How to improve your typing speed

What is a good typing speed?

Around 40 words per minute (WPM) is the figure most often cited as an average typing speed. 60 WPM or more is generally considered fast, and above 90 WPM is very fast. These are rough bands, not fixed standards, and your score changes with the text, the keyboard and how awake you are.

Where the typing test's Average rating starts

40 WPM

Rated Fast

60 WPM

Rated Very fast

90 WPM

Speed means little without accuracy. A common target is 95% accuracy or better: below that, the time you spend fixing mistakes eats most of the speed you gained. Take a 60-second typing test now so you have a starting point to compare against.

How WPM and accuracy are calculated

Typing tests count a word as five characters, including the space after it, so long and short words are treated fairly. The typing test gives you three numbers:

• Net WPM: only the characters you typed correctly, divided by five, divided by the minutes elapsed. This is your real speed.
• Raw WPM: every character you typed, right or wrong, worked out the same way. The gap between raw and net shows how much your mistakes cost.
• Accuracy: the share of keystrokes that matched the passage, counted as you made them.

Fixing a mistake with Backspace brings your net WPM back up, because the corrected characters are now right. It doesn't restore your accuracy, because the wrong keystroke was still made. That's useful: accuracy tells you how cleanly you type, not how well you clean up.

How to take a typing speed test

1. Open the typing test and choose 15, 30 or 60 seconds. Use 60 seconds for your baseline: short tests flatter burst speed.
2. Click or tap the passage. The timer starts on your first keystroke, so take a breath first.
3. Type the words, pressing Space after each one. Use Backspace to fix errors in the current word or step back into a previous word that has one.
4. When time runs out, note your net WPM, raw WPM, accuracy and errors.
5. Press Esc or Restart and run it two more times. Use the average of the three, not your best.

Your best score for each length is kept for the session, which is handy for warm-ups, but the average is what tells you whether you're improving.

Learn to touch type

Touch typing, typing without looking at the keys, is the biggest single step up for most people. If you type with two or three fingers and glance down often, there's a ceiling you'll hit no matter how much you practise.

• Rest your fingers on the home row: A, S, D, F for the left hand and J, K, L and ; for the right. The small bumps on F and J let you find them without looking.
• Each finger owns a column of keys above and below its home key. Index fingers also cover the column next to them (G and H, T and Y, and so on).
• Thumbs handle the spacebar. Use whichever thumb feels natural, but stick with it.
• Return to the home row after every key. That's what lets you find keys by position instead of by sight.

Expect your speed to drop at first, sometimes by half. That's normal. Keep accuracy high and the speed comes back, usually past where you started, within a few weeks of regular practice.

Posture and setup

• Sit so your elbows are roughly level with the keyboard and your forearms are close to horizontal.
• Keep your wrists straight and floating while you type, rather than bent up and planted on the desk.
• Put the screen at or just below eye level so you aren't looking down, which makes it tempting to watch your hands.
• Type lightly. You don't need to press keys all the way to the bottom, and hammering them tires your fingers sooner.

If your wrists or forearms ache, stop and rest. Practice should feel easy on the body.

A practice plan to type faster

Short, regular sessions beat long, occasional ones. Fifteen minutes a day is enough to see steady progress.

1. Warm up with one 30-second test at an easy pace, aiming for 100% accuracy.
2. Do five or six 60-second tests. Type at a pace where your accuracy stays at 95% or above. If it drops, slow down.
3. Note the words you keep getting wrong and type each of them slowly ten times.
4. Finish with one 60-second test at full effort and write down your net WPM and accuracy.
5. Once a week, compare your weekly average with the week before.

When your accuracy stays high for a week, push the pace a little. When it slips, ease off. Speed follows accuracy, not the other way round.

Does your keyboard affect typing speed?

A comfortable keyboard helps, but it won't add much speed on its own. Key feel is personal: some people type faster on short laptop keys, others on mechanical switches. Use the one you'll practise on.

What does matter is a keyboard that registers every key. Two faults can quietly lower your score:

• Dead or sticky keys. Press every key in the keyboard test. A key that doesn't light up, or lights up when you didn't press it, will cost you errors.
• Ghosting. Fast typists often press the next key before releasing the last, called rollover. Some keyboards drop a key when certain keys are held together. Hold a few letters at once in the keyboard ghosting test and check each one registers.
• A worn spacebar. You press it after every word, so a bar that misses presses near its ends shows up as merged words. The spacebar counter makes misses easy to spot: tap the bar at the left, middle and right and compare.

If you're checking a second-hand laptop's keyboard, our used laptop checklist covers the rest of the machine too.

Next, check your other speeds

Once your typing is on track, see how quickly you press a single key in the spacebar counter, or switch to the mouse and find out what a good CPS is. Then come back to the typing test next week and compare your average.