Quick answers to the questions we hear most often. If you don't see yours here, head to about → contact or send a bug report.
40 WPM is the average for adult typists in their native language. 60 WPM is the threshold of solid touch typing, where the keyboard stops being the bottleneck between thought and screen. 80+ WPM is fast — you can transcribe a phone call in real time. 100+ WPM puts you in roughly the top 5% of typists. 140+ WPM is competitive territory.
If you're starting out, don't fixate on a target. Pick a baseline today, beat it next month. That's the only number that actually matters.
Every standard typing test, including tempo, counts a "word" as 5 characters including the space. So "hello " is one word, and "antidisestablishmentarianism " is roughly 6. This is why your score on tempo translates to other typing sites — the math is the same everywhere.
The formula tempo reports is net WPM: gross WPM with errors deducted. A 90 WPM run at 80% accuracy is worth less than a 75 WPM run at 100% — backspacing and retyping wipes out whatever raw speed you "gained."
Gross WPM counts every keystroke you make, including the wrong ones, divided by minutes. Net WPM subtracts your uncorrected errors. Net is the honest number — gross flatters typists who race ahead and leave a trail of mistakes.
Tempo's results page shows both your raw output (which mirrors gross) and your accuracy, so you can see the trade-off your fingers actually made.
Word lists are tuned for rhythm — the words are short, common, lowercase, and there's no punctuation to break your flow. Quotes have capitalization, commas, periods, and longer "rare" words. Code is heavy on symbols, brackets, and numbers that almost never appear in normal prose.
This is why competitive typists train on all three. A clean 100 WPM on words can drop to 75 on quotes and 50 on code for the same person. That gap is the skill you're missing.
Concentration is finite. On a 15-second test you can sustain near-perfect focus; on a 60-second test you'll drift; on a 2-minute test you'll almost certainly make at least one mistake. This isn't a typing problem, it's a brain problem — and the fix is to train longer tests deliberately, not to avoid them.
If your goal is "type a document at work without errors," practice on 60s and 2-minute tests. If you just want a high single-run score for the leaderboard, 30s is your friend.
Both, and that's fine. The "remembering common words" effect is real but small — tempo's word lists are large and randomized, so you're not memorizing sequences. What you're really training is muscle memory for individual key transitions (bigrams: "th", "ing", "ou", etc.) and your eye-finger lookahead. Those transfer to any typing you do, not just to tempo.
No. Every typing mode and most features work without an account. Sign-in (with Google) unlocks: history that syncs across devices, badges and achievements, the global leaderboard, multiplayer races, global and direct chat, and the daily challenge.
If you're just here to take a test or two, skip the sign-in. Your local stats still save to your browser.
The core typing test is free forever — every mode, every language, races with friends, leaderboards, badges, themes, daily challenges. Premium and Starter subscriptions exist for users who want extras like longer tests, the AI typing coach, fun-box modifiers, more themes, premium race rooms, and no ads. Subscriptions fund hosting and development.
Open the race button in the header, create a room, and share the 4–8 character code with a friend. They join, you both type the same passage, and live progress bars show who's ahead. First to finish wins. Races support solo, 1v1, and small group rooms; the prompt is the same for everyone in the room.
Premium users get unlimited race rooms; free users get a smaller daily allowance.
Badges are unlockable achievements — some are easy (run your first test), some are statistical (hit a certain WPM), some are time-bound (the daily streak), and a handful are secret. You can pick one to display next to your name in chat and on the leaderboard as your showcase badge.
Rank-tier badges (first 10 to reach a milestone, etc.) are verified server-side — you can't claim one you didn't earn.
One fixed prompt that rotates every 24 hours. Everyone in the world types the same passage, and the scores are ranked on a daily leaderboard. Because the prompt is identical for all users, it's the cleanest way to compare your real progress over time — no luck-of-the-words variance.
We run server-side anti-cheat that flags runs with statistically improbable patterns — pasted text, copy-and-type, autotyper-style perfect rhythm, and a handful of less obvious tells. Flagged runs don't show on the leaderboard and the user gets a warning. Persistent cheating earns a ban from the leaderboard.
The system isn't perfect — competitive runs sometimes flag false positives — but every flagged run goes through review, and you can appeal if yours did.
The minimum needed to make the product work: your stats (WPM, accuracy, history) if you're signed in, your chat messages while they're in the public buffer, and standard request-level metadata (IP, user-agent) for abuse prevention. We don't sell data, we don't run third-party trackers beyond Google AdSense and Vercel Analytics for traffic counts, and we don't keylog — the typed characters are processed in your browser and only the summary (WPM, accuracy, errors) is sent to the server.
Full detail is in the privacy policy.
Yes. Sign in, open the account menu, and use the delete-account option. Your stats, badges, chat history, and account record are removed. Some abuse-prevention logs (IP addresses associated with ban-evasion attempts, for example) are retained on a 90-day rolling window per the privacy policy.
No. We don't sell typed content, stats, or any user identifier to anyone. Ads on the site are served by Google AdSense based on standard AdSense targeting — Google may use cookies for personalization. You can opt out via Google's ad settings. Premium and Starter subscriptions remove ads entirely.
The most common cause is an outdated cached version of the site. Hard-refresh the page (Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux, Cmd+Shift+R on Mac) to fetch the latest build. If the problem persists, check the version label in the footer of the about page and include it in a bug report from about → bug report.
Yes, but typing tests on touchscreens are fundamentally a different skill — you'll see scores 40–60% lower than your desktop numbers regardless of how fast you are. The interface is mobile-optimized but we recommend a physical keyboard for any serious practice.
The latest two versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge are fully supported. Older browsers may work but aren't tested. JavaScript is required (the test logic runs entirely in your browser).