Short answer: Yes, 70 WPM is good. It sits well above the 40 WPM average for adults and is faster than most office workers. At 70 words per minute you clear the bar for nearly every job that lists a typing requirement, and you type quickly enough that the keyboard rarely slows your thinking.
If you just took a typing test and landed on 70 words per minute, you are probably wondering whether that number is something to be proud of or something to fix. The short version: 70 WPM is a genuinely strong result. But "good" depends on what you are comparing against and what you need typing for, so let us put 70 WPM in proper context.
What the 70 WPM Number Actually Means
Typing speed is measured in words per minute, where a "word" is standardized to five characters including spaces and punctuation. This standard exists so that "I" and "international" do not count the same. When a test reports 70 WPM, it usually means net WPM, which is gross typing speed minus a penalty for errors. So 70 net WPM already accounts for mistakes you made and corrected along the way.
That detail matters. Someone who hammers the keyboard at 90 gross WPM but makes constant errors might end up at 70 net WPM after the penalty. Someone slower and more careful might hit the same 70 with almost no corrections. Both land at 70, but the careful typist has a more usable, sustainable speed because they are not constantly backing up to fix things.
It is also worth knowing how test conditions inflate or deflate the number. A test using common, familiar words will give you a higher reading than one full of unusual vocabulary, numbers, and punctuation. The same person can easily score 75 on an easy word list and 60 on a passage with dense punctuation. So when you say "I type 70 WPM," the honest version is "I type around 70 WPM on typical text," and that is the figure worth comparing against the benchmarks below.
How 70 WPM Compares to Average
Here is the context that makes 70 WPM look good:
- The average adult types around 40 WPM. At 70, you are roughly 75% faster than the typical person.
- Most professional office workers land in the 50-65 WPM range. You are at the top of that band or just past it.
- Professional typists and data-entry specialists average 80-100 WPM. This is the tier above you, and it is reachable with focused practice.
- The fastest competitive typists exceed 150 WPM, but that level requires obsessive training and is far beyond what any normal job needs.
So 70 WPM places you comfortably above average, near the ceiling of normal office proficiency, and within striking distance of professional speed. For the overwhelming majority of people and jobs, that is more than good enough.
Is 70 WPM Good Enough for a Job?
This is the question most people are really asking. The answer is almost always yes.
Typical typing requirements by role look like this:
- General office and administrative work: 40-50 WPM is usually the listed minimum. You clear this easily.
- Customer support and live chat: 50-60 WPM is often preferred so agents can keep up with conversations. 70 is comfortable.
- Data entry and transcription: 60-80 WPM with high accuracy. You are right in the target zone.
- Legal and medical secretarial work: 70-80 WPM is often the benchmark. You meet it.
- Court reporting and specialized stenography: 200+ WPM, but that uses a special machine and shorthand system, not a standard keyboard. It is a different skill entirely.
Unless you are pursuing one of those specialist stenography careers, 70 WPM satisfies essentially every typing requirement an employer will put in front of you. If a posting asks for "fast and accurate typing," you have it.
70 WPM in Different Contexts
"Good" is relative to who is asking. The same 70 WPM reads differently depending on the context you are measuring it in.
For a student
If you are a student, 70 WPM is excellent. It means you can take notes nearly as fast as a lecturer talks, draft essays without the keyboard becoming the bottleneck, and breeze through online exams that involve typed answers. Most of your peers are slower, so you have a real, practical edge in any timed, text-heavy task.
For an office professional
In an office context, 70 WPM puts you at the upper end of normal. You are not the fastest person in the building, but you are faster than the typical colleague, and crucially you are fast enough that typing is no longer the limiting factor on how much you get done. Emails, reports, and chat keep pace with your thinking.
For a gamer or programmer
For gaming, 70 WPM is plenty for fast in-game chat and commands. For programming, raw WPM matters less than you would think, because coding is more about thinking and navigating than sustained prose. Still, 70 WPM means you are never waiting on your fingers when you do need to type out a comment, commit message, or block of documentation.
For a typing test enthusiast
If you are someone who enjoys typing tests for their own sake, 70 WPM is a respectable score that puts you ahead of the casual crowd but leaves clear room to chase higher numbers. It is a satisfying place to be: good enough to feel accomplished, with a visible path upward if you want it.
How Long Does It Take to Reach 70 WPM?
If you are reading this because you want to get to 70 rather than because you are already there, here is a realistic timeline. Someone starting from hunt-and-peck, around 25-30 WPM, can usually reach 70 WPM with two to three months of consistent practice, meaning fifteen to twenty focused minutes most days. The single biggest accelerator is committing to touch typing and refusing to look at the keys, even though it feels slower at first.
The progression tends to go in stages. You climb quickly from 30 to 50 as touch typing clicks into place, then more gradually from 50 to 70 as muscle memory deepens. Plateaus are normal and not a sign you have hit your limit. They usually break when you switch from raw speed drills to practicing real, varied text with punctuation and capitalization.
The Accuracy Factor Most People Ignore
Raw speed is only half the story. A 70 WPM result with 99% accuracy is far more valuable than 70 WPM with 92% accuracy. Why? Because errors compound. Every mistake breaks your flow, forces a correction, and in real work can slip through into a sent email or a saved record.
Employers who test typing usually care more about accuracy than peak speed. A steady, accurate 70 WPM beats an erratic 85 WPM that needs constant cleanup. If you are at 70 and want to improve, push accuracy first. Clean, error-free typing at 70 is professional-grade.
How to Push Past 70 WPM
If you want to climb from 70 toward the 80-90 range, the path is well understood:
- Touch type without looking. If you still glance at the keyboard even occasionally, fixing that alone can add 10-15 WPM over time.
- Train your weak keys. Adaptive tools generate drills that target the specific letters and combinations that slow you down.
- Practice real text, not just word lists. Punctuation, capitalization, and numbers are where speed leaks out. Practicing full sentences keeps you honest.
- Stay relaxed. Tension in the hands and shoulders quietly caps your speed. Loose hands move faster.
- Be consistent. Fifteen focused minutes a day beats a two-hour binge once a week.
Most people who commit to short daily practice can move from 70 to 85 WPM within a couple of months. The gains slow down after that. Getting from 85 to 100 takes far more work than getting from 70 to 85, and beyond 100 the returns shrink dramatically.
The Ceiling Nobody Talks About
Here is the uncomfortable truth about typing speed: there is a hard ceiling, and it is lower than you think. For most people, the practical maximum sits somewhere around 100-120 WPM. Beyond that, you are fighting human motor limits, and the training required is wildly disproportionate to the benefit.
So suppose you do everything right and grind your way from 70 to 90 WPM over six months of practice. That is a real, respectable improvement. But step back and ask what you actually gained. You can now produce text about 30% faster than before, and you spent dozens of hours getting there.
Now compare that to how fast you already communicate without any keyboard at all.
The 150 WPM You Already Have
You speak at roughly 130-150 words per minute. You have done so since childhood, with zero practice, in every conversation you have ever had. That is more than double a strong 70 WPM typing speed, and you did not train for a single minute to get there.
This is the gap that voice dictation closes. Modern speech recognition has become accurate and fast enough that speaking your text is now a practical everyday alternative to typing it. Instead of training for months to add 20 WPM to your keyboard speed, you can switch to a tool that lets you produce text at the speed you already talk.
Voice Keyboard Pro is built for exactly this. On the Mac, it lives in your menu bar. You hold a hotkey, speak, and release, and your words appear at the cursor in whatever app you are using, in under a second. On iPhone, it is a custom keyboard with a built-in mic button, so you can dictate into any app instead of thumb-typing. Powered by Voice Keyboard Pro's advanced AI transcription, it is accurate enough to trust with real emails, documents, and messages.
None of this means your 70 WPM is wasted. Keyboard skill still matters for coding, editing, spreadsheets, and the precise navigation that voice does not handle well. But for the bulk of what most people produce every day, plain prose in emails, notes, chats, and drafts, your voice is simply faster than your fingers will ever be.
Months of typing practice might take you from 70 to 90 WPM. Your voice runs at 150 WPM today, untrained.
So, Is 70 WPM Good?
Yes. Without hedging, 70 WPM is a good, above-average typing speed that meets the requirements of nearly every job and lets the keyboard keep pace with most of your thinking. If you enjoy improving it, by all means train toward 85 or 90. The skill is real and the practice pays off.
But if your goal is not "type faster" so much as "get the words out of my head faster," there is a shortcut that no amount of typing practice can match. Voice Keyboard Pro has a free tier, so you can dictate your next few emails and feel the difference between 70 typed words a minute and 150 spoken ones. The number on your typing test is good. Your voice is just faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is 70 WPM fast for a 13-year-old?
Yes, very. Most teenagers type well below 70 WPM, and many adults never reach it. A 13-year-old typing at 70 is comfortably ahead of the curve for their age and ahead of plenty of working adults too.
Is 70 WPM good enough to be a transcriptionist?
It is on the edge. General transcription work often looks for 60-80 WPM with high accuracy, so 70 qualifies for many roles, especially if your accuracy is strong. Specialized real-time transcription and court reporting use dedicated stenotype machines and demand far higher effective speeds, but those are separate professions with their own equipment.
What percentile is 70 WPM?
While exact percentiles vary by the population tested, 70 WPM generally lands well into the upper range of everyday typists. Against the roughly 40 WPM average for adults, you are typing about 75% faster than the median person, which places you near the top of the ordinary distribution, below only trained professional and competitive typists.
Should I keep practicing past 70 WPM?
Only if you enjoy it or a specific goal requires it. The returns shrink past 70, and for most real-world purposes 70 WPM is already more than adequate. If your underlying aim is to produce text faster overall, your time is better spent learning to dictate than grinding out another 15 WPM on the keyboard.