How much data does YouTube use?
About 1.8GB an hour at 720p.
Resolution is everything. Dropping YouTube from 1080p to 480p on your phone cuts it by more than five times, and on a phone screen you will struggle to tell.
Put that on a real trip: 30 minutes a day for 10 days at 720p works out at about 8.8GB , before anything else on your phone, and before the 120MB a day that background sync quietly takes.
YouTube data usage by quality
| Quality | Data | 1GB lasts | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 240p | 225MB/hr | 4.6 hours | measured |
| 480p | 560MB/hr | 1.8 hours | measured |
| 720p | 1.8GB/hr | 34 minutes | measured |
| 1080p | 2.9GB/hr | 20 minutes | measured |
| 4K | 13GB/hr | 5 minutes | measured |
Published means the service states the figure itself. Bitrate means it's arithmetic from a documented stream rate. Measured means it's corroborated across independent tests. Real usage moves with signal strength and how aggressively the app pre-buffers.
How that compares
Lighter than YouTube
- TikTok870MB/hr
- Netflix700MB/hr
- Instagram600MB/hr