What's a fast typing speed?
A fast typing speed lands around 70 WPM — solid professional-touch-typist territory, well above the typical adult, but short of the elite band that requires deliberate training.
Where 70 WPM sits
At 70 WPM you're typing roughly 50-75% faster than the average adult, who clocks in around 40-50 WPM. You're in the band most professional touch typists hit comfortably — administrative assistants, programmers, customer-support reps, journalists. It's the speed at which typing stops being a bottleneck on your thinking; you can keep up with the pace of conversation, transcribe notes in real time, and not feel the keyboard slowing you down.
In percentile terms, 70 WPM puts you above about 80% of test-takers on most platforms. It's a meaningful gap from average — not a rounding error — but it's also short of the 90+ WPM elite tier that represents trained competitive typists. The 70-90 gap is roughly twice as hard to close as the 50-70 gap, because the bottleneck shifts from learning the keyboard to removing micro-hesitations on uncommon character sequences and training peripheral vision to read ahead.
Most people at 70 WPM got there by typing for years professionally rather than through deliberate practice — typing speed is one of the few skills where decades of casual use can produce genuine expertise without any conscious training.
What's driving the 70 WPM band
The single biggest factor is touch-typing fluency. People who learned home-row touch typing early (school, parents who insisted, Mavis Beacon in the 90s) and have been using keyboards professionally typically settle in the 60-80 WPM range without trying. Those who learned to type by hunt-and-peck or two-finger methods cap out lower — usually 30-50 WPM — even after years of daily use. The fast tier is largely the touch-typing tier.
The second factor is content familiarity. Most typing tests use mixed text — common English, occasional uncommon words, basic punctuation. You'll type faster on simple passages and slower on technical content (programming code, scientific notation, anything with unusual capitalization or symbols). A 70 WPM reading on a standard test usually corresponds to 50-60 WPM on code or technical writing, and 80-90 WPM on conversational prose.
The third factor is what the test measures. Some tests count all keystrokes (including corrections); others net out errors. A "70 WPM with 95% accuracy" reading is the cleanest measurement of sustained output — if you're hitting that, you're genuinely typing at 70.
What's realistic to improve
Getting from 70 to 80 WPM is realistic with 6-8 weeks of focused practice. The gains come from three places: smoothing out hesitations on specific bigrams (combinations like "tion", "ing", "ed", "ch" that you may not be hitting at peak speed), eliminating accuracy errors that force backspacing, and training your eyes to scan a couple of words ahead so your fingers can stay engaged without your conscious attention catching up.
Getting from 70 to 90 WPM is meaningfully harder — typically 4-6 months of consistent daily practice (10-15 minutes is plenty per session; longer sessions create fatigue and don't help). The biggest blocker for most people at 70 is accuracy, not raw speed. If your accuracy is below 96%, your effective speed is being suppressed by corrections and you're plateaued not by finger speed but by typo-prone patterns.
Past 90, additional gains take years of deliberate practice and are mostly the domain of competitive typists who treat it as a hobby. For everyday productive typing, the marginal value of getting from 70 to 90 is real but small — what 70 WPM gives you (typing not being a bottleneck) is already the main practical benefit.
Where 70 WPM falls
- Your score
- 70 WPM
- Tier
- Fast
- Elite threshold
- 90 WPM
- Fast threshold
- 70 WPM
- Average threshold
- 45 WPM
- Estimated percentile
- 84%
Nearby scores
Frequently asked questions
Is 70 WPM a good typing speed?
Yes — 70 WPM puts you above about 80% of adult test-takers and well into the professional touch-typist range. It's the speed at which typing stops being a bottleneck on your thinking, and it comfortably meets the requirements for most jobs that test typing speed (customer service, administrative work, transcription).
What's the difference between WPM and net WPM?
Gross WPM counts all characters typed (including ones that were wrong and then corrected). Net WPM subtracts errors. Most modern typing tests, including this one, report net WPM with an accuracy percentage. A 70 WPM net at 95% accuracy is a much better measure of real typing skill than 75 WPM gross at 85% accuracy.
Does typing speed slow down with age?
Less than reaction time does, but yes — average typing speed declines a few percent per decade after 40, mostly tied to general motor slowing and small reductions in finger dexterity. People who continue to type professionally see much smaller declines than those who stop using the skill.
Why am I faster on familiar text?
Because typing speed is partly about predicting what's coming. On familiar text your eyes can scan ahead of your fingers, your brain pre-loads the next few words, and your hands flow naturally. On unfamiliar text you process word-by-word, which forces a pause every few characters. Most typing tests use varied content specifically to defeat this and measure stabilized speed.