Ask "is my typing speed good" and the honest answer is: good for what? A novelist drafting at 40 words per minute is doing fine. A data-entry clerk at 40 WPM would struggle to keep a job. Speed only means something next to a baseline, so here's where the real benchmarks sit and why your number can shift depending on how you measure it.
What counts as slow, average, and fast
Most adults who type regularly land somewhere between 35 and 45 WPM when typing normal text, not copying a passage verbatim. That's the realistic average for someone who didn't specifically train on a keyboard -- it's slower than people assume, because everyday typing involves pauses to think, not just finger movement.
Touch typists who learned proper technique, or anyone who types for a living, typically sit in the 50-70 WPM range. Professional typists, transcriptionists, and competitive typists regularly clear 80-100+ WPM, and the recognized world-record pace is well over 200 WPM on short bursts -- but that's an extreme outlier, not a target to feel bad about missing.
So to answer the question directly: 60 WPM is comfortably above the average adult and solidly in touch-typist territory. It's not exceptional, but it's good -- good enough that speed stops being your bottleneck for most office and writing work.
Why two typing tests can disagree
Run the same person through two different typing tests and you can get two different scores, and it's not random. A few things change the number:
- Gross WPM vs. net WPM. Gross speed counts every keystroke you typed, errors included. Net speed subtracts a penalty for mistakes (commonly a fixed deduction per error). A fast, sloppy typist can post a high gross number and a much lower net one.
- Test length. Short bursts (15-30 seconds) favor people who can sprint but tire or lose focus over longer stretches. A two-minute test rewards sustained accuracy more than a quick burst does.
- Familiar text vs. random text. Typing a passage with common words and predictable sentence structure is faster than typing random characters, numbers, or unfamiliar vocabulary, because your fingers are partly anticipating what's coming.
- Physical keyboard and layout. A cramped laptop keyboard, a different key layout, or an unfamiliar device can cost several WPM even if your underlying skill hasn't changed.
None of this means a test is "wrong" -- it means WPM is a measurement of a specific task under specific conditions, not a fixed trait you carry around.
Why accuracy matters more than raw speed
A typist who hits 70 WPM with 85% accuracy is, in practical terms, slower than one who hits 55 WPM at 98% accuracy -- because every error has to be noticed and fixed, and fixing costs more time than typing the correct character would have in the first place. This is why most real typing tests report both numbers together instead of speed alone, and why net WPM (speed minus an error penalty) is the more honest figure for anything other than casual self-tracking.
If you're trying to actually improve, accuracy is also the cheaper thing to fix. Slowing down by 10-15% to eliminate most errors usually raises your net WPM faster than trying to type the same mistakes faster.
What's actually worth improving
If your job or your goals depend on typing speed, the fastest gains usually come from:
- Learning (or relearning) proper finger placement, so you're not hunting for keys with your eyes.
- Reducing look-backs at the screen to check what you just typed -- trust the keystroke and keep moving.
- Practicing on text similar to what you actually type (code, prose, numbers) rather than generic passages, since muscle memory is somewhat content-specific.
- Testing regularly with the same method so your numbers are comparable over time, rather than jumping between different tests and being confused by the variance.
Check your own numbers
If you want a real baseline instead of a guess, type a passage and see your actual words-per-minute and accuracy with the Typing Speed Test. Run it a few times across different sessions -- a single result tells you more than a one-off attempt, and a trend tells you more than either.