Reaction Time Test

How to use

1. Click the pad once to start a round. It turns red and shows Wait for green….
2. Do not click yet — the delay is random (a few seconds) so you cannot anticipate it. Clicking early cancels the round and you retry.
3. When the pad turns green, click as fast as you can. Your time in milliseconds appears immediately.
4. Click to continue; after 5 rounds you get your average, best and a rank. Reset starts a fresh set.
5. For a fair number: full-screen the browser, close other tabs, use a mouse rather than a trackpad, and take 2–3 sets — the first set is usually the slowest.

What the test measures and how it is timed

This is a simple visual reaction test: a stimulus (the pad turning green) and a response (your click). The result is the time between the two in milliseconds. It includes everything on the way — your eyes noticing the colour change, the brain deciding, the finger moving, the mouse switch closing, and the computer delivering the click to the page.

Timing uses performance.now(), a high-resolution clock, and the moment the pad turns green is taken from the requestAnimationFrame callback that paints the change — that is the closest a web page can get to "the pixel actually changed". Clicks are captured on pointerdown, the earliest event the browser fires when the button goes down. The random delay before green is drawn each round, so you cannot learn the rhythm; an early click cancels the round rather than counting as a fake 0 ms.

Average reaction time: what is normal, what is fast

By the data published by Human Benchmark from over 81 million recorded tests, the median reaction time is 273 ms and the mean is 284 ms. Under laboratory conditions with a dedicated response key the figure is lower: by the summary in Wikipedia's Mental chronometry article (citing Kosinski, 2008), college-age people take approximately 190 ms to respond to a visual stimulus. The gap between 190 and 273 is mostly hardware — monitor, mouse and browser add tens of milliseconds, which is why the ranks below are set for a browser test, not a lab.

Age matters too: the same Wikipedia summary notes that processing speed rises through childhood into early adulthood, stays stable, and starts declining from middle age. Teens and twenty-somethings have the edge; that is normal biology, not a lack of skill.

What your setup adds to the number

Two people with identical reflexes can differ by 30–50 ms because of hardware. The parts that add delay:

• Monitor refresh rate. A 60 Hz screen redraws every 16.7 ms, so on average the green frame shows up 8 ms after it is ready; at 144 Hz that wait is 3.5 ms, at 240 Hz 2 ms. Add the panel's own pixel response.
• Mouse. Polling at 125 Hz means up to 8 ms before the click is even reported; 1000 Hz cuts it to 1 ms. Wireless adds a little; a worn switch adds contact bounce. Trackpads are the slowest input of all.
• Browser and OS. Compositing, V-sync and background tabs add a frame or two. Full-screen the page and close heavy tabs for the fairest run.
• You. Sleep, caffeine, warm-up and attention move the number more than any hardware. Test at the same time of day if you want to track progress.

For the same reason, don't compare your browser result with a pro's number from a different tool or a different machine; compare your own runs over time.

How to improve reaction time

• Warm up before measuring or playing. Two sets of five rounds usually knock 20–30 ms off a cold start. Ten minutes on the aim trainer does the same.
• Sleep. The single biggest factor. A short night shows up in this test immediately.
• Fix the setup. High-refresh monitor, 1000 Hz mouse, game mode on the screen, no V-sync in games. Check your mouse with the polling-rate test on this site.
• Train the specific action. Reaction to a colour change transfers only partly to a game. Practise the real thing: peeking angles in CS2, flicks in Valorant, with the reaction test as a warm-up and a check.
• Don't chase anticipation. Sub-150 results are usually early clicks that happened to land after green. The 5-round average with early clicks cancelled is the honest number.

What makes our reaction test different

• Frame-synced timing. The clock starts on the animation frame that paints green, not on a setTimeout that fires whenever the browser gets to it.
• Precise clock and earliest click event — performance.now() and pointerdown.
• Early clicks are cancelled, not counted, so anticipation cannot game the average.
• No ads on the pad, nothing appears or moves while you wait for green.
• Five rounds with last, average and best on screen; works on touch screens too.

Privacy: everything happens in your browser. Your times are not sent anywhere and are not stored beyond the current tab — there is no leaderboard and no account.

FAQ