How to Type Faster: From 40 to 60+ WPM
The fastest way to type faster is to learn touch typing, keep your accuracy at 97% or higher, and practise in short, focused daily sessions. Most people can move from the 40 WPM average to 60–80 WPM in two to three months this way. This guide lays out the exact route: ten steps that actually raise WPM, the home-row method, the 97% accuracy rule, a posture and setup check, a 15-minute daily plan with week-by-week targets, and the bad habits to break first.
Measure your starting speed with the free typing test before you begin the plan.How to Type Faster: 10 Steps That Actually Raise Your WPM
Here are the ten steps that reliably move people from the 40 WPM average toward 60–80 WPM. Everything below expands on them. 1. Learn the home row (ASDF and JKL;) and return to it after every keystroke. 2. Assign every key to one finger and never improvise. 3. Stop looking at the keyboard — keep your eyes on the screen. 4. Slow down until your accuracy hits 97%, then add speed. 5. Practise 15 minutes every day instead of one long weekly session. 6. Drill your weakest keys and most common words, not random text. 7. Type real sentences, since letter drills alone don't transfer. 8. Sit upright with your wrists floating, not planted on the desk. 9. Test your WPM weekly so progress stays visible. 10. Rest your hands, and stop when they ache.
Learn Touch Typing: Home Row and Finger Zones
Touch typing means every finger owns a fixed set of keys, so your hands stop travelling and your eyes stop checking. Rest your fingers on the home row — left hand on A, S, D, F and right hand on J, K, L and the semicolon — and find the small bumps on F and J by feel. Each finger covers the column diagonally above and below its home key: the left index handles F, R, V, G, T and B, the right index takes J, U, M, H, Y and N, and so on outward to the pinkies, which also cover Shift and Enter. Thumbs share the spacebar. It feels slower for the first week or two — that's normal and temporary. Once the map is in muscle memory, speed comes almost for free.
Accuracy Before Speed: The 97% Rule
The single biggest mistake learners make is chasing speed while typing sloppily. Every error costs two corrections' worth of time — the backspace and the retype — and worse, it trains the wrong movement. The 97% rule fixes this: type only as fast as you can while keeping accuracy at 97% or higher. If a test shows 94%, slow down; if you're holding 99%, push the pace slightly. This works because typing is muscle memory, and muscle memory records whatever you repeat, mistakes included. Practise clean, and the fast version of the movement is also clean. Practise messy, and you hit a ceiling in the 50s where your error rate eats every raw-speed gain. Net WPM — your speed after errors are deducted — is the honest number to track.
Posture, Hand Position, and Keyboard Setup
Your setup quietly caps your speed. Sit with your feet flat and your screen roughly at eye height, so you're not craning down at the keyboard — looking down is half of what keeps hunt-and-peck typists slow. Keep your elbows at around 90 degrees and let your wrists float above the desk rather than resting on it while you type; planted wrists force your fingers to stretch instead of letting your hands glide. The keyboard should sit flat or nearly flat, centred on your body. Any working keyboard is fine to learn on — consistency beats hardware — but if your laptop keys feel mushy or cramped, an external keyboard is a cheap upgrade. And keep your hands warm: cold fingers drag down both speed and accuracy.
A 15-Minute Daily Practice Plan (Week by Week)
Fifteen focused minutes a day beats a two-hour weekend session, because typing skill is built by frequent, clean repetition. Split each session simply: five minutes of warm-up on your weakest keys, eight minutes of real-sentence practice at 97% accuracy, and one 60-second test to log your score. The table below shows typical targets from a 40 WPM starting point. Treat the numbers as guides, not deadlines — people progress at very different rates, and a plateau of two or three weeks before a jump is completely normal. What matters is that the weekly test happens under identical conditions, so the trend line is honest.
| Weeks | Focus | Typical target |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Home row and finger zones, eyes off the keyboard | 97% accuracy at any speed |
| 3–4 | Full alphabet, common words and punctuation | 40 WPM at 97% accuracy |
| 5–8 | Real sentences plus a daily 60-second test | 50 WPM |
| 9–12 | 5-minute endurance runs and weak-key drills | 60+ WPM |
Bad Habits That Cap Your Speed
Four habits keep most people stuck below 50 WPM. Hunt-and-peck — typing with two to four fingers — caps you hard, because a few fingers simply can't cover the keyboard fast enough; there's no way around relearning proper fingering. Looking down at the keys forces a constant eye shuttle between keyboard and screen that costs time and breaks your reading flow. Mashing through errors — typing fast, spraying mistakes, then holding backspace — feels productive but trains sloppiness into your muscle memory. And inconsistent fingering, where the same key gets hit by whichever finger happens to be nearest, means the movement never becomes automatic. Breaking these habits temporarily drops your speed, which is exactly why most people never do it. Accept the two-week dip; the ceiling above it is far higher.