Typing · 5 min
Five Minute Typing Test
Five minutes. The closest thing here to real work.
Start typing. The timer starts on your first keystroke.
man my come came do you point have about write kind find other big long right even where write you hand where word two man into little only for play America may live land study live there even an too home an follow could good study answer these number of and oil make there a help its home world get not sentence so a which away around year it want look would
Click here or start typing
What this measures
Five minutes is the closest this site gets to what typing actually feels like at work. Posture, breathing and how tense your shoulders are all start to matter, and none of them show up in a fifteen-second test.
Expect your score to be lower than your thirty-second number, and treat that gap as useful information rather than a disappointment. It is the difference between what you can do and what you can keep doing.
This is the variant to use if you are training for a transcription role or preparing for a long assessment.
What is a good typing test score
| Band | Score | Percentile |
|---|---|---|
| Top 1% | ≥ 120 WPM | 99th |
| Top 5% | ≥ 95 WPM | 95th |
| Top 15% | ≥ 80 WPM | 85th |
| Top 30% | ≥ 65 WPM | 70th |
| Median | ≥ 52 WPM | 50th |
| Bottom 25% | ≥ 40 WPM | 25th |
| Bottom 10% | ≥ 30 WPM | 10th |
Bands follow Dhakal et al., CHI 2018 — 136 million keystrokes from 168,000 typists, mean 51.56 WPM.
Full typing test statistics, by age and device →
Questions
Why is my five minute score lower?
Because sustained typing is a different task from a sprint. Concentration slips, posture degrades, and small errors accumulate. The gap between your short and long scores is your typing endurance.
What is a good typing speed?
The average across a large research sample is about 52 WPM. Above 65 is faster than 70% of typists, above 80 is top 15%, and above 95 is top 5%. Professional transcriptionists work at 90 to 120.
What is the difference between net and raw WPM?
Raw WPM counts every keystroke you made. Net WPM subtracts the errors you left uncorrected. Net is the honest figure, and it is what employers mean when they ask for a typing speed.
How is a word counted?
As five characters including spaces, the standard used in typing research for a century. It makes results comparable across languages and across texts of different word lengths.
What is consistency?
How much your speed varied from second to second during the test. A high figure means you held a steady pace; a low one means you had bursts and stalls, which usually points to specific keys giving you trouble.
Does the keyboard layout matter?
Less than people claim. Alternative layouts such as Dvorak and Colemak show small gains in controlled studies, and most of the speed difference between typists comes from practice and technique rather than layout.
Try next
Results are stored in your browser only. Read how we measure if you want the details of the timing, or go back to the standard typing test.