How much mobile data do I actually use?

Estimate your monthly mobile data from what you actually do with your phone, as a range rather than a false precision, and see which allowance that points at.

Or
What do you do on mobile data? Fill in the ones that apply.
  • Web browsing

    Text-heavy pages sit at the bottom of this. Image-heavy news and shopping sites sit at the top.

  • Social media

    Almost entirely decided by autoplaying video. A feed of text and photos is a fraction of a feed of clips.

  • Music streaming

    Follows the bitrate directly: roughly 43 MB an hour at 96 kbps, 72 at 160 kbps, 144 at 320 kbps.

  • Video, standard definition

    Around 480p. The single most effective change available on mobile data is dropping to this from HD.

  • Video, HD

    720p to 1080p. The top of the range is a high-bitrate 1080p stream, which some services default to on a fast connection.

  • Video, 4K

    An hour of 4K can use more data than a week of everything else. Few phone screens show any benefit from it.

  • Video calls

    A one-to-one call on a messaging app sits near the bottom. A group meeting in HD sits near the top.

  • Maps and navigation

    Much smaller than people expect. Live traffic and re-routing account for most of it, not the map itself.

  • Cloud backup

    Close to the size of what is backed up, plus a few per cent of protocol overhead. This is the one most worth restricting to Wi-Fi.

  • Photo and video uploads

    The widest range here, because a photo is a few megabytes and a phone video is tens to hundreds. If yours are mostly video, enter the total size under cloud backup instead.

  • Game downloads and updates

    Updates are easy to forget and can be larger than the original download.

  • Hotspot for a laptop or tablet

    Depends entirely on what the other device does. A laptop left connected will also download its own updates in the background.

  • Something else

    Entered directly in megabytes, so it passes through unchanged.

Fill in whichever activities apply above. Two or three of the big ones is enough for a usable estimate.

Not enough to say anything yet

Low — this is a starting point, not a finding. More information would change it.

Nothing has been entered that can be turned into an answer. Every tool here works from figures you supply, and none of them will guess on your behalf.

What to try, all free

  1. Look up what you actually used

    Both Android and iOS keep a running total of mobile data, and your network shows the last few months in its app. That record beats every estimate on this page — use this tool to sanity-check it, not to replace it.

    • Do it now
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Worked out by mobile rules 1.0.0. Nothing you entered leaves your browser.

Why this is a range and not a number

An hour of navigation uses about 5 MB. An hour of 4K video uses about 7,000. Those are both “an hour on your phone”, and they differ by more than a thousand times. Even within one activity the spread is large: an hour of social media is four times heavier if video autoplays than if it does not.

So a calculator that multiplies your hours by one number per activity gives you a confident answer that is wrong in a way you cannot see. This one carries a low, typical and high figure through the whole calculation and shows you the band that comes out. If the band is wide, that is the honest result — and the page says so rather than picking a point inside it and pretending.

Your phone already knows

Both Android and iOS keep a running total of mobile data, and your network shows the last few months in its app. That record beats every estimate on this page, because it is a measurement rather than an inference from how many hours you think you spend on things.

Use this to sanity-check that number, to work out what a change would do, or to plan for a month that will not look like last month. If the two disagree, believe your phone.

The two things that decide most of it

Video quality.Dropping from HD to standard definition on mobile data roughly thirds the data an hour of video uses. On a phone screen held at arm’s length the difference in what you see is far smaller than the difference in what you pay for.

Background backup. Photo and video backup is usually the largest thing a phone does without being asked, and it is the one that least needs to happen immediately. Setting it to Wi-Fi only changes nothing you would notice.

Between them those two account for most of the usage people cannot explain. Both are free to change and both are reversible in a tap, which is why they come before any suggestion of a different plan.

What allowance this points at

Two answers, deliberately. The first is the smallest standard allowance that covers a typical month; the second is the one that covers a heavy month too. Sizing everyone from the high estimate would push every reader towards a larger plan than they need, which happens to be the direction that makes a site like this money.

Which of the two to pick depends on how much you mind an overage charge. Before deciding, look at your highest month in the last year rather than your average — the worst month is the one that has to fit.

Once you know the size you need, the contract cost checker works out what a plan actually costs over its term, which is a different question from what it costs a month.

What this cannot tell you

It does not know what your apps do in the background, how aggressively your phone compresses video, or whether a service you use has changed its default quality. Those are real and they are part of why the top of each range sits where it does.

Nothing you enter here leaves your browser. There is no account, no upload, and nothing stored between visits.