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Data Usage Calculator
Estimate how much data you use in a month. Enter your daily hours of music and video streaming at each quality, add an allowance for everything else, and compare the total with your plan’s data cap.
- Data per day
- 3.27 GB
- Share of your allowance
- 98.16%
- Video
- 90 GB
- Music
- 2.16 GB
- Everything else
- 6 GB
Saved setups
Save a set of inputs you reuse — your usual rate, your loan, your room sizes — and load it back in one tap.
Your recent calculations
Results you calculate here are kept on this device so you can come back to them.
Formula
How to use it
- Enter average daily hours for music and each video quality.
- Enter an estimate for all other use per day.
- Set the number of days in your billing period and your plan’s allowance.
- Read the total and what share of your plan it uses.
Worked examples
An hour of music, an hour of HD video and 200 MB of other use a day: 3.272 GB a day, 98.16 GB in 30 days
- Data per day
- 3.27 GB
- Data per billing period
- 98.16 GB
- Share of your allowance
- 98.16%
- Video
- 90 GB
- Music
- 2.16 GB
- Everything else
- 6 GB
Two hours of SD video and half an hour of music a day on a 50 GB plan: 43.08 GB
- Data per day
- 1.44 GB
- Data per billing period
- 43.08 GB
- Share of your allowance
- 86.16%
The rates used
Music is counted at 160 kbps, a common streaming quality, which works out to exactly 72 MB an hour; the highest-quality 320 kbps setting doubles that. Video is counted at 0.7 GB an hour for standard definition, 3 GB for HD and 7 GB for 4K, in line with the per-hour figures Netflix publishes for its quality settings. Other services and lower quality settings can use less.
Estimating “everything else”
Web browsing, social feeds, maps, email and messaging are hard to pin down by the hour. The reliable source is your own phone: both iOS and Android list data used per app under their cellular or mobile data settings. Divide last month’s non-streaming total by 30 and enter it here.
Video dominates
One hour of HD video uses as much data as about 42 hours of music. If you need to cut usage, lowering video quality or downloading over Wi-Fi does far more than anything else.
Questions people ask
How much data does an hour of HD video use?
About 3 GB at Netflix’s high-quality setting. Standard definition is about 0.7 GB and 4K about 7 GB.
How much data does streaming music use?
About 72 MB an hour at 160 kbps, so an hour a day is a little over 2 GB a month.
How many hours of HD video is 100 GB?
About 33 hours at 3 GB an hour.