How Much Data Do I Need for a Trip? Real Numbers

Every travel eSIM guide answers this question with "it depends," which is true and completely useless. Here are actual numbers. 🪼

The per-app numbers that matter

These are rough real-world figures, measured on a phone rather than taken from a spec sheet. Your mileage varies with quality settings, but the order of magnitude is right.

Activity	Data used
Google Maps navigation	3-5 MB per hour
WhatsApp text messaging	Under 1 MB per hour
WhatsApp voice call	15-20 MB per 10 minutes
WhatsApp video call	60-100 MB per 10 minutes
Instagram or TikTok scrolling	100-200 MB per 30 minutes
Uploading 20 photos	40-80 MB
Spotify streaming (normal quality)	40-70 MB per hour
YouTube at 480p	250-350 MB per hour
Netflix at 1080p	2-3 GB per hour
Email and web browsing	10-20 MB per hour
Laptop tethered, general work	300-600 MB per hour

Two things jump out. Navigation, the thing everyone worries about, is essentially free. Video, the thing nobody accounts for, is where entire plans disappear.

A formula you can do in your head

Pick a daily figure from your honest usage profile:

• Light, 300 MB/day. Maps, messaging, checking email, a few photos uploaded on hotel Wi-Fi rather than on cellular.
• Medium, 800 MB/day. The above plus social scrolling, uploading as you go, and the occasional short video.
• Heavy, 2 GB/day. Streaming music or video daily, video calls home, working from your phone.

Then: daily figure x trip days x 1.3

The 1.3 is not padding for its own sake. It covers the day your hotel Wi-Fi does not work, the unplanned video call, and the app that decides to update itself over cellular.

A ten-day trip on medium usage: 800 MB x 10 x 1.3 = about 10 GB. That is why 10 GB is the size most travelers end up buying.

Tethering changes everything

If a laptop or tablet is coming with you and will connect through your phone, recalculate from scratch. A laptop is not a bigger phone: it loads desktop versions of every page, syncs Dropbox and iCloud in the background, pulls email attachments in full, and installs OS updates when it feels like it.

A realistic figure for a working day tethered to a phone is 1.5-3 GB. A week of remote work abroad is a 20 GB plan, not a 5 GB one. If you are doing video calls from a tethered laptop, budget 3-5 GB per day and consider whether an unlimited plan actually is the cheaper option for you.

Six ways to use dramatically less

1. Download offline maps before you fly. Google Maps and Apple Maps both let you save a whole city. This removes the one thing people are most afraid of running out of.
2. Download your music, podcasts, and one film. Streaming is the single largest consumer of travel data by a wide margin.
3. Turn off auto-play video. Instagram, TikTok, X, and Facebook all have a "use less data" setting that stops autoplay on cellular. This alone can halve social usage.
4. Push photo backups to Wi-Fi only. iCloud Photos and Google Photos will happily upload 400 holiday photos over cellular otherwise.
5. Disable background app refresh for anything that is not messaging.
6. Do updates on hotel Wi-Fi. An OS update over a travel plan can eat several gigabytes in one go.

Do the first two and a light user genuinely can get through a two-week trip on 3 GB.

Should you just buy unlimited?

Sometimes. Unlimited plans are priced for the heaviest users, which means lighter users are subsidising them. The maths is usually simple: if your estimate comes out above roughly 2 GB per day, compare the unlimited price directly. Below that, a sized plan is cheaper.

Two cautions on unlimited. First, "unlimited" in mobile data almost always means unlimited subject to a fair-use policy, with speeds throttled after some threshold. Second, tethering rules on unlimited plans are frequently different from normal browsing rules. Read the terms for your specific destination rather than the headline.

When in doubt, buy small and top up

The cheapest mistake is buying too little, because topping up takes about thirty seconds and applies to the eSIM already on your phone. The expensive mistake is buying a 20 GB plan, using 6 GB, and flying home.

If you are genuinely unsure, start one size below your estimate. You will know your real usage rate by day two.

Want the maths done for you? The estimator on our homepage turns trip length and usage profile into a recommendation, and every destination page shows the real plan sizes available.