You ran a typing test, scored 40 words per minute, and now you are sitting on a webpage wondering whether that number is good, bad, or somewhere in between. The honest answer is the one most articles dance around: 40 WPM is not slow. It is also not fast. It is, almost exactly, the adult average.
That answer is not very satisfying on its own. So let us go deeper — what 40 WPM actually means in context, where it lands across different jobs and life stages, whether you should bother trying to improve it, and what the alternative looks like if you decide the whole exercise of practicing typing is not the best use of your time.
What 40 WPM Actually Means
Words per minute is a measurement, not a judgment. It counts how many standardized "words" (typically five characters including spaces) you can correctly produce in sixty seconds. The number tells you something useful, but only when you compare it to a reference point.
Here is the reference point that matters most: the adult average for typing speed sits right around 40 WPM. Some sources put it slightly higher, some slightly lower, but 40 is the figure most often cited as the typical baseline for someone who uses a keyboard regularly without having ever formally trained for speed.
That means if you tested at 40 WPM, you are not below average. You are average. Half the keyboard-using population is slower than you, and half is faster. You are exactly in the middle of the bell curve.
Slow Compared to What?
Whether 40 WPM feels slow depends entirely on the comparison you are making.
Compared to a hunt-and-peck typist: 40 WPM is genuinely fast. People who look at the keyboard while typing and use two to four fingers usually top out somewhere between 20 and 30 WPM. If you can hit 40, you are typing more efficiently than the average non-touch-typist.
Compared to a competent touch typist: 40 WPM is on the slow side. People who learned proper touch typing in school or through deliberate practice usually settle around 50 to 70 WPM as a comfortable working speed. From this perspective, 40 WPM suggests either incomplete touch typing form or just less time at the keyboard.
Compared to a professional typist: 40 WPM is slow. Court reporters, transcriptionists, and dedicated data entry workers can sustain 80 to 100 WPM, and the fastest can push beyond that. But these are highly trained specialists, not a fair comparison group.
Compared to your spoken language: 40 WPM is glacial. You speak in normal conversation at roughly 130 to 150 words per minute. We will come back to this point.
40 WPM by Job Category
The relevant question is not whether 40 WPM is fast in the abstract. It is whether 40 WPM is fast enough for what you actually do with a keyboard. Here is a rough map of where 40 WPM lands across common job categories.
Most office work: comfortably sufficient
The majority of office jobs do not require fast typing. Email, reports, slide decks, spreadsheets — these involve a lot of thinking, pausing, formatting, and editing. The bottleneck is rarely the speed of your fingers. 40 WPM is fine for accountants, project managers, marketers, designers, lawyers, engineers, executives, and most knowledge workers.
If you spend two hours a day actually putting words on a screen and the rest reading, meeting, or thinking, then increasing your speed from 40 to 60 WPM saves you maybe twenty minutes a day at best. That is not nothing, but it is also not a career-changing improvement.
Customer service and support: borderline
Live chat support, ticket handling, and customer service often have unofficial speed expectations. Reps who type faster can handle more conversations simultaneously. 40 WPM is workable but on the slow end — most support workflows reward typists in the 50 to 70 WPM range.
Transcription and captioning: too slow
Live transcription requires real-time speed because spoken English moves at 130-150 WPM. Even with the ability to pause and rewind audio, professional transcribers usually need 70 WPM minimum to keep up productively, and 90 WPM or above to make it a viable career. 40 WPM disqualifies you from this kind of work.
Court reporting and stenography: nowhere near
Court reporters using stenotype machines work at 200 to 280 WPM. This is a specialist skill that requires years of training on a chorded keyboard. 40 WPM on a standard keyboard is not in the same conversation.
Programming: surprisingly fine
Programmers often assume they need to type fast. They mostly do not. Code is dense with thinking, debugging, and reading — the actual finger-on-key time is small. Plenty of senior engineers type at 40 WPM and have never felt limited by it. The bottleneck in software work is almost never typing speed.
Writing (journalism, copywriting, fiction): situational
For writing where the words flow easily, 40 WPM is the constraint. You think faster than you can type, and that mismatch becomes frustrating. For writing where each sentence requires deliberation, 40 WPM is plenty. Most writers report that the bottleneck is composition, not typing speed — until it suddenly is not, and they are trying to get a half-formed paragraph out before they lose it.
Should You Try to Improve from 40 WPM?
This is where the honest answer gets uncomfortable. The truthful response to "should I improve my typing speed from 40 WPM" is: it depends, and probably not as much as you think.
The realistic improvement curve
Going from 40 to 60 WPM is achievable for most people with consistent practice. Fifteen to thirty minutes a day on a typing tutor, every day, for two to three months, will usually produce a 20 WPM bump. That is not magic — it is just deliberate practice closing the gap between your current habits and proper touch typing form.
Going from 60 to 80 WPM is harder. It takes another three to six months of focused practice, and many people plateau short of 80. The diminishing returns kick in fast.
Going from 80 to 100 WPM is genuinely difficult. It requires sustained training, perfect technique, and often a re-examination of your keyboard, posture, and even letter-by-letter habits. Most people who reach 80 WPM never push much past it because the additional gains stop justifying the effort.
The opportunity cost
Here is the cost-benefit calculation nobody does. Suppose you commit to fifteen minutes of typing practice every day for six months. That is roughly 45 hours of practice. In return, you might go from 40 WPM to 60 WPM.
What does that 20 WPM improvement buy you? If you type 1,000 words a day on average (which is a lot — most people produce far less), the speed boost saves you about eight minutes a day. Over a year, that is roughly 50 hours saved.
You invested 45 hours to save 50 hours in year one. After that, the savings compound — every year you keep using the faster speed, you save 50 hours. So the long-term return is real. But the return is also smaller than people imagine, and it takes serious commitment to realize.
When it is worth doing
If you genuinely type a lot — more than two or three hours a day of pure text production — improving from 40 WPM is worth the time investment. The hours add up.
If your typing form is bad (hunt and peck, looking at the keyboard, only using a few fingers), learning proper touch typing is worth it regardless of speed. Touch typing reduces strain, improves ergonomics, and lets you keep your eyes on the screen. The speed boost is a side effect.
If you experience pain or fatigue from typing, learning better technique is medically valuable, not just productively useful.
When it is not worth doing
If you only put in an hour or two of actual typing per day, going from 40 to 60 WPM saves you ten minutes. There are higher-leverage ways to spend six months of effort.
If your work requires careful thought between sentences — coding, legal drafting, technical writing — the keyboard is rarely your bottleneck. Faster fingers will not make you a better writer or engineer.
And if your real goal is just to get text out of your head and onto the screen faster, there is a different path that does not involve typing practice at all.
The Math That Changes Everything
Hold the typing improvement question to one side for a moment and look at a different number.
Comfortable conversational speech runs at roughly 130 to 150 words per minute. That is a well-documented baseline across decades of speech research. It is the speed at which people naturally talk when they are explaining something to a friend — not racing, not lecturing, just talking.
You can do that right now. Today. No practice required. You have been talking at 130+ WPM since you were six years old.
So compare your two options:
- Option A: Six months of daily typing practice to go from 40 WPM to 60 WPM. Net gain: 20 WPM.
- Option B: Use voice dictation. Net gain: roughly 90-110 WPM, available today, no practice required.
The asymmetry is enormous. Practice gets you a small incremental boost over months. Voice gets you 3x the speed in zero seconds.
For decades, this comparison was not relevant because voice dictation did not work well enough. Speech recognition was slow, inaccurate, and clunky. So the only realistic way to type faster was to type faster. That has changed.
What Voice Dictation Looks Like Now
Modern speech recognition — specifically, the AI-driven models from companies like OpenAI — is fast and accurate enough that voice dictation is genuinely competitive with typing for everyday text. Accuracy stays above 95% for most speakers, even with accents and moderate background noise. Latency runs under a second. Punctuation handling has gotten dramatically better.
The output looks like this paragraph: a normal paragraph, with proper sentences, commas, line breaks, and a finished feel. Not "ums" and "uhs" littered through your sentences. Not transcribed garbage that needs heavy editing.
Voice Keyboard Pro is one of the easier ways to use this on a Mac. It lives in your menu bar, weighs about 1.7MB, and works system-wide. You hold a hotkey, speak, release, and text appears at your cursor — in your email, in Notion, in Slack, in your code editor. It does not matter what app you are in. The hotkey is the same.
It uses the Voice Keyboard Pro Whisper API for fast cloud transcription, with an offline mode powered by Apple Speech for when you do not have a connection or do not want audio leaving your machine. Audio is never stored on servers. There is a free tier; Pro is $4.99/month or $34.99/year. There is also an iPhone keyboard that works the same way, so the dictation experience travels with you.
The honest answer to "is 40 WPM slow" is no. The honest follow-up is: it does not matter, because the keyboard is no longer the fastest way to get words on screen.
The Reframe
So here is the answer to your original question, in full.
Is 40 WPM slow? No. It is the adult average. You are not behind anyone — you are right in the middle.
Should you try to improve it? Maybe. If you type a lot, yes. If you do not, the return on investment is modest. If you want to learn proper touch typing form, that is worthwhile for its own sake. If you just want to put text on a screen faster, there is a better lever to pull.
Should you try voice dictation? If you have not in the last year or two, almost certainly yes. The technology has changed enough that the answer is different now than it was even a few years ago. Try dictating your next long email or message. You will likely be surprised — both by how much faster it is, and by how natural the finished text reads.
40 WPM is not slow. It is just the wrong layer to be optimizing. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier — try it on a message or document and see how it compares. The difference is not subtle.