Average Typing Speed, and What the Number Is For
A data entry advert asking for 10 000 keystrokes per hour is asking for 167 characters a minute, which is about 33 words per minute in the unit typing tests use. That conversion is the most useful thing anyone can know about typing speed figures, because employers publish requirements in units that sound far larger than the numbers people see on a test screen.
The conversion ladder
One word in a typing test means five characters including the following space, so the three common units are multiples of each other. CPM is WPM times five, and KPH is CPM times sixty.
| WPM | CPM | KPH | |---|---|---| | 20 | 100 | 6 000 | | 30 | 150 | 9 000 | | 40 | 200 | 12 000 | | 50 | 250 | 15 000 | | 60 | 300 | 18 000 | | 80 | 400 | 24 000 |
Read the table in either direction. An advert asking for 8 000 KPH wants about 27 WPM. One asking for 12 000 wants 40. One asking for 15 000 wants 50, and that is the point at which requirements stop being routine office figures. The reasoning behind the five character word is set out in what WPM means, and the units themselves in CPM and keystrokes per hour.
Why published averages should be read carefully
Numbers described as the average typing speed almost always come from people who chose to take an online typing test. That is a self selected group: it excludes everyone who never looked for such a page, and it counts repeat attempts by people practising. The figure describes test takers, not populations, and no honest source can turn it into a national average.
What can be stated without inventing anything is arithmetic. A 500 word message takes 12.5 minutes of pure typing at 40 words per minute and 8.3 minutes at 60. The difference over one message is four minutes, which tells you plainly how much a speed change is worth for the work you actually do, and how much it is not.
A 15 second figure and a 60 second figure are different measurements
Our typing test runs at 15, 30 and 60 seconds, and the shortest run reliably produces the highest number. That is not a flaw in either mode, it is what the clock does.
A 15 second run measures a burst. There is no time for your attention to drift, the passage rarely reaches an awkward word, and a single lucky stretch of familiar text carries the whole result.
A 60 second run brings in two things a burst hides: how long you take to recover after a mistake, and what happens to your accuracy in the last fifteen seconds when concentration loosens. That makes it the closer match to a pace you could hold through a working morning.
Compare a 15 second result only with other 15 second results. Progress measured across different durations is measuring the durations.
Accuracy moves the total more than the hands do
Speed and accuracy are not two separate scores, because errors cost time twice: once when you type the wrong character and again when you go back for it.
Take a one minute run at 300 characters, which is 60 WPM gross. Leave six errors uncorrected and the usual net formula subtracts one word per error, giving 54 net WPM. Correct those six errors instead and you spend twelve extra keystrokes plus the pause before each one, which lands you in much the same place.
A figure quoted without an accuracy percentage beside it is therefore incomplete. Our test reports both, along with a separate raw figure counting every character you typed and a count of the corrections you made, so the trade off is visible rather than averaged away.
What to do with your own number
Three uses justify measuring at all. Translating a job requirement into the unit your test reports, so you know whether an advert is describing routine office typing or something specialised. Noticing your own change over weeks, which needs the same duration and comparable text each time. And deciding what to type by hand rather than dictate or template, which is pure arithmetic once you know your pace.
There is a fourth thing the number is not, and that is a description of you. It measures one motion of the hands on one passage on one day, and it moves with sleep, keyboard, chair height and how familiar the text is. If you want it to change, the method matters more than effort: the accuracy first approach in the 30 day plan is designed around exactly that.
For a comfortable measurement, Aesop reads better than a test sentence. The Hare and the Tortoise, in the English wording George Fyler Townsend printed in London in 1867, runs to 488 characters and turns on a steady pace rather than a burst, which is the same quality a 60 second run brings out. Alfred Tennyson published The Brook in 1855, and its 482 characters repeat short verbs in pairs, so a tempo arrives without being chased. If you would rather begin with something shorter, Jane Austen's walk down to the sea at Lyme, from Persuasion in 1818, is 260 characters of plain sentences. All three are waiting in the typing test, each with its author, year and source on its own page.