Typing speed test

What’s a good typing speed?

Most people land between 35 and 45 WPM. Office professionals who type all day average around 50, and anything above 80 puts you in the top few percent of typists.

Speed alone isn’t the whole story, though. A hurried run at 85% accuracy produces slower, messier writing than a steady one at 98% — the errors all come back as correction time.

How the score is calculated

The headline number is net WPM: every character in a correctly typed word — plus the space that follows it — counted in blocks of five, divided by the minutes you typed. Five characters is the standardised “word”, which is how short words and long ones balance out.

Accuracy is character-level: every character you enter is compared against the one the text expected, so mistakes you notice and fix still count against it. That’s why accuracy here tends to sit a little lower than on tests that only check the final text.

The test runs entirely in your browser. Keystrokes never leave your machine, and your best score is stored only on your device — the same principle Nextline itself is built on: its language model runs locally on your Mac.

How to type faster

1. Accuracy first. Speed is a byproduct of clean strokes. An error costs more time to notice and fix than a slightly slower, correct keystroke would have taken.
2. Live on the home row. Every reach should start and end there. If your hands drift, your fingers spend their time finding keys instead of pressing them.
3. Stop looking at the keyboard. Eyes on the words. Glancing down breaks your place in the sentence, and the round trip costs more than any key it saves.
4. Short daily runs beat marathons. Two or three one-minute tests a day move your speed more than an hour of grinding once a week.

Past 80 WPM, stop typing faster — type less

There’s a ceiling on fingers. The fastest typists in the world top out around 200 WPM, and getting anywhere near it takes years of deliberate practice — for a skill your email doesn’t actually reward. Past a point, the way to write faster isn’t pressing keys faster. It’s pressing fewer of them.

That’s what Nextline is for: it predicts the rest of your sentence as you write — in Mail, Slack, your browser, any Mac text field — and you accept it with Tab. The next line, before you type it. Download it for your Mac and watch the test up there stop mattering.