Average Reaction Time and How to Improve It

Once you've taken a reaction time test, the next question is always the same: is that fast or slow? This page answers it. What the average really is, how much it changes with age, how humans compare with professional athletes and with animals, and what actually shortens your number — using only figures we can point to a source for. Where we couldn't find a source, we left the number out rather than inventing one.

What is the average reaction time

For a simple visual task — screen changes, you press — adult averages sit in the low-to-mid 200s of milliseconds.

The most widely cited large sample is Woods et al. (2015, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, "Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time"). In Experiment 1, 1,469 people tested on a computer display with a mouse averaged 217.8 ms in the 18–24 age group.

The important part comes next. The authors calibrated their own equipment and reported that 11.0 ms of display delay plus 6.8 ms of mouse delay — about 17.8 ms in total — was sitting inside every measurement. Subtract it and the youngest group's true reaction time lands at roughly 200 ms, with the oldest group at about 222 ms.

Read your own score accordingly:

• A browser result in the 200s is normal. It is not slow.
• Above 300 ms, suspect the measurement conditions — refresh rate, touch input, background load, tiredness — before you suspect yourself.
• Under 100 ms is anticipation, not reaction. Discard that attempt and take the round again.

Because a single attempt swings by tens of milliseconds, one number tells you almost nothing. Take the reaction time test again over five attempts and read the average.

How reaction time changes with age

Plenty of sites publish confident age tables. Very few of those numbers carry a citation. Two things can be said with a source behind them.

1. The change is gentler than people expect. The age slope in Woods et al. (2015) was about 0.45–0.55 ms per year. That is roughly 5 ms per decade — smaller than the swing between two consecutive attempts by the same person. Test a 25-year-old and a 55-year-old once each and you will measure today's alertness, not their ages.

2. Simple and choice reactions age differently. Der and Deary (2006, Psychology and Aging) reanalysed reaction times for 7,130 adults in the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey and found:

• Simple reaction time showed little slowing until around age 50.
• Four-choice reaction time slowed across the entire adult age range.
• Sex differences were statistically significant, most notably in the variability of choice reaction time.

The test on this page is the simple kind. That is why people in their forties routinely post scores indistinguishable from people in their twenties. What age costs you is the choosing, not the pressing.

One more finding worth knowing: Woods et al. (2015) reported that stimulus detection time did not change with age, and that the age-related slowing appeared on the motor side — producing the click. It is less "seeing later" than "pressing later."

Why your phone score is slower

This is the single most common worry we see, and the most misread. A slower phone score is usually your hardware, not you.

Any browser-based score is the sum of four parts:

1. Time for the display to actually show the green cue.
2. Time for your eyes and brain to notice it.
3. Time for your finger to travel and land.
4. Time for the device to register that input and pass it to the browser.

Only parts 2 and 3 are you. Parts 1 and 4 belong to the equipment. Touchscreens need longer than mice to turn a contact into a browser event, and refresh rate feeds straight into part 1: a 60 Hz panel updates about once every 16.7 ms, a 144 Hz panel about once every 6.9 ms.

The 17.8 ms that Woods et al. measured was on lab equipment. On an everyday laptop or phone it is usually larger. So putting a desktop score next to a phone score and concluding that you have got slower is simply the wrong comparison. Keep it within one device, one browser, one display.

How fast are professionals?

You will find a lot of confident claims about a particular pro gamer's or F1 driver's reaction time in milliseconds. We could not locate a primary, standardised, published measurement for any named athlete, so we do not quote one. Without a common task and common hardware, such a number means nothing anyway.

What can be checked:

The 0.100 s line in athletics. World Athletics Technical Rules 16.7 and 16.8 require a certified Start Information System to raise a false-start signal when an athlete's reaction time is less than 0.100 second. Even against a gunshot — an auditory cue, which is faster than a visual one — anything below that line is treated as anticipation rather than reaction. That is the closest thing to an officially recognised human floor. A visual click task like this one sits well above it.

How an F1 start is structured. Five red lights illuminate at one-second intervals, and then, after a hold whose length is deliberately not fixed, all five go out together and the race is on. If the hold were constant, drivers would learn the rhythm and launch early. The green cue on this site appears after an unpredictable delay for exactly that reason — with a fixed interval you would be measuring rhythm, not reaction.

Where elite performers genuinely pull ahead is probably not raw simple reaction at all, but in narrowing down what is about to happen. Anticipating the next move shrinks the set of things you have to react to, and that advantage does not show up on a one-signal test.

Humans versus animals

Animal comparisons are a favourite subject and most circulated figures have no traceable source. The measurements that do exist in peer-reviewed literature are mostly from insects.

Sourakov (2011, Florida Entomologist 94(2), 367–369) documented a long-legged fly, Condylostylus, taking off in response to a camera flash in under 5 ms, and possibly in as little as 2 ms. The same paper lists the earlier published values it was compared against:

Forty to a hundred times faster than a person. One caveat: these insect responses are escape reflexes wired through very short neural circuits, not the see-decide-press chain this test measures. Enjoy the comparison, but it is not the same ability. Cats, dogs and cheetahs are quoted constantly; we could not trace those numbers to a source, so they are not in the table.

How to improve your reaction time

Roughly in order of effect. The first four will take tens of milliseconds off today.

1. Have your finger already on the button — resting on the mouse, or a centimetre above the glass. Lifting and dropping your hand is added to your score in full.
2. Look at the centre of the panel. Colour changes caught in peripheral vision register later than ones caught centrally.
3. Don't anticipate. Trying to jump the cue either produces a sub-100 ms throwaway or a badly rattled slow attempt right after. Waiting for the signal is faster on average.
4. Clean up the setup. Close heavy background tabs, turn off battery saver, use a wired or low-latency mouse, prefer a high refresh-rate display. As the 17.8 ms in Woods et al. (2015) shows, this is a real part of the number.
5. Show up rested. Sleep loss and alcohol both slow you down measurably. Test at a similar time of day if you want comparable results.
6. Measure repeatedly. Run several five-attempt sets across different days and compare the set averages. Progress is invisible in single attempts.

Whether training makes the nervous system itself faster is not something we will claim. Test scores certainly improve; separating "genuinely faster" from "more practised at this specific task" is hard. That is why you won't find a promise here about shaving a fixed number of milliseconds off in a week.

Fixing the conditions, though, moves the number noticeably. Once you've done that, run the test again.

Common misconceptions

"I'm slower on my phone, so I've got worse." No. See the hardware section above. Scores from different devices are not comparable measurements.

"My single attempt is my real score." No. Within-person variation across attempts is tens of milliseconds. Use the average of at least five.

"A slow reaction means something is wrong with me." This test diagnoses nothing. Reaction time moves by tens of milliseconds with sleep, caffeine, hardware, attention and time of day. If you're worried about your health, see a clinician rather than a web page.

"The rating table is an official standard." It isn't. Our bands are blockblast.co's own presentation scale and other sites draw the lines elsewhere.

"Fast fingers mean fast reactions." Different abilities. Reaction is one movement triggered by one signal; clicking speed is how densely you can repeat the same movement. Test both with the same hand — the click speed test for raw clicking rate and the aim trainer for accuracy under time pressure — and you'll often find you're clearly better at one than the other.

Adding a different sort of brain test, such as a memory test, rounds the picture out further. And once more: everything here is for curiosity and self-measurement, not medical judgement.

When you're ready, go back and take five more attempts.

References

• Woods, D. L., Wyma, J. M., Yund, E. W., Herron, T. J., & Reed, B. (2015). Factors influencing the latency of simple reaction time. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 131.
• Der, G., & Deary, I. J. (2006). Age and sex differences in reaction time in adulthood: Results from the United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle Survey. Psychology and Aging, 21(1), 62–73.
• Sourakov, A. (2011). Faster than a flash: The fastest visual startle reflex response is found in a long-legged fly, Condylostylus sp. (Dolichopodidae). Florida Entomologist, 94(2), 367–369.
• World Athletics, Technical Rules (C2.1), Rules 16.7–16.8 (False Start).

Reaction Time FAQ

Where does the 200-something milliseconds figure come from?

From Woods et al. (2015, Frontiers in Human Neuroscience). Testing 1,469 people with a mouse and monitor, the 18–24 group averaged 217.8 ms. The team measured their own hardware delay — 11.0 ms for the display and 6.8 ms for the mouse, 17.8 ms in total — and after subtracting it the youngest group sat at about 200 ms. So a browser score in the 200s is an ordinary result, not a slow one.

How much does reaction time slow with age?

In Woods et al. (2015), hardware-corrected times ran from about 200 ms in the youngest group to about 222 ms in the oldest, a trend of roughly 0.45–0.55 ms per year. Der and Deary (2006, Psychology and Aging), reanalysing 7,130 UK adults, found that simple reaction time barely slows until around age 50, while four-choice reaction time slows across the whole adult range.

Is age-related slowing about eyesight?

Woods et al. (2015) reported that the time to detect the stimulus did not change with age, and that the slowing showed up in the motor side — producing the click. In other words it looks less like seeing later and more like pressing later.

My phone score is slower than my desktop score. Am I getting worse?

Probably not. A touchscreen takes longer to register a finger and hand it to the browser than a mouse takes to register a click, and that difference is added straight onto your score. The same person on the same day will score differently on the two devices, so only compare results within one device and browser.

How fast are professional esports players and F1 drivers?

Plenty of numbers circulate, but we could not find a standardised, published measurement of any individual pro's reaction time, so we do not print one here. The verifiable benchmark comes from athletics: World Athletics Technical Rules 16.7 and 16.8 treat any start reaction faster than 0.100 s as a false start, on the basis that a human cannot react to the gun that quickly.

How does human reaction time compare with animals?

The best-documented comparisons are in insects. Sourakov (2011, Florida Entomologist) recorded a long-legged fly, Condylostylus, responding to a flash in under 5 ms and possibly as little as 2 ms, and cited earlier measurements of 30–50 ms for houseflies, under 50 ms for cockroaches and under 17 ms for skipper butterflies. Against a human score in the 200s, that is a different order of magnitude.

Can you train your reaction time?

Your score on the test will definitely improve. Whether that means faster nerves or simply a more practised, better-prepared response to this particular task is hard to separate. What you can clearly control is the setup: rest your finger on the button beforehand, watch the centre of the panel, test when you are rested, and use low-latency hardware. Those alone move the number noticeably.

How many attempts should I average?

Five at minimum. A single attempt swings by tens of milliseconds and tells you almost nothing. This page measures five and shows the mean. For a serious comparison, run several sets across different days at a similar time of day and compare the set averages.

I scored under 100 ms. Is that a record?

No — you clicked before the cue, or anticipated it. That is exactly why athletics treats sub-0.100 s starts as false starts: below that threshold the movement was planned, not triggered. Drop that attempt from your average.