How long does it take to learn touch typing?

Plan for roughly 20 to 35 hours of practice, spread over 6 to 10 weeks, before you type reliably without looking. Getting back to the speed you had before usually takes one to three months. These are our estimates, drawn from the studies below rather than from a single experiment. Touch typing is learned over weeks, not in a weekend.

What the estimate means

“Reliably” means that you type every letter, capitals and common punctuation without looking down, at 97% accuracy or better. It does not mean fast. Speed comes later.

Where you land in that range depends mostly on two things: how regularly you practice, and how soon you use the new technique for your everyday typing. A quick calculation shows why the second part matters. One twenty-minute session a day for ten weeks adds up to only about 23 hours. A second short session or everyday use fills the gap, because every email you write without looking is practice too.

Be wary of precise promises for higher goals. The research offers no reliable hour counts for reaching 60 or 80 words per minute (WPM), so any such figure is a guess. What those numbers mean in daily life is explained in our guide to good typing speeds. For now, set a single goal: typing without looking.

Why short daily sessions work better

In a classic study, Baddeley and Longman followed 70 postal workers who learned to type on different schedules. The group that practiced one hour a day needed 34.9 net hours to master the keyboard. A group that trained twice a day for two hours at a time needed 49.7 hours. The one-hour group also typed faster at the end: 79.3 keystrokes per minute, compared with 66.8 for the group with the long sessions.

One detail is easy to miss. The participants themselves preferred the long, massed sessions. Long blocks feel productive, but the spaced schedule got more out of every hour.

Both groups in this comparison practiced for at least an hour at a time. Our advice takes the same principle one step further: keep your sessions short, one or two sessions of 10 to 20 minutes a day, ideally at fixed times, such as before you open your inbox in the morning. Stop when your accuracy starts to slip, and take a break when your hands feel tense.

Sleep does part of the work

Learning continues after you close the trainer. Walker and colleagues had people practice a finger-tapping sequence and tested them again after a night of sleep. They performed it about 20% faster, with no loss of accuracy. The task was a practiced sequence, not typing text, so the number does not carry over one to one. The general idea is still useful: a motor skill keeps developing after practice, and sleep plays a part in that.

That is one more argument for spreading practice over many days. It also changes how you should judge a session: if an exercise went badly in the evening, try it again the next day before you draw conclusions.

How the learning curve looks

Progress continues for months, not just weeks. In a study by van Weerdenburg and colleagues, children who practiced 20 minutes a day went from 52.85 to 168.34 keystrokes per minute over seven months. Converted at five keystrokes per word, that is roughly 11 to 34 WPM.

A first milestone is worth aiming for. A school report by Ertl, which was not peer reviewed, suggests that fifth graders who reached at least 20 WPM were likely to still have the skill in seventh grade. Below that, their chance of keeping it was about 50%. Treat this as a hint rather than a rule, since it is a single report about children.

So don’t stop once you know where the keys are. Keep practicing until touch typing is simply how you type, and at least until you are past 20 WPM.

The slow phase during the switch

At some point in the first weeks, your new technique will be slower than your old way of typing. This is where many people give up. Yechiam and colleagues cite earlier research showing that success in a touch typing course does not guarantee that people keep using it in daily life. The reason is simple. Looking at the keys is faster in the short term, so learners slip back.

Research suggests the dip is temporary. Weigelt Marom and Weintraub followed students in higher education, 30 without and 44 with learning disabilities. Right after the course, the students without learning disabilities typed more slowly than before, while the other group got slightly faster. Three months later, both groups typed significantly faster than before the course, and their accuracy stayed above 95%.

Use touch typing for short everyday messages as early as you can, even when it feels slow. Whether the switch is worth it for you is the topic of Is touch typing still worth learning?

A weekly plan to start with

The following plan is our suggestion, not a research result. It assumes one or two sessions of 10 to 20 minutes a day and follows the order of the lessons on typando.

If a lesson takes longer, stay with it and let the plan stretch. The finger for each key is shown in our guide to the home row. Once you know all the keys, How to type faster explains how to build speed without losing accuracy.

You can start week one today: the first lessons in the trainer cover the home row, beginning with F, J and the space bar.