Typing speed by age

Real measurements from school studies, a 37,000-person phone study and decades of research on older typists, instead of made-up charts.

Take a one-minute test

The best-known typing study of recent years recorded 136 million keystrokes from 168,960 volunteers and asked every one of them their age. The paper doesn't report a single speed by age group. It does say who took part: the average volunteer was 24.5 years old, and three in four were between 11 and 30. So the familiar average of 52 words per minute is mostly a teenage and young-adult number.

That hasn't stopped the charts. Search for typing speed by age and you'll find a WPM figure for every birthday, rarely with a source and almost never with a spread. This guide sticks to what has been measured: a school year of tests with about 1,700 American children, a phone study of 37,370 people that did split its results by age, and smaller studies of students and older typists. Where the evidence runs out, it says so.

The short answer

There are no agreed typing norms by age. A 2022 paper on testing children's keyboarding pointed out that standardised keyboarding tests for primary-school children barely exist, so nobody can tell you what a normal 10-year-old types the way a growth chart tells you what a normal 10-year-old weighs.

What has been measured points one way. Children start very slowly, then gain a few words per minute a year. Speed peaks somewhere between the late teens and about 30, then drifts down gently, and people who keep typing can hold on to it. Within every age group the spread is wide, which is why one number per age tells you so little. For the ages people ask about most:

• Around 10, on a keyboard: in one study of four US schools, fifth-grade classes (ages 10 to 11) averaged 12 to 16 WPM at the end of the school year, with errors subtracted.
• Around 12 to 14: none of the large studies reports keyboard speeds for this age on its own. On phones, people aged 10 to 19 averaged about 40 WPM.
• Teenagers and adults together: about 52 WPM on a keyboard in the 2018 study, with the middle half between about 38 and 65. Average typing speed has the full picture.
• Over 60: no large study gives averages, but in a classic 1984 study, skilled typists up to age 72 were no slower at typing than younger ones.

Children: one school year, measured

The most useful numbers for primary-age children come from a 2019 study by Denise Donica and colleagues. About 1,700 children from kindergarten to fifth grade, in four public schools in the rural southern United States, took a one-minute typing test at the start of the 2016–17 school year and again in May. They copied a passage written at a first-grade reading level, with Backspace switched off and errors subtracted from the score. Easy text, strict scoring.

Class averages in net WPM (errors subtracted), from Donica, Giroux and Kim (2019), rounded to whole numbers. Each range spans the two groups in the study, which were taught keyboarding in two different ways. Kindergarten averages were below 0.5 WPM.

Two things stand out. First, the numbers are low. Even at the end of fifth grade, the class averages were under a third of the 52 WPM from the big 2018 study, and kindergarten scores were so close to zero that the authors suggest WPM isn't a sensible measure at that age. A child typing 10 WPM at the age of nine is right where the fourth-grade classes in this study finished their year.

Second, teaching made a visible difference. In every grade from first to fifth, children in one group improved significantly more over the year than children in the other. In fourth grade, one group went from 7.3 to 12.2 WPM and the other from 5.9 to 8.4: a gain of 4.9 against 2.6, nearly double. The study wasn't randomised and the groups didn't start level, so take that as a strong hint rather than proof.

Other studies point the same way. In a 2007 British study of 300 primary-school children, published when touch typing was rarely taught in UK schools, handwriting was faster than typing at every age, and only a small minority of 9- to 11-year-olds typed faster than they wrote. In an American study of 40 sixth-graders who had just finished a school keyboarding class, the average child typed faster than they wrote by hand.

Reading counts as well. In a 2023 study of 57 fourth-graders, how fast they read was the strongest predictor of how well they typed, in both copying and dictation, ahead of fine-motor skill and attention. For a young child, a typing test is partly a reading test.

School standards don't settle the question either. The US Common Core writing standards set keyboarding goals in pages, not speed: at least one page in a single sitting in fourth grade, two in fifth and three in sixth, without saying how long a sitting is. And the 2019 study's authors note that published speed expectations for fifth- and sixth-graders range from 4.7 to 70 WPM. If a chart gives one number per year of age, with no source and no spread, treat it as decoration.

Teenagers and adults: the phone study

Teenagers turn up in every big typing study and are almost never reported on their own. The 2018 keyboard study was full of them but published no breakdown. The one large study that splits speed by age is about phones: in 2019 the same research group had 37,370 people copy English sentences on their own phones, and reported the results by decade.

Palin and colleagues (2019): volunteers on a typing-test website, September 2018 to January 2019. Spread is the standard deviation. Nearly four in five volunteers were aged 10 to 29 and under 2% were in their fifties; over-60s were left out. Phone speeds only, so don't compare them with keyboard scores.

People aged 10 to 19 were the fastest group, even though people in their twenties reported more daily phone typing. The lead is smaller than it looks: in a subsample of 1,475 Americans chosen to match the US population, teenagers (38.0) and people in their twenties (39.0) were statistically level. From the twenties on, the average falls a few WPM with each decade, from 36.5 to 26.3 by the fifties.

Now look at the spread column. In every group it's between 9 and 14 WPM, far bigger than the step between neighbouring decades, so the age groups overlap heavily. Age moves the average; it tells you very little about any one person.

Phone speed and keyboard speed are separate skills, too. The same study found that having taken a touch-typing course on a physical keyboard made no recognisable difference to speed on a phone. A 14-year-old can manage 40 WPM with two thumbs and 15 on a laptop with nothing wrong at all: one skill has had years of daily use and the other hasn't.

Older typists on keyboards

Keyboard data shows a similar shape, with a twist. A 2021 study of 1,682 Dutch typists aged 13 to 83, most of them secondary-school and university students, found typing fastest between 21 and 30 and slowing gradually from about 30, with wide differences among the older typists. The authors add a caution that applies to every study in this guide: they compare different people at different ages, so they can't separate the effect of age from the effect of generation. Typing used to be a job for specialists; now most people start on keyboards and touchscreens as children.

The twist is encouraging. In 1984 the psychologist Timothy Salthouse tested typists aged 19 to 72, with speeds from 17 to 104 net WPM. The older typists were slower on simple tests of tapping and reaction time, as you'd expect, but they were not slower at typing. They made up for it by reading further ahead in the text and preparing keystrokes earlier. A 1993 study of 80 typists aged 21 to 71 found the same. If you've typed for decades, age takes less off your typing than it takes off your reflexes.

What matters more than age

Across these studies, the things that separate fast typists from slow ones are mostly things you can change.

The first is plain use. In a 2022 study of 1,301 French university students, average age 21.6, only 17 had ever had formal typing lessons, yet the slower third averaged 54 WPM and the faster third 80, on short sentences that flatter speed. The faster students typed for longer each day (2.4 hours against 1.7), had been typing for more years, used more fingers and looked at the keyboard less. Whether they said they'd practised deliberately to get faster made no difference. What set them apart was hours of ordinary typing.

The second is technique. In the 2018 keyboard study, people who used more fingers tended to be faster, and those who had taken a typing course were about 5 WPM faster on average than those who hadn't. Among the French students, nearly three in four of the fastest group said they rarely or never looked at the keyboard, against fewer than half of the slowest. Touch typing builds both habits on purpose, at any age; the touch typing lessons here start with F and J and build up from there.

The third is the device and the language. The average was about 36 WPM in the phone study and 52 in the keyboard study, and how to type faster on your phone covers the phone side. In the phone study, native English speakers averaged 37.8 WPM on the English sentences, against 25.6 for people who never type in English: a 12 WPM gap, about the same as the gap between teenagers and people in their fifties. For children, add reading speed.

How to compare fairly

A single test is a poor measure at any age and a worse one for children, whose scores swing with tiredness, mood and how familiar the words are. Use the same routine every time:

1. Use a one-minute test. It's long enough to absorb one bad word and short enough to hold a young child's attention.
2. Take three to five tests in a row and keep the middle score, not the best. Scores of 14, 19, 15, 17 and 16 WPM sort to 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, so the median is 16.
3. Use the same device each time, and never compare a phone score with a keyboard score.
4. Check accuracy as well as speed. If the raw speed on the results page is well above the WPM, mistakes are costing more than slow fingers.
5. Compare with last month's median, not with other people.

That last point matters because of how the "faster than X%" figure on the results page works. It places you on a curve fitted to the 2018 study: typists of all ages together, average 51.56 WPM, mostly teenagers and young adults. It isn't adjusted for age. A 10-year-old who types 16 WPM, about the end-of-year average of one of those fifth-grade groups, will see "faster than 4%". That's an accurate statement about 16 WPM among mostly older typists, and says nothing bad about a 10-year-old. A 70-year-old at 45 WPM sees "faster than 37%", against a crowd whose average age was 24.5. Profiles of children under 13 always stay private here, so a child's results aren't on show while they learn.

For a child, a better first yardstick than any chart is their own handwriting. A 2005 review of keyboarding research concluded that students need to be able to type at least as fast as they write by hand. To check, have them copy a passage by hand for one minute, count the characters including spaces and divide by five: 75 characters is 75 ÷ 5 = 15 WPM. If their typing median is below their handwriting speed, that's the gap to close first. If it's above, they've passed the first milestone.

Where to start

Take three one-minute tests today and write down the median and its accuracy; for a child, add the one-minute handwriting check. Then pick one thing to work on. If you or they still look at the keys, start lesson 1 and give it ten minutes a day. If the eyes are already up, work on accuracy, then speed, with how to type faster. Test again in a month, on the same device at the same time of day, and compare with your own number. For when and how to teach children, see typing for kids.

Sources

• Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes”, CHI 2018.
• Palin, Feit, Kim, Kristensson and Oulasvirta, “How do People Type on Mobile Devices? Observations from a Study with 37,000 Volunteers”, MobileHCI 2019 (paper and supplementary statistics).
• Donica, Giroux and Kim, “Effectiveness of Two Keyboarding Instructional Approaches on the Keyboarding Speed, Accuracy, and Technique of Elementary Students”, The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy 7(4), 2019.
• Connelly, Gee and Walsh, “A comparison of keyboarded and handwritten compositions and the relationship with transcription speed”, British Journal of Educational Psychology 77(2), 2007.
• Rogers and Case-Smith, “Relationships Between Handwriting and Keyboarding Performance of Sixth-Grade Students”, American Journal of Occupational Therapy 56(1), 2002.
• Gahshan-Haddad and Weintraub, “Underlying functions associated with keyboarding performance of elementary-school students”, Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy 30(8), 2023.
• Khoury-Shaheen and Weintraub, “Keyboarding assessments for elementary school students: Can they be uniform?”, Computers and Education Open 3, 2022.
• Freeman, Mackinnon and Miller, “Keyboarding for students with handwriting problems: a literature review”, Physical & Occupational Therapy in Pediatrics 25(1–2), 2005.
• National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers, Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, writing standards W.3.6 to W.6.6, 2010.
• Van Waes, Leijten, Roeser, Olive and Grabowski, “Measuring and Assessing Typing Skills in Writing Research”, Journal of Writing Research 13(1), 2021.
• Salthouse, “Effects of age and skill in typing”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113(3), 1984.
• Bosman, “Age-related differences in the motoric aspects of transcription typing skill”, Psychology and Aging 8(1), 1993.
• Pinet, Zielinski, Alario and Longcamp, “Typing expertise in a large student population”, Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 7, 2022.