"Good" is a slippery word when it comes to reaction time. A lab-grade measurement, a gaming website and a sprinter's starting blocks can all report a number in milliseconds, and the numbers are not comparable. This guide explains what reaction time is, what the research says about age, why a sound is answered faster than a flash, what a sensible target looks like for a web test, and what honestly moves the number.
What reaction time actually measures
Reaction time is the gap between a signal and your first response to it. It is the sum of several steps: your eye or ear detects the signal, the brain recognises it, a decision to respond is made, and the nerve signal reaches the muscle that presses the button. Researchers separate three kinds:
- Simple reaction time: one signal, one response, such as pressing as soon as the box turns green. This is what the test above measures.
- Choice reaction time: several possible signals, each needing a different response, such as pressing the left key for a left arrow and the right key for a right arrow. It is always slower, because you have to decide as well as react.
- Recognition (go/no-go) time: responding to some signals and holding back for others.
Real life is mostly the second and third kind. A goalkeeper, a driver or a boxer is rarely waiting for a single known signal, so a simple reaction time test captures only the fastest and simplest part of the picture.
What is a good reaction time?
For a visual simple reaction time measured with a mouse click or a screen tap, a commonly quoted figure is roughly 200 to 250 milliseconds under good lab conditions. A website adds delay of its own: the screen refreshes in steps (a 60 Hz display updates only about every 17 ms), the browser, operating system and input device each add a little, and wireless or touch input adds more. Together that is often 20 to 80 ms, so a typical web score is higher than a laboratory score for the same person.
The table below shows the rule-of-thumb values this site's test compares you against. They are our own approximation, shaped by the finding below that simple reaction time changes little until around 50, and then slows. They are not a published population norm and your own device will shift your results.
| Age | Typical visual click (ms) | Typical to the sound of a beep (ms) |
|---|---|---|
| Under 18 | About 250 to 275 | About 230 to 255 |
| 18 to 45 | About 250 | About 230 |
| 50 | About 260 | About 240 |
| 60 | About 285 | About 265 |
| 70 | About 305 | About 285 |
Use the table as a loose guide. Two tests on two different screens can differ by more than the gap between two age bands, so the most useful comparison is you against your own earlier average on the same device.
How reaction time changes with age
The best-known data come from a re-analysis of 7,130 adults in the UK Health and Lifestyle Survey. It found that simple reaction time shows little slowing until around age 50, while four-choice reaction time slows throughout adult life (Der and Deary, 2006). In plain terms, the "just press when you see it" part holds up well into middle age, and the decision part is what slows first. The authors also report significant sex differences, most clearly in how variable choice reaction times are.
Two practical points follow. First, a slow single click is not a sign of anything on its own, because reaction time varies from round to round for everyone. Second, if you have noticed a clear and persistent change in your reactions, or they are slowing together with other symptoms, that is a question for a doctor, not a website.
Sound versus sight: why a beep is answered faster
In small laboratory comparisons, people respond to a sound faster than to a light. In one student study of 14 participants, the mean auditory reaction time was about 284 ms against about 331 ms for visual, and males were faster than females in both (Coaching Science Abstracts, San Diego State University). A sample that small should not be treated as a population norm, but the direction (sound faster than sight) is a long-standing and widely reported pattern. The usual explanation is that the ear passes the signal to the brain more directly than the eye does, which has to convert light into a neural signal first.
The test on this page lets you try both. Expect the sound version to read a little lower for most people, and use the same version every time you compare scores.
Reaction time for athletes and gamers
Sport shows both the limits and the uses of the number. In sprinting, World Athletics treats any start where an athlete moves within 0.100 seconds of the gun as a false start, on the reasoning that the brain cannot hear and process the sound faster than that. A study commissioned by the IAAF in 2009 suggested that the very best sprinters can sometimes react in about 0.08 seconds, which is why the rule remains debated (see the Wikipedia summary below). Our test follows the same logic: any round under 100 ms is thrown out as a guess, because it is faster than a real reaction.
Away from the track, elite performance depends less on the raw 200-odd milliseconds and more on what surrounds it: reading cues early, anticipating what is coming, and choosing the right response quickly. That is why a goalkeeper or an esports player can react "faster" in their sport than their plain click-test score would suggest. If you want to compare yourself with athletes or gamers, treat their advantage as mostly choice and anticipation, not the simple click.
What affects your score
- Sleep: sleep loss is one of the most reliable ways to slow reactions. Studies of vigilant attention find that after sleep deprivation average response times lengthen and the number of long lapses rises (Lim and Dinges, 2008). Test when you are rested if you want a representative number.
- Attention and distraction: a single phone notification or wandering thought can add tens of milliseconds to one round. This is why the test uses five rounds and averages them.
- Early guesses: pressing before the cue is the commonest way to ruin a run. Do not try to predict the signal; the delay before it is random on purpose.
- Device and set-up: a wired mouse on a fast display is usually quicker than a trackpad or a touch screen on a slow one.
- Age and sex: averages differ between groups, but the spread within any group is large, so these are poor guides to an individual.
Can you improve your reaction time?
Partly. The raw simple reaction time is largely set by your nervous system and does not change dramatically with training. What does respond is the stuff around it: being rested and alert, removing anticipation errors, practising a specific task until the response is automatic, and, in sport, getting better at reading cues so that you start moving sooner. Evidence that general "brain-training" games make you faster in unrelated situations is limited, so do not expect a web game to change your driving or your sport.
If you want to try to improve your score:
- Sleep well the night before and test at a consistent time of day.
- Use the same device, a mouse click or screen tap, and your dominant hand.
- Do the five rounds, write down the average, and compare like with like over weeks, not hours.
- Do not chase one fast round. The median and the spread across rounds say more than your best single result.
How the test on this page works
You choose a visual test (the box turns green) or a sound test (a short beep). Each run has five rounds, and before each one there is a random wait of about 1.5 to 5 seconds so that you cannot predict the signal. Pressing early restarts the round, and any press under 100 ms is rejected as a guess. Your result is the average of the five rounds, shown with your fastest and slowest round, the median and the spread. Nothing you enter is sent to our servers, and the age field is used only to pick the comparison value.
Reaction time and the rest of your physical profile
Reaction time is one piece of physical performance. Explosive power, strength, body composition and proportions matter just as much for most sports, and they respond more clearly to training. The vertical jump calculator and the guide on how to increase your vertical jump cover the power side, and the full Body Report combines your measurements into a ranked plan.
This guide is informational and is not medical advice. See our disclaimer.
Sources
- Der G, Deary IJ. Age and sex differences in reaction time in adulthood: results from the United Kingdom Health and Lifestyle Survey. Psychology and Aging. 2006;21(1):62-73.
- Lim J, Dinges DF. Sleep deprivation and vigilant attention. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2008;1129:305-322.
- San Diego State University, Coaching Science Abstracts. Auditory reaction times are faster than visual reaction times while males are faster than females (small student study, n = 14).
- Wikipedia. False start (World Athletics 0.100 second rule and the 2009 IAAF-commissioned sprinter study).
- Hick WE. On the rate of gain of information. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 1952;4(1):11-26 (choice reaction time grows with the number of options).