What is a good typing speed?

There is no fixed standard, because it depends on what you type and why. For most daily use, a speed at which you stay accurate matters more than a high number. Compare yourself with your own previous result, and use the arithmetic on this page to see what a speed means for your own work: at 50 words per minute, a 300-word email takes about six minutes to type.

How is words per minute calculated?

We count the keystrokes that were right and divide by five, because a standard word is counted as five keystrokes, spaces included. Your result is net: a wrong keystroke does not count towards it. 250 right keystrokes in one minute is 50 words per minute.

Does the typing test work on a phone?

No. Typing on a touchscreen is a different skill, and the phone completes words for you. On a phone or tablet without a keyboard you see a notice instead of the test. If you have connected a keyboard, you can tell the page and take the test.

A valid round is stored without your name, email or account, under a random code. We keep it to count how often the test is taken. A round with pasted text, more than 900 keystrokes a minute or fewer than half of the keystrokes right is not stored.

Typing test: how many words per minute do you type?

Take the full Brain Check

You copy ordinary sentences for one minute. We count the keystrokes that were right, divide by five to get words per minute, and show your accuracy and the character you missed most often. It is free and needs no account.

How this typing test works

You get a passage of plain text, the kind you would find in a short article or a work email, in an order that changes every round. The minute starts with your first key, not with the button, so you can read the first line before you begin. It stops by itself after sixty seconds.

If you press a wrong key, the character you should have typed turns red and the cursor stays where it is. You carry on with the right key. There is no need to delete anything, and deleting does not count. Pasting does not work.

How your words per minute are counted

A keystroke is every character you type: a letter, a digit, a punctuation mark or a space. Shift and Backspace do not count. Gross is all your keystrokes, mistakes included. Net is only the characters that are right, and net is the number at the top of your result.

Words per minute is the net number divided by five, because a word is counted as five keystrokes. An example: you type a sentence of 60 characters in 30 seconds and miss twice. That is 62 keystrokes, so 124 gross and 120 net per minute, which is 24 words per minute, with an accuracy of 96.8 percent.

What a good typing speed is for your work

A single number cannot answer that, because a good speed depends on what you type. For emails and notes, the time you spend thinking is longer than the time you spend typing. For copying a list of names or numbers, speed and accuracy are the whole job, and one wrong digit costs more than a slow minute.

The arithmetic helps you judge it. A 300-word email takes about ten minutes at 30 words per minute and about six minutes at 50. If you write one a day, the difference is four minutes. If you write forty a day, it is almost three hours. Look at how much typing you really do before you decide that you need to be faster.

Three habits that slow typing down

Looking at the keys is the first. Your eyes leave the text to find a letter, and every time they return you have lost your place. The second is stopping at every mistake: going back to fix a single letter often costs more time than the letter was worth. The third is reading one word at a time. If you look a few words ahead, your hands can keep moving while your eyes plan the next phrase.

When a round does not count

If you paste text, reach more than 900 keystrokes a minute or get fewer than half of your keystrokes right, we do not store the round. You still see a short note about why. This keeps the numbers we count made up of people who really typed.

Where the text comes from

The passages were written for this test. They use plain letters, digits and punctuation, with no quotation marks or accents, so that a key that needs a combination of presses does not turn the test into a measure of your keyboard layout. The test assumes a QWERTY keyboard.

More tests

Typing is one skill among several. On the brain games page you can play five short games, and the reaction time test measures how fast you respond to a signal. The Dutch version of this test is the typetest.

Frequently asked questions

What is a good typing speed?: There is no fixed standard, because it depends on what you type and why. For most daily use, a speed at which you stay accurate matters more than a high number. Compare yourself with your own previous result, and use the arithmetic on this page to see what a speed means for your own work: at 50 words per minute, a 300-word email takes about six minutes to type.
How is words per minute calculated?: We count the keystrokes that were right and divide by five, because a standard word is counted as five keystrokes, spaces included. Your result is net: a wrong keystroke does not count towards it. 250 right keystrokes in one minute is 50 words per minute.
Does the typing test work on a phone?: No. Typing on a touchscreen is a different skill, and the phone completes words for you. On a phone or tablet without a keyboard you see a notice instead of the test. If you have connected a keyboard, you can tell the page and take the test.
Is my result saved?: A valid round is stored without your name, email or account, under a random code. We keep it to count how often the test is taken. A round with pasted text, more than 900 keystrokes a minute or fewer than half of the keystrokes right is not stored.