Public speaking and interview statistics

Ace Coach – Public Speaking & Interview Statistics (2026)

By the Ace Coach team, built with the best speech coaches · Updated October 31, 2026 · How we write

Short answer

About 21% of US adults report a lifetime fear of public speaking, the most common social fear. Lectures run about 145 words per minute and TED talks about 169. People produce about 6 disfluencies per 100 words, and candidates who look down at the screen in video interviews are rated lower on hireability.

Every number below links to the study or report it came from. Where a figure is commonly misquoted, the row says what the source actually measured. We checked each source on 31 October 2026.

Fear of public speaking

Statistic	Source
21.2% of US adults report a lifetime fear of public speaking, the most common of 14 social fears measured.	Ruscio and colleagues, Psychological Medicine, 2008; 9,282 adults
12.1% of US adults have social anxiety disorder at some point in life; 7.1% in any given year.	Ruscio and colleagues, 2008; NIMH
Social anxiety disorder in a given year affects 9.1% of adults aged 18–29 but 3.1% of those over 60.	NIMH
About 1 in 3 adults report excessive anxiety when speaking to a large audience.	Stein, Walker and Forde, Archives of General Psychiatry, 1996; 499 adults
Of people anxious about speaking, 80% fear visibly trembling, 74% fear their mind going blank and 63% fear being unable to continue.	Stein and colleagues, 1996
Speaking anxiety starts early: 50% of cases begin by age 13, 75% by 17 and 90% by 20.	Stein and colleagues, 1996
28.9% of Americans are afraid or very afraid of public speaking; 30.3% say the same about dying.	Chapman University Survey of American Fears

Speaking pace

Statistic	Source
University lectures average about 145 words per minute; TED talks about 169, significantly faster.	Wingrove, Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2017; 90 one-minute samples
Phone conversations average 196 words per minute counting silences, 236 excluding them and 164 per speaker turn.	Yuan, Liberman and Cieri, Interspeech, 2006; 2,438 conversations
Across those conversations, average pace ranged from 111 to 291 words per minute.	Yuan and colleagues, 2006

Want your own number? Take the 60-second words per minute test.

Filler words and disfluency

Statistic	Source
People produce about 6 disfluencies per 100 words in conversation (fillers, repeats and restarts), and some speakers about three times that.	Shriberg, Journal of the International Phonetic Association, 2001; 100 speakers
Disfluencies affect up to 10% of words and over a third of sentences in natural conversation, but under 1% when people talk to a computer.	Shriberg, 2001
“Uh” signals a short delay and “um” a longer one; speakers plan them like words.	Clark and Fox Tree, Cognition, 2002
Listeners recalled a story better after hearing fillers than after coughs of the same length.	Fraundorf and Watson, 2011
Young women's voices with vocal fry were rated less competent, trustworthy and hirable by a national panel.	Anderson and colleagues, PLOS ONE, 2014; 800 listeners

Count your own fillers with the free filler word counter.

Eye contact and video calls

Statistic	Source
In simulated online job interviews, candidates whose gaze skewed down at the screen scored lower on all six ratings, including job ability and hireability, than when they looked at the camera, and even lower than audio only.	Shinya and colleagues, Scientific Reports, 2024; 38 raters
Doctors who looked into the camera on a telemedicine call were seen as making eye contact and rated more empathic and supportive.	Helou and colleagues, 2022; 51 raters
Heavier video-call use predicted more “Zoom fatigue”, and women reported more than men, linked to mirror anxiety, constant gaze and feeling trapped.	Fauville and colleagues, 2023; 9,787 people
35% of US workers who can work remotely did so all the time in 2023, up from 7% before the pandemic.	Pew Research Center, 2023; 5,775 workers

Job interviews and first impressions

Statistic	Source
Interviewers rate candidates lower in video and phone interviews than face to face (effect size d = −0.41).	Blacksmith, Willford and Behrend, 2016; 12 studies, 1,557 people
About 3 in 4 of 700 executives said their companies use live video to interview leading candidates.	Korn Ferry Futurestep, via SHRM, 2015
Candidates who made a better impression in the opening small talk got higher interview ratings (r = .42) and more job offers (r = .22).	Barrick, Swider and Stewart, Journal of Applied Psychology, 2010
People judge trustworthiness and competence from a face in 100 milliseconds; more time mostly adds confidence, not accuracy.	Willis and Todorov, Psychological Science, 2006
Voters of both sexes preferred lower-pitched voices for male and female candidates.	Klofstad, Anderson and Peters, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2012

Practice the opener that sets that impression: how to answer “Tell me about yourself”.

Hands, face and body

Statistic	Source
People touch their face about 23 times an hour; 44% of touches reach the mouth, nose or eyes.	Kwok and colleagues, American Journal of Infection Control, 2015; 26 students, 2,346 touches
Stopping people from gesturing made their speech less fluent when describing space and movement.	Rauscher, Krauss and Chen, Psychological Science, 1996
Across 63 studies, seeing a speaker's gestures improved listeners' understanding, most when gestures added information.	Hostetter, Psychological Bulletin, 2011

Attention during talks

Statistic	Source
In a 40-minute video lecture, students' attention fell from 6.0 to 4.9 on a 7-point scale, and fidgeting rose.	Farley, Risko and Kingstone, Frontiers in Psychology, 2013
Short quizzes between lecture segments cut mind-wandering and improved learning.	Szpunar, Khan and Schacter, PNAS, 2013

Nerves and what helps

Statistic	Source
Saying “I am excited” before a speech made people more persuasive, competent and confident than saying “I am calm”.	Brooks, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014
Telling test-takers that nerves help raised real GRE math scores to 770 vs 706 for the control group.	Jamieson and colleagues, 2010
Practice in front of real or virtual audiences strongly reduced speaking anxiety (g ≈ −1.4) across 11 studies and 508 people.	Reeves and colleagues, Behavior Modification, 2021
Virtual reality exposure worked as well as group therapy for people with a fear of public speaking, and gains held after 12 months.	Anderson and colleagues, Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 2013; 97 people

The practical version is in how to overcome the fear of public speaking.

Four popular statistics that are myths

“People fear public speaking more than death.” Not what surveys find. In Chapman University's survey, 28.9% fear public speaking and 30.3% fear dying. What holds up: public speaking is the most common social fear, at 21.2% of adults (Ruscio, 2008).
“Communication is 7% words, 38% tone, 55% body language.” Albert Mehrabian's figures came from experiments on single words expressing like or dislike, and he said they don't apply to ordinary communication. Tone and face only outweigh words when they contradict them.
“You have 7 seconds to make a first impression.” No study found that. People form impressions of a face in 100 milliseconds (Willis and Todorov, 2006), and in interviews the opening few minutes of small talk predict ratings (Barrick, 2010).
“Attention drops after 10 minutes” or “we have a goldfish's 8-second attention span.” A review found no primary data behind the 10-to-15-minute lecture claim (Bradbury, 2016). Measured attention fades gradually over a long talk, with no sudden cliff.

Use these freely with a link to this page. To see your own numbers, a practice call with Ace Coach measures your pace, fillers, eye contact and gestures, then gives you the one thing to fix.

Public speaking and interview statistics.