Words per minute (WPM)
A "word" is five characters, spaces included, so long and short words are treated the same. Your WPM is the number of characters in the words you typed correctly, plus the spaces after them, divided by five and by the minutes the test took. A word with a mistake left in it does not count at all. This is your net speed.
WPM = (characters in correct words + spaces) ÷ 5 ÷ minutes
Example: in a one-minute test you type 52 words correctly with 240 characters and 52 spaces between them. That is 292 ÷ 5 = 58.4, so your speed is 58 WPM.
Raw speed (gross WPM)
Raw speed counts every character key you pressed, right or wrong, including letters you later deleted. The gap between raw speed and WPM shows how much speed your mistakes cost you. Many other tests subtract one word per uncorrected error per minute from gross speed instead; the result is similar.
Accuracy
The share of key presses that were correct when you made them. Fixing a mistake does not undo it: the wrong key still counts. That is why accuracy is the best measure of clean, controlled typing. Employers usually want 90 to 95% or better.
Consistency
We record your raw speed for every second of the test. Consistency is high when those numbers are close to each other and low when you speed up and stall. It is worked out from the coefficient of variation (standard deviation divided by the mean), squeezed into a 0 to 100% scale.
Characters
Shown as correct / incorrect / missed: letters typed right, letters typed wrong, and letters skipped
when you pressed space early. Keys pressed after the last letter of a word are not added to the word, but they
count as mistakes in your accuracy.
Keystrokes per hour (KPH)
The 10 key typing test is scored in KPH: correct keystrokes, including the Enter after each number, scaled to one hour. 150 correct keys in one minute is 9,000 KPH.
Leaderboards
Race results can be saved to the leaderboards. A saved score has to be from a full one-minute test with at least 75% accuracy, and the server checks that the speed, raw speed and second-by-second chart agree with each other. Results stay in your browser unless you save one; see the privacy notice.
What the numbers mean
See what is a good typing speed for levels by job, the average typing speed for how others type, and how to type faster to improve.
See where you stand: take the one-minute typing test.
Start the test →Questions
What is the formula for WPM?
Gross WPM = (all characters typed ÷ 5) ÷ minutes. Net WPM = gross WPM − (uncorrected errors ÷ minutes). typing-test.com goes one step stricter and counts only the characters of words typed fully correctly, plus their spaces. Try the typing speed calculator.
What is the difference between raw and net WPM?
Raw (or gross) WPM counts every key you pressed, right or wrong. Net WPM counts only correct work. The gap between the two is what your mistakes cost you.
Why is a word five characters?
It is a long-standing typing convention that makes scores comparable: long words and short words count the same, so a test full of short words does not give you a higher score.