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Five minutes is the length many employment typing tests use. It rewards a steady pace and clean typing far more than a fast start.
Five minutes shows the speed you would actually type at while doing a job, rather than the speed you reach in a sprint. It is also a length many pre-employment typing tests use, so it is the best practice if you have one coming up. Our guide to typing tests for jobs covers the common formats.
Exactly the same as the shorter tests: characters in correct words plus one space per word, divided by five, divided by five minutes. Accuracy, corrected and uncorrected errors and consistency all appear in the results. At this length the consistency figure gets very honest. A pace you cannot hold shows up as a long slope down the speed chart.
A pace caret makes the plan easier to follow. In settings, set it to a custom speed at your target and keep just ahead of it.
Some employer tests do not allow corrections, and some will not let you continue past an error. Presspace can do both:
Practise a few runs with each before the real thing, and turn punctuation on if your test uses prose. For real sentences with capitals, the quote typing test is closer to many copy tests.
Five minutes of continuous typing is enough to notice a bad chair height or a cramped wrist. Sit so your forearms are roughly level with the desk, keep your wrists from resting on its edge while you type, and take a short break between runs. Our page on typing ergonomics covers setup in more detail. If typing causes pain, see a professional.
Many do, especially for office, admin and data entry roles, although formats vary between employers and testing services. Ask the recruiter what to expect. Practising at five minutes also means a shorter test will feel easy.
Most people lose a few WPM compared with their one-minute score as focus and comfort fade. If you lose much more than that, start slower and concentrate on accuracy. A small gap is a sign of good pacing.
On Presspace a corrected word still counts, so fixing a mistake inside the current word is usually worth it. Some employer tests disable Backspace, though, so practise a few runs with Confidence set to Max to get used to it.
At 50 WPM it is about 250 standard words, or 1,250 characters including spaces. At 70 WPM it is 350 words. That is far longer than most people type without a pause, which is the point of the test.