Do Lubed Switches Make You Type Any Faster?

The Short Answer

> Quick answer: Lubing removes scratchiness and makes each keypress smoother and more consistent, which reduces fatigue over long sessions. It does not change actuation force or travel distance, so the direct WPM gain is small — think a couple of words per minute at most, mostly from consistency rather than speed. Do it for the feel and the sound, not for the score.

I want to be careful here because this topic attracts two kinds of nonsense. One side claims lubing is a placebo for people with too much time. The other implies it'll add ten words a minute.

Both are wrong. Lubing makes a real, obvious difference to how a board feels — the change is not subtle and you'll notice it within one sentence. Whether that translates into a faster test result is a separate question with a much duller answer.

I lubed a board, measured before and after, and the numbers were less exciting than the experience.

What Lubing Actually Changes

A mechanical switch has plastic sliding against plastic. Manufacturing tolerances mean that contact is rarely perfectly smooth, and you feel the roughness as scratchiness during the keypress.

A thin layer of lubricant on the stem rails and housing removes that friction, and keyboard builders have documented what lubing does to feel and sound in far more depth than any typing test can capture. The keypress becomes smooth and consistent, and the sound changes noticeably — higher-pitched scratch and rattle disappear, leaving a deeper, more uniform sound.

What doesn't change: actuation force, actuation point and total travel. The switch still needs the same pressure and still bottoms out at the same depth, because lube doesn't alter the spring or the geometry.

That's the crux of the speed question. Lube removes friction that varies unpredictably from key to key, so the benefit is consistency rather than a shorter or lighter press. Consistency helps a bit. It doesn't help the way a genuinely shorter actuation distance would — which is the actual mechanism behind rapid trigger keyboards.

Stabilizers Are the Bigger Win

If you only do one thing to a keyboard, tune the stabilizers rather than the switches. Stabilizers sit under the wide keys — space, enter, shift, backspace — and out of the box they usually rattle.

That rattle is the loudest and most irritating sound on most stock boards, and it's coming from the keys you press most often. Space bar alone accounts for a huge share of your keystrokes.

Fixing it means lubing the wire and the housing, and often applying a band-aid mod or clipping the stabiliser feet. It takes twenty minutes for the whole board versus two to three hours for every switch.

The payoff-to-effort ratio isn't close. I'd argue anyone bothered enough to be reading this should do stabilizers first, use the board for a fortnight, and only then decide whether the switches are worth the afternoon. Most people find they're satisfied at that point.

There's a diagnostic worth doing first: press space, enter and left shift slowly, one at a time, and listen. If each one produces a metallic ping or a hollow rattle that the letter keys don't, your stabilizers are the problem and no amount of switch work will fix it.

What I Measured

I ran twenty one-minute tests before lubing and twenty after, on the same board, same switches, same week, alternating with a rest between each so fatigue wasn't skewing one set.

Before: 103 WPM average, 96.4% accuracy. After: 105 WPM average, 97.1% accuracy. So about a 2% speed change and a small accuracy improvement, both within the range I'd expect from normal day-to-day variance.

What did change measurably was the tail. My worst tests got less bad — fewer runs where a sticky key threw off the rhythm mid-sentence. Median barely moved, the floor came up.

And the subjective difference was enormous, which is the part the numbers can't capture. Typing on the lubed board is simply more pleasant, and I type more because of it. If a mod makes you practise longer, it improves your speed by a route that has nothing to do with the switch. That's a real effect and it's worth being honest about the mechanism, as I found when I tracked my speed for 60 days.

Linear vs Tactile After Lubing

Lube affects switch types differently, and this catches people out. Linears benefit most — there's nothing you're trying to preserve, so smoother is straightforwardly better.

Tactiles are riskier. Too much lube on the legs of a tactile stem rounds off the bump you were paying for, and you end up with a mushy switch that's neither cleanly tactile nor properly linear. Less is genuinely more here.

Clicky switches shouldn't be lubed on the click mechanism at all. You'll dampen the click, which is the entire reason someone buys a clicky switch.

If you're still choosing switches rather than modding the ones you have, our comparison of linear, tactile and clicky covers which suits typing rather than gaming. Buying the right switch beats lubing the wrong one, by a wide margin.

The Time Cost Nobody Mentions

Lubing a full-size board means opening around 104 switches, brushing two or three surfaces on each, and reassembling. That's three to five hours the first time you do it.

The first twenty switches take forever. By switch sixty you've got a rhythm, and by ninety you're rushing and applying it unevenly, which is how people end up with a board where a third of the keys feel different from the rest.

A smaller board is genuinely easier to mod — one of several practical arguments in favour of 60% and TKL layouts beyond desk space.

You can also buy pre-lubed switches, and in 2026 factory lubing on mid-range boards has got considerably better than it used to be. If you're buying new anyway, paying a small premium for decent factory lube saves you an afternoon and gets you 80% of the result. The remaining 20% is the difference between a board that feels good and one that feels remarkable, and only you can decide whether that's worth four hours with a tiny paintbrush.

When Modding Is Worth It

It's worth it if you type for hours a day and the board irritates you. Reduced fatigue is real, and irritation compounds over an eight-hour day in a way a one-minute test never captures.

It's worth it if you enjoy the process. That's a completely legitimate reason and I'd rather people said it out loud than dressed it up as performance tuning.

It's not worth it if you're chasing a number. Two words per minute is noise. Practice moves your speed by 10 to 20 WPM over a few months, and no amount of lubricant competes with that — our practice routine guide is a far better use of the same afternoon.

And it's definitely not worth it if you haven't yet learned to touch type properly. Fix the technique, then fix the hardware. Doing it in the other order is the keyboard hobby's most common and most expensive mistake, and I've made it myself.