How many words per minute does an average person type?

How to get close to this number

Time yourself mentally. Most people can type a short sentence in ten or fifteen seconds, which works out to a few dozen words a minute sustained. Self-measurement is available here and it is accurate, which makes this one of the easier questions on the site to reason about rather than recall.

The spread in the explanation is where the interest lies. Professionals reach twice the average and the record is five times it, which is a wider range than most physical skills produce — typing rewards training far more than it rewards natural aptitude, and the gap between an untrained and a trained typist is enormous.

The phone figure is the genuinely surprising one: around thirty-six words a minute on a touchscreen, remarkably close to a full-size keyboard. Predictive text and swipe input have closed a gap that seemed permanent, which means the keyboard's advantage now lies in comfort and error rate rather than in raw speed.