The average typing speed is 36 words per minute. Typing speed is usually measured in words per minute, but as most people have noticed, words have different lengths. Depending on your profession, you may need to type longer words than in other professions. For example, if you’re a legal typist, you’re probably typing longer words than most people do. For this reason, the best way to measure typing speed is in characters per minute. The average typing speed, in this case, is about 187 characters per minute. What’s a good typing speed? A good typing speed for most people is 40 words per minute or over. This would give you a word count of 2400 words per hour if you could sustain the pace for sixty minutes. There are people who can type a whole lot faster than 40 words per minute. If you’re a professional typist, you can probably type 75 words per minute, and maybe even more.