SPEED BY PROFESSION
What typing speed do jobs actually require?
Around 40 words per minute clears the bar for most office work, and past 80 the extra speed almost never reaches your output. The figures below are what specific roles ask for, and in most of them accuracy is the number that decides it.
The number most jobs actually want
Around 40 words per minute clears the bar for the overwhelming majority of office work. Above about 60 you are faster than nearly everyone you work with, and past 80 the extra speed almost never touches your output, because the constraint has moved to deciding what to write.
Job adverts quote typing speeds far more often than anyone tests them, which is worth keeping in mind when you read the table.
By role
These are typical expectations, and local practice varies. Where a range is given, the lower figure is usually enough to be hired and the upper is what experienced people in the role reach.
| Role | Typical requirement | What is really being asked |
|---|---|---|
| General office and admin | 35 to 45 wpm | Rarely tested. Enough that typing is not the slow part of your day |
| Data entry | 50 to 70 wpm, often quoted as 8,000 to 10,000 keystrokes per hour | Accuracy above 98 percent, and number pad fluency more than prose speed |
| Customer support and live chat | 50 to 65 wpm | Holding two or three conversations at once without visible delay |
| Medical and legal transcription | 65 to 90 wpm | Sustained speed with near perfect accuracy on specialist vocabulary |
| Court reporting and live captioning | 180 to 225 wpm | A different instrument entirely, not a keyboard. See below |
| Journalism and copywriting | 50 to 70 wpm | Typing at the speed you think, so the sentence does not escape while you type it |
| Software development | No requirement, 60 plus is comfortable | Symbols, navigation and editing speed matter far more than prose wpm |
| Programme and executive assistants | 60 to 80 wpm | Minute-taking in real time, which is the hardest ordinary typing task there is |
Why court reporters are not comparable
The 200 word per minute figure quoted for court reporting causes a lot of unnecessary despair, and it should not, because it is not the same activity.
Stenographers use a stenotype machine with around 22 keys, pressed in chords. One simultaneous press produces a whole syllable or a whole word, so the number of physical actions per minute is far lower than the word count implies. Certification in the United States requires around 225 words per minute on testimony at 95 percent accuracy, and it typically takes two to four years of training.
Nobody reaches those speeds on a QWERTY keyboard. The realistic maximum for a conventional keyboard on unseen text is somewhere around 120 to 150 words per minute for exceptional typists, and world records on prepared text sit higher still but are not a working speed.
What employers measure that is not speed
If you are being tested for a role, the number on its own is rarely the thing that decides it.
- Accuracy, and it is usually a hard floor. Data entry roles commonly require 98 or 99 percent, and a fast candidate at 94 percent will fail where a slower one at 99 passes. In transcription the error costs someone else's time to find and fix, which is why the standard is so high.
- Keystrokes per hour rather than words per minute. Common in data entry because much of the input is numbers, where the five characters per word convention stops meaning anything. Roughly, 10,000 keystrokes per hour is in the region of 33 words per minute sustained across a full hour, and sustaining it is the difficult part.
- Alphanumeric speed separately from prose. Some tests report both, because someone fluent in English text can be dramatically slower on a column of reference codes.
- Whether you can hold it for an hour. A one minute test measures your peak. Real work measures your average, and most people's average is well below their peak.
Test the way you will be tested. If a job quotes keystrokes per hour, practise on the kind of material the job involves rather than on prose. Someone who types 70 words per minute of English can easily drop under 40 on a spreadsheet of part numbers, and the number row is usually the reason. That is a two week fix.
How to prepare for a typing test
Most employment typing tests share a few properties, and knowing them is worth several words per minute on the day.
- Find out whether backspace is allowed. Some tests block it and count every error against you. If corrections are permitted, correcting is nearly always the better choice, because an uncorrected error usually costs more than the time to fix it.
- Type at about 90 percent of your maximum. Your best score comes from the speed where you rarely miss, not from your peak. The arithmetic on that is here, and it consistently surprises people.
- Warm up first. Five minutes of ordinary typing before a test is worth a few words per minute, for the same reason as in anything physical.
- Practise on the same keyboard you will use. If the test is on site you cannot, so get used to more than one keyboard beforehand.
If you are below the bar
Going from 30 to 50 words per minute is a matter of weeks rather than months, and it is the range where improvement comes fastest, because the fundamentals are usually what is missing. If you do not touch type at all, that is the place to start and it is worth the fortnight of being slower. If you touch type already, accuracy and your own weak keys are where the time is hiding.
And a note of perspective. Typing speed appears on job descriptions far more often than it is genuinely a limiting factor. It is easy to specify and easy to test, which is not the same as being important. Clearing the bar comfortably is worth doing. Optimising well past it is a hobby, which is a fine thing for it to be.
Accuracy is what gets tested
KEYSTORM scores accuracy above raw speed, and shows you where the errors come from.
Play KEYSTORM