We introduce the concept of inflation word entropy for random substitutions with a constant and primitive substitution matrix. Previous calculations of the topological entropy of such systems implicitly used this concept and established equality of topological entropy and inflation word entropy, relying on ad hoc methods. We present a unified scheme, proving that inflation word entropy and topological entropy in fact coincide. The topological entropy is approximated by a converging series of upper and lower bounds which, in many cases, lead to an analytic expression.