What Is a Good Typing Speed? Benchmarks by Job, Age, and Skill Level
The average person types 40 WPM. The average office worker types 56 WPM. Professional typists hit 80+. Where do you fall — and does it actually matter for your career?
Typing speed is one of those skills that most people never think about until they sit next to someone who types twice as fast and realize how much time they waste every day. At 40 WPM, a 500-word email takes 12.5 minutes of pure typing time. At 80 WPM, the same email takes 6.25 minutes. That 6-minute difference happens dozens of times daily for knowledge workers — emails, Slack messages, reports, documentation. Over a year, the slower typist loses roughly 250 hours (six work weeks) to the keyboard that the faster typist spends on actual thinking and doing.
Benchmarks by Category
General population average: 38-40 WPM. This is the "hunt and peck with occasional glancing" speed that most people who never learned touch typing settle into. High schoolers average: 30-35 WPM. College students: 35-45 WPM. Office workers: 50-60 WPM. Administrative professionals: 60-75 WPM. Data entry specialists: 75-90 WPM. Court reporters: 200+ WPM (using stenotype machines). Professional transcriptionists: 80-100 WPM with 98%+ accuracy.
For employment purposes, here is what different jobs expect. General office work: 50 WPM is the functional minimum. Administrative roles: 60-70 WPM. Journalism and content writing: 70+ WPM is a significant advantage. Programming: typing speed matters less than thinking speed, but 50-60 WPM prevents the keyboard from becoming a bottleneck. Customer service chat: 65+ WPM is typically required because you are handling multiple conversations simultaneously.
Speed vs Accuracy: Which Matters More
A 90 WPM typist who makes errors every 10 words types at an effective speed of about 65 WPM after corrections. A 70 WPM typist with 99% accuracy types at an effective speed of 69 WPM — essentially the same output with dramatically less frustration. For anything involving communication (emails, reports, messages), accuracy matters more than raw speed because errors require rereading, backspacing, and retyping — each correction costs 3-5 keystrokes plus mental context-switching.
That said, both speed and accuracy improve simultaneously with proper technique. Learning touch typing does not sacrifice accuracy for speed — it improves both because your fingers develop muscle memory for correct key positions. The tradeoff only applies to pushing speed beyond your comfort zone, which you should do in practice but not in production work.
Test your current speed with our typing speed test — it measures WPM and accuracy on real prose, not artificial drills, so the result reflects your actual working speed.