Travel Data / WiFi Calculator
Estimate travel mobile data from streaming, video calls, social media, music, and maps.
Returns daily and trip totals in GB plus the plan size to buy.
Buying a travel data plan means guessing a number before you know what you will use, and most people guess badly in both directions. The estimate here is built up from what each activity actually consumes rather than from a vague sense of being a light or heavy user.
The formula
Daily GB = Video + Video Calls + Social and Browsing + Music + Navigation
Trip GB = Daily GB × Days
What each activity costs you, per hour
| Activity | Data per hour | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Video, low quality | 0.3 GB | Netflix “Low”, 480p YouTube |
| Video, standard definition | 0.7 GB | Netflix “Medium” |
| Video, high definition | 3.0 GB | Netflix “High”, 1080p |
| Video, 4K | 7.0 GB | Rarely worth it on a phone screen |
| Video calls | 1.0 GB | WhatsApp and FaceTime run lighter, Zoom heavier |
| Social scrolling | 0.7 GB | TikTok and Instagram are almost all video now |
| Music streaming | 0.07 GB | 160 kbps. Even a long day barely registers |
| Map navigation | 0.005 GB | Vector tiles, and far smaller than people expect |
Two of those rows surprise people every time. Music is nearly free at about 72 MB an hour, so streaming all day for a fortnight costs under 3 GB. Navigation is free enough to ignore at roughly 5 MB an hour, because the map is drawn from vector data your phone already has, and only the route and traffic come over the wire.
The one that is not free is video. An hour of HD Netflix costs more data than a week of navigating, which is why “I only used maps and messaging” and “I watched two films on the train” land in completely different plans.
Worked example
10 days in France. An hour of HD video a night, 20 minutes of video calling home, moderate scrolling, two hours of music, an hour of navigation.
Video: 1 × 3.0 = 3.0 GB
Video calls: 0.33 × 1.0 = 0.33 GB
Social: 0.4 GB
Music: 2 × 0.07 = 0.14 GB
Navigation: 1 × 0.005 = 0.005 GB
Daily total ≈ 3.9 GB, so about 39 GB for the trip
Drop the video to standard definition and the same trip fits in 16 GB. That single setting, buried in the Netflix and YouTube apps, moves the plan you need by more than every other habit combined.
Round up, but not by much
Buy the next plan size above your estimate. Most eSIM providers sell top-ups mid-trip at roughly the same price per gigabyte, so running slightly short is a minor annoyance rather than a disaster, and over-buying by 20 GB is money you do not get back.
Hotel Wi-Fi does the heavy lifting Download the films, the offline maps, and the podcasts before you leave the room. Nothing on the list above needs to run on cellular except navigation and messaging, and those two are the cheapest things on it.
How we build and check this calculator
This calculator runs entirely in your browser, so the numbers you enter stay on your device. The math behind it is written by hand and tested against worked examples and standard references before the page goes live.
SuperGlobalCalculator is independently built and maintained. See how we build and verify our calculators.