Measured in milliseconds ยท lower is better
Reaction Time Test
Wait for red to turn green, then click as fast as you can. Five trials, then we place you in the population.
Before you start
The median on mouse is 273 ms. Run the test and we will place you against it.
Compared against
Your monitor, mouse, and browser all sit between you and this number. Compare results only across the same setup.
The other device classes
Trackpad
Touchscreen
Curve is a fitted baseline plus 1 first attempt recorded here. The baseline is a curve, not a sample: no part of it is a real person. Baseline fitted from Human Benchmark's published reaction time statistics (n=81,000,000) (source). That figure pools every input device into one number. Splitting it by mouse, trackpad and touchscreen is our extrapolation, not theirs. Per-device offsets are extrapolated, not measured. The baseline is dropped once a device class holds 5,000 real first attempts. See the full distribution.
Understanding your score
| Band | ms | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Exceptional | 150 and below | Trained or anticipating. Verify it with a clean run. |
| Very fast | 151 to 170 | Top few percent on a mouse. |
| Fast | 171 to 190 | Comfortably quicker than most people. |
| Above average | 191 to 220 | A good result on any setup. |
| Average | 221 to 260 | Where most first-time results land. |
| Below average | 261 to 320 | Common when tired, distracted, or on a trackpad. |
| Slow | 321 and above | Usually a setup or attention problem, not a physical limit. |
What this test actually measures
Simple visual reaction time is the delay between a stimulus appearing and your hand completing a response to it. That single number is the sum of four separate delays: your retina and optic nerve carrying the signal, your brain recognising it and deciding to act, your motor cortex driving the muscle, and your hardware registering the click.
Only the middle two are you. The other two belong to your monitor, your mouse, and your browser, and they can account for 20 to 60 milliseconds on their own. This is why a result is only meaningful against other results measured the same way, which is why we split the population by input device instead of pooling everyone into one number.
This is a simple reaction test, not a choice reaction test. There is only one stimulus and one correct response, so nothing here measures decision speed. Choice reaction times run roughly 100 to 200 milliseconds slower, and the two are not comparable.
How to get a result worth keeping
Run all five trials without stopping. Single trials are noisy: the gap between your best and worst attempt in one session is routinely 80 milliseconds, and any one of them could be either end of that range. We take the median of your five, which throws away a single mistimed click without letting one lucky trial define you.
Do not try to anticipate the colour change. The delay is randomised between 1.4 and 4.2 seconds precisely so that guessing does not pay: click before green and the trial is voided, not just penalised. If you find yourself twitching early, slow down and wait to actually see the change.
Use the same device every time you compare. Switching from a mouse to a trackpad will move your number more than a week of sleep deprivation will.
What moves your score
Sleep. This is the largest reversible factor by a wide margin. A night of restricted sleep reliably adds tens of milliseconds and, more tellingly, adds occasional very slow trials called lapses. If your five trials are spread far apart, sleep is the first thing to look at.
Caffeine. Produces a real but modest improvement, typically single-digit milliseconds, peaking roughly 30 to 60 minutes after intake. It is not the difference between average and fast.
Age. Reaction time improves through the teens, plateaus somewhere in the twenties, and declines slowly and steadily after that. The decline is gradual enough that a fit sixty year old routinely beats an inattentive twenty year old.
Physical state. Being warm, upright, and recently active helps. Being cold, sedentary for hours, or mildly dehydrated hurts. The effects are small individually and add up.
Screen and input device. A 60Hz display adds an average of 8 milliseconds of latency purely from waiting for the next frame; a 144Hz display adds about 3.5. Wireless mice, high display latency, and heavy browser load all push the number up without changing anything about you.
Attention. Knowing roughly when the stimulus is coming is worth more than caffeine. Background noise, notifications, and conversation cost more than most people expect.
Why we show you a percentile
A raw number in milliseconds is not information until you know what surrounds it. Told that you scored 240ms, most people cannot say whether that is good. Told that 240ms puts you ahead of 61 percent of people clicking with a mouse, you know exactly where you stand.
The distribution of reaction times is right-skewed, not a bell curve. There is a hard floor near 150 milliseconds that nobody beats honestly, and a long tail of slow results from tired, distracted, and mismatched setups. That shape is why the average sits above the median, and why comparing yourself to the average alone flatters you slightly.
Questions
- What is a good reaction time?
- On a mouse, anything under 200 milliseconds is genuinely fast and puts you in roughly the top quarter. Most first-time results land between 220 and 260. Under 150 is rare enough that it usually means the trial was anticipated rather than reacted to.
- Why is my phone result slower than my computer result?
- Touchscreens add real latency. The screen has to detect the touch, debounce it, and report it, and that path is slower than a mouse switch closing a circuit. A 40 millisecond gap between the two is normal, which is why we rank touch results only against other touch results.
- Can I train my reaction time?
- You can improve your measured result substantially in the first few sessions, but most of that gain is learning the task rather than getting faster. Genuine improvement past that point is small and slow. The fastest way to improve your number is to fix sleep and remove distractions.
- Why does my score change so much between attempts?
- Because reaction time is genuinely variable. Within-session spread of 60 to 100 milliseconds is normal for an untrained person. That variability is the reason we take the median of five trials rather than reporting a single click.
- Do you store my results?
- Your scores are kept in your own browser so you can see your history and export it. We store one anonymous row per attempt to build the population distribution: the score, the device category, and a random token. No account, no IP address, no way back to you.
- What is the fastest possible human reaction time?
- The physiological floor for a visual stimulus is around 100 to 120 milliseconds, and reaching it requires knowing exactly when the stimulus is coming. Under real test conditions, sprint starters are ruled to have false-started below 100 milliseconds because reacting that fast is considered impossible.