Typing Speed Test

WPM

Accuracy

100%

1:00

the room was lit by a single desk lamp. we watched the boats drift slowly across the bay. the path through the woods was covered in dry leaves. he carved a small bird out of a piece of driftwood. she planted bulbs in the fall and waited until spring. he closed the door quietly and turned off the light. they hiked all day and reached the cabin by dusk. they spoke quietly so as not to wake the baby. the garden behind the house was full of wildflowers. every summer they drove to the same small lake. the snow began to fall just as the sky turned pink. she folded the letter neatly and slid it into the envelope. they planted tomatoes along the south side of the fence. he wore the same brown jacket every day in october. they swept the porch every saturday after breakfast. they bought fresh apples and cheese at the small market. we lit candles when the storm took out the power. he carried the toolbox out to the workshop in the garage. the bakery on the corner opened at five in the morning. the dog chased the ball into the tall summer grass. she balanced the checkbook at the kitchen table every sunday. we found an old map tucked inside the wooden chest. she taped a list of chores to the refrigerator door. the early morning train arrived ten minutes late. the lake froze early and the children skated for hours. they kept a jar of old buttons on the mantel. a cool breeze moved through the open kitchen window. he wrote a short note and left it on the counter. the bread rose slowly in the warm corner of the room. a soft rain began to fall just after lunch. the kitchen smelled of cinnamon and warm bread. he kept his old letters in a tin box under the bed. we built a small fire and roasted the last of the marshmallows. they spent the afternoon reading on the back porch. we counted seven deer in the field before sunrise. the basket by the door held three pairs of muddy boots. a long line of cars waited at the railroad crossing. he marked each book in the series with a colored tab. we found shells along the shore at the lowest tide. we left the windows open to catch the evening breeze. she taught herself to play guitar one chord at a time. the road home was longer than either of them remembered. the kettle whistled and she lifted it off the stove. they hung lights along the porch for the winter holidays. the bus stopped at every corner along the wide avenue. the painting above the couch had hung there for decades. we walked along the river until the sun went down. every winter the same birds returned to the feeder. the cat curled up on the warmest cushion in the house. the radio played softly while they finished the puzzle. the library was quiet except for the hum of the lights. the bookshelf in the corner held forty old novels. a fresh pot of coffee was waiting on the counter. she always carried a small notebook in her pocket. she poured two cups of tea and sat by the fire. a thick fog hid the houses across the narrow street. after dinner he washed the dishes without being asked. the children built a tall fort out of couch cushions. the river bent sharply just below the old stone bridge. we watched the lightning move across the open fields. her favorite chair sat in front of the wide window. the engine made a strange noise and then went silent. she pinned the photograph to the wall above her desk. he carried two heavy bags up the narrow stairs. a thin layer of frost covered the windshield each morning.

Start typing to begin. The timer starts on your first keystroke.

Most typing tests on the open web are funnels. Behind the test sits a sign-up form, a certificate paywall, or a typing-tutor subscription you didn't ask about. This one isn't. You sit down, type the passage at your natural pace, and at the end you see two numbers: how fast you type in words per minute and how accurate you were. That's it. The default test is one minute, but you can pick 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 2 minutes from the row below the text. The timer starts on your first keystroke — there's no Start button to find. When time's up, the result card shows your net WPM, your accuracy percentage, your raw WPM (before error penalty), and the number of mistakes you made. You can copy a one-line summary for a job application or a Slack message, or hit Try again for a fresh passage.

Built by Bob Article by Lace QA by Ben Shipped May 21, 2026

How to use

1
Open the page and the test is already loaded with a 1-minute timer, English text, and the caret on the first letter. There is no Start button — the timer starts the moment you press a key.
2
Type the passage as it's shown. Correct characters turn dark; wrong characters turn red. Backspace is allowed — use it to fix a mistake before the next character. There's no penalty for backspacing other than the time it costs you.
3
Watch the live metrics bar above the text. It shows your current WPM and accuracy, updated once per second. Don't fixate on it — the final result is what matters.
4
When the timer hits zero, the typing surface is replaced by your result card. You'll see your net WPM (big number), accuracy percentage, raw WPM, total characters typed, and total errors.
5
Tap Copy result to put a one-line summary on your clipboard: 'Typed N WPM at N% accuracy on microapp.com/typing-speed-test'. Or tap Try again for a fresh passage and another go.
6
Want a different duration? Use the chips below the text or results card: 15s, 30s, 1m, 2m. Switching duration during a test asks you to confirm — once you confirm, the test resets with fresh text.

📖 Reading Speed Test 📝 Word Counter 🔤 Character Counter ⚡ Reaction Time Test ⏱️ Reading Time Calculator

Frequently asked questions

How is words-per-minute calculated?

The typing industry treats a 'word' as exactly five characters, including spaces and punctuation. So if you correctly type 300 characters in one minute, that's 300 ÷ 5 = 60 words per minute. The five-character convention is what every serious typing benchmark uses — without it, a test on long-word text (microbiology research) would always score lower than a test on short-word text (basic English), which would make scores incomparable. This page reports Net WPM (only correct characters count) and Raw WPM (every character you typed, errors included). Net WPM is the number people usually mean when they say 'I type 80 WPM.'

What's a normal typing speed?

Most adults who type regularly land somewhere between 35 and 50 WPM. People who type for a living — software engineers, journalists, transcriptionists — often sit between 60 and 80 WPM with high accuracy. The often-cited 'good touch typist' figure is around 60 WPM at 95%+ accuracy. Anything above 100 WPM is genuinely fast; anything above 130 WPM is competitive territory, where minor changes in keyboard layout or hand position start to matter. If your score lands between 40 and 60 WPM, you're an average-to-good typist — and that is not a deficiency.

Why does accuracy matter? I just want my WPM.

Because speed without accuracy isn't typing — it's mashing. If you typed 600 characters in a minute but only 200 were correct, your effective output is closer to 40 WPM than 120, because the wrong characters either get fixed (costing you backspacing time on the next attempt) or don't get fixed (and the document you're producing is unusable). The Net WPM we show only counts correct characters, which is why a high error rate pulls Net WPM down even though Raw WPM stays high. Most jobs that ask for a typing speed implicitly mean Net WPM at 95%+ accuracy.

Why does the timer start on my first keystroke instead of when I click Start?

Because there is no Start button. Clicking Start is one extra step that does nothing useful — by the time you read this far, you've already decided to take the test. Starting the timer on your first keystroke means the 60 seconds measure your typing, not your reaction time to find a button. The same convention is used by every serious typing benchmark, including the one most power-users use.

Can I paste text into the typing surface?

No. Pasting is intentionally blocked — when you try, a small note appears explaining why. The page exists to measure how fast you type, and pasting a 200-character passage in a single keystroke would produce a meaningless WPM. The block isn't about stopping cheaters — there's no leaderboard, no certificate, no reason to cheat. It's about stopping accidental paste-by-muscle-memory, which would corrupt your own result.

Does this work on my phone?

No, and we say so upfront instead of pretending. On-screen phone keyboards autocorrect, autocapitalize, and add invisible delays that have nothing to do with typing speed. A 'typing test' on a phone keyboard measures swipe-input or autocomplete, not typing. When the page detects you don't have a precise-pointer device — usually meaning no physical keyboard — it shows a polite empty state instead of rendering a typing surface that would lie to you. Open it on a laptop or desktop and you'll get an honest number.

Why doesn't my score save?

Because there's no account, and we'd rather not invent one just to store a number you can write down. The test runs entirely in your browser; the timer, the passage, and the scoring all happen on your device. Close the tab and the result is gone. If you want to track progress over time, the Copy result button writes a one-line summary you can paste into a note, a journal, or a spreadsheet — that's the simplest tracking system, and it doesn't require us to hold your data.

Why are there four duration options instead of just one?

Different durations measure slightly different things. A 15-second test rewards bursts and underweights fatigue — useful for warming up, or for comparing keyboard layouts side by side. A 1-minute test is the typing-benchmark standard and the most comparable across the web. A 2-minute test reveals stamina; many typists lose 5–10 WPM over the second minute as their hands fatigue. We default to 1 minute because that's the convention; we keep the others because honesty about what each measures matters more than picking the 'right' one for you.

Why doesn't your test have a certificate?

Because certificates from typing-test sites are not credentials. No employer asks for one, no school accepts one, and the sites that print them are using the certificate as a sign-up gate — you give them your email, and they email you marketing for a paid typing course. If you need a verifiable typing speed for a job application, the standard practice is to do the test live during the interview, on the employer's hardware. The number we give you is honest; the lack of a certificate is the feature, not the omission.

Why did my WPM go down on a longer test?

Three usual reasons. (1) Stamina — most people slow down measurably after 60 seconds of sustained typing, especially if they're not used to it. (2) Variance — a 15-second test catches your best burst, while a 2-minute test averages across both fast and slow stretches. (3) Familiarity — the passage might include words or letter patterns that are slightly harder for you specifically. The most honest measure of your typing speed is the median of three or four 1-minute tests on different passages, not any single attempt.

Ratings & Reviews

Rate this tool

Loading reviews…

What is words per minute?

Words per minute (WPM) is the standard way to measure typing speed. One "word," by industry convention, is five characters — including spaces and punctuation. So "the quick brown fox" counts as four words for a reader, but for a typing test it's 20 characters, which is exactly four typing-words. The five-character word was settled on in the 1970s as a fair average across English text, and every modern typing test uses it.

WPM matters because most knowledge work is, in the end, typing. Emails, code, essays, meeting notes, chat replies — the speed at which your fingers can move thoughts into a text field is a real ceiling on the speed at which you can finish work. The average adult types around 40 WPM. Office workers who type for a living tend to land between 60 and 75. Professional transcribers and competitive typists push past 120. The world record sits around 216 WPM, set on a custom keyboard in 2005.

This Typing Speed Test measures your net WPM over a fixed window — 15 seconds, 30 seconds, 1 minute, or 2 minutes — and shows accuracy alongside. The longer the test, the more honest the number.

The typing-test web is dominated by two kinds of sites. The first is the gamified deep end — monkeytype is the best of these, and it's excellent, but the homepage assumes you already know what "punctuation mode" and "quote length 'short'" mean. The second is the courseware funnel — typing.com, keybr, ratatype — where the test exists mostly to qualify you for a 30-lesson course and an account. The Typing Speed Test is neither. Pick a duration, type, see the number, leave. No account, no leaderboard, no streak tracker, no ads.

How to use the Typing Speed Test

The whole point is that there's nothing between you and the keyboard. Most typing sites make you click a "Start" button, pick a username, or watch an ad first. This one doesn't.

Open the tool. A passage of English text appears with a green caret on the first character.
Pick a duration — 15s, 30s, 1m, or 2m. The default is 1 minute, which is the standard most typing scores are quoted in.
Start typing. The timer begins on your first keystroke. Correct characters turn dark; wrong ones go red and stay red until you backspace through them.
Watch the live WPM and accuracy at the top. They update once a second so they're readable, not jittery.
When the timer hits zero, the test ends and a results card shows your final WPM, accuracy, raw WPM, errors, and characters typed.
Click "Try again" for a fresh passage, or "Copy result" to grab a one-line summary you can paste into chat.

Paste is blocked on purpose — pasting the target text into itself would give everyone a 9,000 WPM score and the number would mean nothing. The block is a small honesty mechanism, not anti-cheat security.

The formula behind WPM

There are two numbers the test reports, and they answer different questions.

Net WPM = (correct characters ÷ 5) ÷ minutes elapsed

Raw WPM = (total characters typed ÷ 5) ÷ minutes elapsed

Net WPM is your real typing speed. It penalises mistakes because wrong characters don't count toward the numerator. Raw WPM is the speed you'd hit if accuracy didn't matter — total fingers-moving throughput. The gap between the two is a useful diagnostic. A small gap means your hands and your brain are in sync. A large gap means you're fast but sloppy, and the fix is to slow down 10% and watch the gap close.

Accuracy is the third number:

Accuracy % = (correct characters ÷ total characters typed) × 100

Worked example. Say you take a 60-second test. You type 280 characters. 266 of them are correct, 14 are wrong. Your net WPM is 266 ÷ 5 ÷ 1 = 53.2, which the test rounds to 53. Your raw WPM is 280 ÷ 5 ÷ 1 = 56. Your accuracy is 266 ÷ 280 × 100 = 95%. That's a healthy result for an office typist — close to the average ceiling, with a three-point gap between net and raw that suggests your speed is honest.

Now run the same numbers on a 15-second test. 70 characters typed, 66 correct, 4 wrong. Net WPM is 66 ÷ 5 ÷ 0.25 = 52.8, rounded to 53. Same speed, smaller sample. Short tests are good for warmups; long tests are better evidence.

What's a good typing speed?

It depends entirely on what the typing is for. Below is the range you'll find quoted across typing schools, recruitment guides, and competitive typing communities.

WPM	What it means	Who types at this speed
0–20	Hunt-and-peck	People who didn't learn touch typing — looking at the keyboard, two fingers
20–40	Below average	Casual typists; most teenagers; anyone who learned by texting
40–60	Average to solid	Most adults with a desk job land here
60–80	Professional	Writers, programmers, customer-service reps, executive assistants
80–100	Fast	Touch typists with years of practice; transcriptionists
100–120	Very fast	Court reporters using standard keyboards (stenotype is separate)
120+	Elite	Competitive typists; the top of monkeytype leaderboards
216	World record	Barbara Blackburn, 2005, on a Dvorak keyboard

The number that matters for most jobs is 40+. Below 40, typing is a bottleneck — you think faster than you can write. Past 80, the marginal value of more speed drops off, because at that point your typing is faster than your thinking. The sweet spot for sustained knowledge work is roughly 60–80 WPM at 95%+ accuracy.

Hiring tests for data-entry and transcription roles usually quote a minimum of 50 WPM with 95% accuracy. Court reporting jobs that use a standard keyboard (not stenotype) demand 90+. Tech support and customer-service roles often list 40 WPM in the job posting.

How to actually get faster

Three things move the WPM number, and only three.

Touch typing. If you look at the keyboard, you have a ceiling around 40 WPM. Touch typing — keeping your fingers on the home row and trusting muscle memory — is the single change that takes most people from 30 to 60+. It feels slower for the first two weeks, then faster forever.

Accuracy first, then speed. The instinct is to mash keys harder. The instinct is wrong. Errors cost you double: once to type the wrong character, once to backspace it. A typist at 60 WPM and 98% accuracy out-paces a typist at 80 WPM and 88% accuracy, every time. Slow down until your accuracy is above 97%, then let the speed come back on its own.

Daily reps, not weekend cramming. Typing is a motor skill. Ten minutes a day for a month beats five hours on a Sunday. The progress curve is steep for the first three weeks and then flattens, which is why most people quit; the people who keep at it past the plateau are the ones who hit 80+.

A useful drill: take a 1-minute test, note your net WPM, then take a 1-minute test where your only goal is 100% accuracy and ignore the speed entirely. Compare the two numbers. The clean-accuracy run is your real ceiling — the noisy one is what you're costing yourself in errors.

Edge cases and limitations

A few things this test doesn't measure, and a few quirks worth knowing about.

Mobile keyboards are out of scope. If you open this page on a phone, you'll see a polite empty state instead of the typing surface. Phone typing is a different motor skill (thumbs, autocorrect, swipe) and a WPM number from a phone test isn't comparable to a desktop one. Open the page on a laptop and we'll measure properly.

The text is English. The passages are drawn from a pool of common English sentences with normal punctuation and capitalisation. If your daily typing is code, the number you score here will under-represent your code-typing speed, because code is mostly short tokens and symbols, not prose. The reverse is also true — prose typists test slower on code.

One bad test doesn't mean much. WPM has natural day-to-day variance of ±10%. The first test of the morning is usually 5–10 WPM slower than your steady-state. If you really want a representative number, take five tests and average the middle three.

Backspace counts as a keystroke that doesn't help your score. Every backspace eats time without adding correct characters. This is by design — it's how every standard typing test works, and it's why accuracy and speed are linked.

Related tools

Once you've used the Typing Speed Test to find your number, a couple of other measurements get easier. The Reading Time Calculator estimates how long a block of text takes to read — useful when your typing speed and reading speed are different muscles (most people read 4–5× faster than they type). The Word Counter counts words, characters, and reading time in any pasted text, which is the inverse of what this test does: it measures the text, where this measures you.

For shorter pieces — tweets, headlines, meta descriptions — the Character Counter is the cleaner choice. And if you're timing yourself on something other than typing, the Stopwatch and Pomodoro Timer handle the rest of the clock. Every tool in the Microapp catalog works the same way as the Typing Speed Test: one job per page, no signup, no upsell. 10% of every dollar Microapp earns goes to charity, off the top, audited quarterly.

Frequently asked questions

What's a good typing speed for a job?

For most desk jobs, 40 WPM with 95% accuracy is the floor and 60+ is comfortable. Data entry and transcription roles typically require 50 WPM minimum. Court reporting on a standard keyboard expects 90+. If the job description doesn't quote a number, 60 WPM is a safe target.

Why is my WPM lower here than on other tests?

Two reasons usually. First, the Typing Speed Test uses real English sentences with punctuation and capitalisation, which slow you down compared to tests that use only common lowercase words. Second, the timer starts on your first keystroke, not after a 3-second countdown, so there's no warmup buffer. The number you get here is closer to your real-world typing speed than a "common words only" test.

Does the test work on a phone or tablet?

No, and on purpose. Phone keyboards involve autocorrect, swipe input, and thumbs — a completely different motor skill. A WPM number from a phone test isn't comparable to a desktop one, so we show a friendly empty state instead of pretending. Open the page on a laptop or desktop with a real keyboard.

What's the difference between net WPM and raw WPM?

Net WPM only counts correct characters, so mistakes drag the number down. Raw WPM counts every character you typed, right or wrong. Net is your real typing speed; raw is your fingers-moving speed. The gap between them is a measure of how accurate you are — small gap good, large gap means you're sacrificing accuracy for speed.

Why is paste disabled?

Because pasting the target text into the test would give you a 9,000 WPM score and the number would be meaningless. It's an honesty mechanism, not an anti-cheat system — there's no leaderboard to game, just your own number to keep honest.

How long should I practice to get faster?

Ten minutes a day for three to four weeks is enough to move most people up by 10–20 WPM, provided they're actually touch typing and not looking at the keyboard. The progress curve is steep for the first month and then flattens. Past 80 WPM, gains are slow and require dedicated drilling — monkeytype is the right tool for that level of practice.

Does the test save my scores?

No. The Typing Speed Test doesn't have accounts, history, or any kind of storage — your score lives on the results card until you start the next test, and that's it. If you want to track progress over time, use the "Copy result" button to paste your scores into a note. If you want a full history with graphs and weak-key analysis, monkeytype is the better fit. This page is for the one-minute check.