Is 40 WPM Good? An Honest Answer (Plus How to Improve Fast)

The short answer: 40 WPM is average. It is good enough for everyday computer use and many general office roles. But it falls below the threshold for most typing-specific jobs — and the gap between where you are and where you need to be is almost certainly smaller than it feels.

Here is the full picture.

What 40 WPM Means in Practice

At 40 WPM, you can type a standard 200-word email in about 5 minutes. A 1,000-word report takes roughly 25 minutes of pure typing time. That is functional — but it is also slow enough to become a bottleneck over the course of a workday.

For comparison, consider what the same document takes at higher speeds:

A typist at 60 WPM finishes that 1,000-word report in about 17 minutes. A typist at 80 WPM finishes it in about 12 minutes. Over eight hours of document-heavy work, those differences compound into significant productivity gaps.

More importantly: 40 WPM is not a fixed ceiling. It is a starting point. Most people reach 60 WPM within four to six weeks of deliberate daily practice — which is a meaningful threshold that opens up a much wider range of job options.

Is 40 WPM Good Enough for Your Job?

The honest answer depends entirely on what you need typing speed for.

Role	Minimum WPM	Is 40 WPM Enough?
General office work	35–40 WPM	✅ Borderline yes
Customer service	45–55 WPM	❌ Below requirement
Data entry	50–65 WPM	❌ Below requirement
Virtual assistant	50–60 WPM	❌ Below requirement
Transcription	65–85 WPM	❌ Well below requirement
Medical / legal	65–80 WPM	❌ Well below requirement

For purely personal use — personal emails, occasional documents, casual browsing — 40 WPM is perfectly adequate. Most people in non-typing-intensive roles never notice any limitation.

But if you are applying for remote work, administrative roles, customer service, data entry, or any position where typing appears in the job description, 40 WPM will typically place you below the minimum requirement. Employers posting remote roles often specify 50–65 WPM as the baseline, and they receive enough applicants who meet that bar that falling short is a meaningful disadvantage.

Why Most People Are Stuck at 40 WPM

The most common reason people plateau around 40 WPM is not a lack of practice — it is the wrong kind of practice. Typing emails and messages every day does improve speed up to a point, but that improvement stops once you have internalized your existing habits. If those habits include looking at the keyboard, using the wrong fingers, or tensing your wrists, more of the same practice reinforces those limits rather than breaking through them.

The other common culprit is chasing speed before accuracy. A typist who tries to go faster before their finger placement is reliable will make more errors, which reduces net WPM and trains the wrong motor patterns simultaneously. This is how people end up typing at 40–45 WPM for years without improvement despite using a keyboard every single day.

How to Go From 40 WPM to 60 WPM

The jump from 40 to 60 WPM is very achievable within four to six weeks with consistent daily practice. The key word is deliberate — random typing does not produce the same results as structured improvement.

Weeks 1–2: Home row mastery. Spend 10–15 minutes per day on pure home row drills — ASDF and JKL; — without looking at the keyboard at all. This feels slow and uncomfortable. That discomfort means it is working. The home row is the foundation of all touch typing, and until your fingers know those positions by feel, every other improvement is limited.

Week 3: Expand to the full keyboard. Once the home row is automatic, add the top and bottom rows. Focus entirely on accuracy during this phase — stay above 95% even if it means typing more slowly than feels natural. Accuracy is the bottleneck, not raw speed.

Week 4: Practice common words. The 200 most common English words make up more than half of all written text. Drilling them builds the specific transition patterns — how your fingers move between letters in real words — that actually drive speed in practice. Random letter strings do not develop the same patterns.

Weeks 5–6: Full timed tests daily. Take a complete timed test at the start of each session and record your net WPM. By this point your accuracy should be stable, and speed will climb naturally as your muscle memory consolidates. Most people following this structure reach 55–65 WPM by the end of Week 6.

The Accuracy Factor

One detail that surprises most people: improving your accuracy will often increase your visible WPM score even before your fingers actually move faster. Net WPM is calculated as gross speed minus an error penalty. Every uncorrected error subtracts from your score, and the time spent backspacing and retyping further reduces your effective output.

A typist at 40 gross WPM with 99% accuracy has a higher net WPM — and produces more usable text — than a typist at 45 gross WPM with 90% accuracy. Cleaning up accuracy is frequently the fastest path to a better score.

What to Do Right Now

Start with a baseline test. A real timed test will give you your actual current WPM — not the number you assume you are at, but where you actually are today. That number is your starting point, and having it makes the improvement plan concrete rather than abstract.

From there, 15 minutes of focused daily practice is enough. You do not need hours of work per day to move from 40 WPM to 60 WPM. You need consistency, the right technique, and a feedback loop that tells you honestly how you are improving.

The gap between 40 WPM and the 55–65 WPM range that unlocks most remote and administrative roles is typically four to six weeks of deliberate effort. That is a very short investment relative to how much faster your daily work — and your job search — will move on the other side.