The world’s top competitive typists gathered for Intersteno’s 2026 championships, where Jonáš Vala took first place in the senior Text Production category with a speed of 837.5 characters per minute and an error rate of just 0.088%, according to competition coverage. Separately, a middle school student in Georgia set a Guinness World Record in the under-16 category by typing the entire alphabet in just 2.22 seconds.

Why “the world record” isn’t one single number

Competitive typing coverage consistently notes there’s no single universal typing world record, since a speed only means something once you know the input method, test length, exact text, and scoring rules being used. A stenotype machine (used by court reporters) achieves far higher speeds than a standard keyboard, and a short alphabet-typing sprint measures something different from a sustained multi-minute passage like Intersteno’s competition format.

Putting championship speed in context

Converting characters per minute to the more familiar words-per-minute metric (roughly dividing by 5), Vala’s winning pace works out to around 167 WPM sustained over a full competitive passage — more than four times the roughly 40 WPM typical of an average adult typist, and well above the 65-75 WPM range considered strong for a professional typist.

See where you land

Our typing speed test measures both your words-per-minute and accuracy on a real passage, so you can see exactly where your own typing speed falls — whether that’s solidly average, professional-level, or somewhere in between.