📶 Streaming Data Usage Calculator
Enter how many hours you stream per month and your typical video quality to estimate data usage — useful for staying within a home internet or mobile data cap.
Hours times a per-hour rate
The estimate is one multiplication against a fixed rate for the quality you pick, then a share of the cap:
data GB = hours × GB per hour
% of cap = data GB ÷ cap × 100
SD 0.7 GB/h HD 1080p 3 GB/h 4K UHD 7 GB/hThe defaults - 60 hours a month in HD - give 180.0 GB, which is 15.0% of a 1,200 GB cap. Switch to 4K and the same 60 hours becomes 420 GB, or 35%. The summary turns amber past 70% of the cap and red past 90%; a blank or zero cap hides the percentage row.
How far to trust the three rates
Those three GB-per-hour figures are hard-coded into this page as commonly cited averages, not fetched from any service. Real usage moves a long way around them:
- Codec matters more than resolution. The same 4K stream in AV1 or HEVC can use close to half the data of an older H.264 one.
- Bitrate is adaptive. A slow connection quietly drops you to a lower tier, so you may be paying for 4K and using HD data.
- Two people streaming on two devices is two streams. Multiply the hours, not the rate.
- Your cap covers everything else too - game downloads, backups, video calls.
Frequently asked questions
How much data does streaming in 4K use per hour?
Around 7 GB an hour is the figure this tool uses, so a two-hour film is about 14 GB. Modern codecs can bring that under 5 GB, and a stream downgraded mid-film uses less again.
How many hours of streaming fit in a 1 TB cap?
At 3 GB an hour for HD, roughly 333 hours - about 11 a day for a month. In 4K it drops to about 143 hours, before anything else in the house uses the line.
Does lowering the quality actually save much?
Yes. Dropping from 4K to SD cuts the rate tenfold: 60 hours goes from 420 GB to 42 GB. On a phone screen the difference is usually invisible, which is why most apps have a separate mobile-quality setting.