed is rejected.

Limits of the comparison

The 51.56 average comes from people copying prepared sentences on a web page, and the paper itself notes that online volunteers are self-selected and that the dataset leans young and female. It measures transcription, not composing: when you also have to think of what to write, your speed drops, and this page cannot tell you by how much. Treat the comparison as a rough guide to where you stand among people who take typing tests, not as a ranking of the whole population, and not as a standard that any employer uses.

Sources and related calculators

Source: V. Dhakal, A. M. Feit, P. O. Kristensson and A. Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes,” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (168,960 participants; mean 51.56 WPM, SD 20.2; one word = five characters; mean uncorrected error rate 1.167%). The net speed with a penalty per error is a convention of typing tests, not a result of that study. Related: word count calculator, reading time calculator, password entropy calculator and time calculator.