The average office worker types around 40 words per minute. Professional typists hit 65 to 75. The gap between those two numbers adds up fast when you spend most of your workday at a keyboard.
If you type at 40 WPM and you bump that to 60, you save roughly 83 minutes for every 10,000 words you produce. Over a year of emails, reports, Slack messages, and documentation, that translates to weeks of recovered time.
Speed is only half the equation. Accuracy matters just as much, because every typo you fix costs you momentum and focus.
This guide covers 10 proven ways to increase your typing speed and accuracy, from foundational technique to tools that let you skip repetitive typing altogether.
How do you increase typing speed?
You increase typing speed by building proper technique first, then layering in tools and habits that eliminate wasted keystrokes. Touch typing is the foundation. Most people who feel slow lose time hunting for keys, correcting frequent errors, or retyping the same phrases dozens of times per day.
Here are the 10 methods that deliver the biggest improvements:
- Learn proper touch typing technique
- Break bad typing habits
- Practice for precision
- Focus on accuracy before speed
- Use typing tools and text expansion
- Optimize your typing environment
- Fine-tune your ergonomics
- Master keyboard shortcuts
- Set goals and track progress
- Make practice enjoyable
Tip 5 covers one of the biggest time savers: text expansion tools like TextExpander that let you skip repetitive typing entirely. But the fundamentals come first.
1. Learn proper touch typing technique
Touch typing means using all 10 fingers with each finger assigned to specific keys, without looking at the keyboard. It is the single most effective way to increase your typing speed because it eliminates the visual search that slows most people down.
Your fingers already know where the keys are. You’re fighting muscle memory from years of looking down.
Start with the home row. Place your left fingers on A, S, D, and F. Place your right fingers on J, K, L, and the semicolon key. Your thumbs rest on the space bar. Every other key on the keyboard is reached from this position, and your fingers return here after each keystroke.
Research from Aalto University found that self-taught typists who use fewer fingers can reach comparable speeds to trained touch typists on modern keyboards. The fastest typists share two traits regardless of method: they keep their hands relatively fixed rather than moving across the keyboard, and they consistently use the same finger for the same key. These consistent motor patterns become automatic with practice, which is why formal touch typing instruction remains the most reliable path to high speed.
If you never learned touch typing formally, it is worth taking two to three weeks to retrain. Your speed will drop temporarily as you build new muscle memory. Push through it. Within a month, most people exceed their previous speed and continue improving.
How to get started with touch typing
- Choose a typing tutor program that teaches finger placement (TypingClub, Keybr, and Typing.com are all free)
- Commit to 15 to 20 minutes of structured practice per day
- Resist the urge to look at the keyboard, even when you make mistakes
- Focus on accuracy first and let speed follow naturally
2. Break bad typing habits
Most self-taught typists develop habits that feel comfortable but limit their speed. The most common ones: hunt-and-peck typing, where you use two to four fingers while watching the keyboard; inconsistent finger assignments, where you use whichever finger feels closest to a key; bottoming out keys by pressing much harder than necessary; and overusing the backspace key instead of slowing down to type it right the first time.
Hunt-and-peck typing caps most people around 30 to 40 WPM because visual search adds a delay before every keystroke. Even if you feel fast, you are losing time on each key transition.
Inconsistent finger assignments create unpredictable motion paths. When you use different fingers for the same key depending on the situation, your brain cannot build reliable muscle memory. The result is hesitation, especially during fast bursts. Bottoming out keys compounds the problem. Modern keyboards register a keypress before the key reaches the bottom of its travel, so a lighter touch allows faster key-to-key movement and reduces finger fatigue over long sessions.
How to break these habits
Record yourself typing for five minutes and watch the footage. You will spot habits you did not know you had. Pay attention to which fingers you use, whether your eyes drift to the keyboard, and how hard you strike the keys.
Then pick one habit to fix at a time. If visual search is the problem, cover your keyboard with a towel or use a blank keycap set. If you bottom out every keystroke, practice with a conscious focus on lighter touches. If you can hear yourself typing across the room, you are pressing too hard. Trying to fix everything at once leads to frustration. One fix per week keeps progress steady.
3. Practice for precision
Deliberate typing practice produces the fastest results. Randomly typing paragraphs helps, but structured practice that targets your weak areas improves speed faster.
Start by identifying which keys or key combinations slow you down. Most typing programs track your accuracy by letter and highlight problem areas. Common trouble spots include less-used keys like Z, X, Q, and punctuation marks, as well as number row keys.
Drill those specific keys until they feel automatic. Then move to word-level practice using common English words and phrases. The 1,000 most common English words make up roughly 85% of everyday writing, so getting fast on those words has an outsized impact on your practical typing speed.
A simple daily practice routine
- Warm up for five minutes with home row exercises, then spend another five drilling your weakest keys
- Type full paragraphs at a comfortable pace for five minutes, aiming for zero errors
- Finish with a one-minute speed test to measure where you stand
The whole routine takes 15 to 20 minutes. Consistency beats intensity. A month of daily short sessions produces better results than two-hour marathons done sporadically.
4. Focus on accuracy before speed
This feels counterintuitive when your goal is to type faster. But accuracy forms the foundation for speed. Every error you make costs you three to five extra keystrokes to backspace, retype, and verify, which adds up to significant time loss across a full workday. The backspace key is the most-used key on most people’s keyboards, and that tells you something.
Consider the correction cost: a typist at 70 WPM with 90% accuracy makes errors on roughly every tenth word. Each error requires backspacing, retyping, and verifying, which breaks rhythm and focus. A typist at 50 WPM with 98% accuracy barely pauses for corrections and maintains a steady, productive flow. The lesson: accuracy reduces friction, and friction is what makes typing feel slow.
The practical approach: slow down until you can type a full paragraph with zero errors. Stay at that pace until it feels comfortable. Then increase speed by 5 WPM and stabilize again. This staircase method builds reliable muscle memory at each level before pushing further.
Accuracy benchmarks to aim for
If you are starting out, target 95% accuracy before worrying about speed at all. Once that feels comfortable, push for 97%, and only then start adding WPM. Advanced typists maintain 98% or higher while sustaining 60+ WPM, but that level takes months of deliberate work.
If your accuracy drops below 95% during a speed test, you are typing too fast for your current skill level. Slow down, stabilize, and build back up.
5. Use typing tools and text expansion
Technique improvements increase how fast your fingers move. But the biggest speed gains for working professionals come from reducing how much you need to type in the first place. The fastest typing is the typing you skip entirely.
Most of us type the same 50 words hundreds of times a day and never think to automate them. Email greetings, project status updates, meeting agendas, addresses, phone numbers, boilerplate responses, code blocks, URLs, standard phrases. Every time you retype something you have typed before, you waste keystrokes and time.
Text expansion: your biggest typing speed multiplier
Text expansion tools let you type a short abbreviation and instantly expand it into a full block of text. Type ;sig and your complete email signature appears. Type ;mtg and a formatted meeting agenda template fills in. Type ;addr and your full mailing address drops in wherever your cursor is. Type ;follow and a three-paragraph follow-up email writes itself.
TextExpander takes this further with Snippets that can include dynamic elements like the current date, fill-in fields for customization, formatted text, and conditional logic. A customer support rep who types 50 standard responses per day can save hours per week by expanding those responses from short abbreviations instead of typing or copy-pasting them manually.
The math is straightforward. If you have 30 phrases you use regularly and each one averages 20 words, typing those phrases manually at 60 WPM takes about 20 seconds each. With text expansion, each one takes under 2 seconds. That saves 9 minutes per cycle through all 30 phrases. Over a week of heavy communication, the savings compound into hours.
Other tools that reduce keystrokes
Autocomplete and predictive text. Operating systems and many apps now suggest completions as you type. On macOS, the built-in text replacement feature handles simple expansions. On Windows, similar functionality exists through settings. For more advanced needs, a dedicated text expansion tool offers team sharing, dynamic content, and cross-platform consistency.
When you need to get ideas down fast and plan to edit afterward, voice dictation eliminates the keyboard entirely. Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and macOS all have built-in dictation. Voice typing works especially well for first drafts and brainstorming sessions where the bottleneck is the speed of thought rather than the speed of fingers.
Clipboard managers fill a different gap. If you frequently copy and paste the same items, a clipboard manager lets you store multiple items and recall them with a keyboard shortcut, which eliminates the cycle of switching windows, copying, switching back, and pasting.
The combination of strong typing technique and smart use of tools is what separates fast typists from truly productive typists. A person who types at 60 WPM but uses text expansion for repetitive content will out-produce someone who types at 90 WPM but retypes everything from scratch.
6. Optimize your typing environment
Your keyboard, desk setup, and screen position all affect how fast and comfortably you type. Small environmental changes can remove friction you did not know was there.
Keyboard choice matters. A keyboard that matches your typing style reduces fatigue and increases speed. Mechanical keyboards with tactile switches give you physical feedback that confirms each keypress, which helps with accuracy. Low-profile keyboards reduce finger travel distance. Try different switch types if possible before committing, since personal preference varies widely.
Screen positioning is the other big factor. Your monitor should sit at eye level, roughly an arm’s length away, as recommended in Mayo Clinic’s ergonomics guide. If you look down at your screen, your neck flexes forward, which eventually leads to shoulder tension that migrates into your hands and wrists. A monitor arm or laptop stand is one of the cheapest upgrades that makes a noticeable difference. While you are adjusting your setup, position the screen perpendicular to windows rather than facing them to cut glare.
Minimize distractions. Typing speed drops when you are interrupted or multitasking. If you are working on a document that requires sustained typing, close unnecessary tabs, silence notifications, and dedicate a focused block of time.
7. Fine-tune your ergonomics
Typing speed and typing health are connected. Poor posture and wrist positioning create tension and fatigue that slow you down during long sessions and can lead to repetitive strain injuries over time. Here is what good ergonomics looks like at a desk, top to bottom.
Posture
Sit with your feet flat on the floor, knees at roughly 90 degrees, and your back supported by your chair. Your shoulders should be relaxed, not hunched up toward your ears. If you catch yourself leaning forward, your screen is likely too low or too far away.
Wrist position
Your wrists should stay neutral: not bent up, down, or to the side. Forearms roughly parallel to the floor, hands floating above the keyboard rather than resting on the desk or a wrist rest while actively typing. Use wrist rests during pauses between typing bursts, not for support during keystrokes.
Chair and desk height
Per OSHA’s computer workstation guidelines, your elbows should form an angle between 90 and 120 degrees when your hands are on the keyboard. If your desk is too high, you will shrug your shoulders to reach the keys. If it is too low, you will hunch forward. An adjustable chair or a keyboard tray can solve most height mismatches.
Take breaks
The 20-20-20 rule works well for typists: every 20 minutes, look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds. Beyond eye strain, take a short hand and wrist stretch every 30 to 45 minutes. These micro-breaks prevent the cumulative tension that causes fatigue-related slowdowns later in the day.
8. Master keyboard shortcuts
Every time you move your hand from the keyboard to the mouse, you lose one to three seconds. That does not sound like much until you realize that the average computer user reaches for the mouse hundreds of times per day. Watch someone who knows their shortcuts work through a spreadsheet or an email inbox. Their hands never leave the keyboard. It looks like a different activity.
Keyboard shortcuts keep your hands on the keys and your workflow moving. Start with the shortcuts you would use most often and build from there.
Essential shortcuts every typist should know
- Ctrl/Cmd + C, X, V: Copy, cut, paste
- Ctrl/Cmd + Z: Undo
- Ctrl/Cmd + A: Select all
- Ctrl/Cmd + F: Find text
- Ctrl/Cmd + S: Save
- Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + V: Paste without formatting, which works in most apps
- Alt + Tab / Cmd + Tab: Switch between windows
- Ctrl/Cmd + arrow keys: Jump between words
- Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + arrow keys: Select entire words
App-specific shortcuts
Every app you use frequently has shortcuts worth learning. Gmail has keyboard shortcuts for composing, archiving, and navigating. Slack has shortcuts for switching channels and searching. Your spreadsheet program has shortcuts for navigating cells and entering formulas. Your code editor has shortcuts for find-and-replace, multi-cursor editing, and jumping between files. Once these become muscle memory, the mouse starts to feel slow.
Focus on learning three to five new shortcuts per week. Write them on a sticky note near your monitor until they become automatic.
9. Set goals and track progress
Improvement without measurement is guesswork. Regular typing tests give you concrete data on your progress and help you identify what to work on next.
How to benchmark your typing speed
Take a one-minute typing test at the same time each day, using the same testing tool, for consistent results. Free options include Monkeytype, 10FastFingers, and TypingTest.com. Record both your WPM and your accuracy percentage, because speed without accuracy is misleading.
Typing speed benchmarks
Below 30 WPM puts you in hunt-and-peck territory, where touch typing instruction will produce the fastest gains. Between 30 and 40 WPM is the average casual typist. Consistent practice can push you past 50 within a month.
- 40 to 60 WPM: Average office worker range. Good enough for most work, but improvement here saves real time.
- 60 to 80 WPM: Above average. Most professional typists, writers, and programmers fall in this range.
- 80 to 100 WPM: Fast typist. Diminishing returns on raw speed begin here, so focus shifts to tools and workflows.
- 100+ WPM: Expert level. At this speed, your bottleneck is thinking, not typing.
Setting realistic goals
Aim for a 5 to 10 WPM improvement per month during active practice. This pace is sustainable and avoids the frustration of unrealistic targets. If you are at 40 WPM today, reaching 60 WPM within three to four months of consistent practice is a reasonable goal.
Track your weekly averages rather than individual test scores. Single tests vary based on the text, your energy level, and your focus. Weekly averages smooth out the noise and show your true trend. A surprising number of people give up because a bad Tuesday test score made them feel like they were not improving, when the weekly average told a different story.
10. Make practice enjoyable
The best typing improvement program is the one you actually stick with. If practice feels like a chore, you will stop doing it within two weeks regardless of how effective it is.
Turn practice into a game
Typing games add competition and variety to drill work. TypeRacer lets you race other typists in real time. Nitro Type adds a car-racing theme. ZType turns typing into a space shooter where you destroy enemies by typing words. Epistory goes further, building an entire adventure game around typing mechanics. These games keep practice engaging while building the same skills as traditional drills.
Type things you care about
Practice by typing passages from books you enjoy, song lyrics, or articles in your field. When the content is interesting, practice does not feel like work. Some typing programs let you import custom text, so you can practice with your own material.
Build typing into your daily work
You do not always need dedicated practice sessions. Commit to keeping your hands in proper position during regular work and resist the urge to look at the keyboard during emails. Try typing Slack messages without using backspace. These micro-commitments build skill throughout the day without requiring extra time.
Track streaks
Consistency matters more than perfection. Track how many consecutive days you practice and aim to keep the streak alive. Even five minutes on a busy day counts.
Related resources
- What Are Text Snippets?
- Best Macros Software for Repetitive Tasks
- Text Replacement Tips and Tricks
- Essential Keyboard Shortcuts
- TextExpander for Teams
Frequently asked questions
What is a good typing speed?
A good typing speed depends on your work. For general office work, 50 to 60 WPM with high accuracy is solid. For roles that involve heavy writing, like journalism, content creation, or programming, 70 to 80 WPM gives you a meaningful productivity advantage. Professional transcriptionists and court reporters often exceed 100 WPM. The most important thing is that your speed matches your workload. If typing feels like a bottleneck in your day, you have room to improve.
How can I type faster without looking at the keyboard?
Start by memorizing the home row position: left hand on A, S, D, F and right hand on J, K, L, semicolon. Most keyboards have a small raised bump on the F and J keys so you can find home position by touch. Practice keeping your eyes on the screen while typing familiar words. Use a typing tutor program that shows you which finger to use for each key. Cover your keyboard with a cloth if you need to break the habit of looking down. Within two to three weeks of daily practice, your fingers will find the right keys automatically.
Does typing speed matter for productivity at work?
Yes, for anyone who spends a significant portion of their day at a keyboard. Consider how much you type in a typical workday: emails, chat messages, documents, and other communication add up quickly. Even a conservative estimate of 5,000 words per day shows how quickly typing speed differences compound. At 40 WPM, that takes roughly 125 minutes of active typing time. At 60 WPM, it takes about 83 minutes. That 42-minute daily difference adds up to over 3 hours per week. Beyond raw speed, reducing typos saves additional time on corrections and avoids miscommunication in professional settings.
What is text expansion and how does it help with typing speed?
Text expansion is a productivity technique where you type a short abbreviation and it automatically expands into a longer piece of text. For example, you type ;ty and it expands into “Thank you for reaching out. I’ll look into this and get back to you by end of day.” Instead of typing 20 words, you type 3 characters. Tools like TextExpander let you create libraries of these Snippets for your most-used phrases, email templates, code blocks, and standard responses. Teams can share Snippet libraries to keep everyone consistent. For professionals who send repetitive messages throughout the day, text expansion often saves more time than improving raw typing speed.
Start typing faster today
The tips above build on each other: technique gives you the foundation, tools eliminate wasted keystrokes, and smart habits keep you improving. If repetitive typing eats into your workday, try TextExpander free and see how much time you recover when your most-used phrases expand from a single abbreviation.
