Monthly Data Budget Planner
Estimate your monthly data usage and check if you will exceed your data cap.
Results
Most internet service providers enforce data caps between 300 GB and 1.25 TB. Video streaming is by far the largest consumer, easily using 180 GB or more per month at 1080p. This planner estimates your total monthly usage from common activities so you can tell whether your plan is large enough.
Explore all our streaming usage calculator tools, or browse the full cooking hub.
Frequently asked questions
The average US household uses about 500 GB per month as of 2025, driven largely by video streaming. Households with 4K streaming or multiple heavy users can easily exceed 1 TB.
If you stream 2 hours of 1080p video daily (180 GB), listen to 1 hour of music (1.8 GB) and browse 2 hours (3.5 GB), you use about 185 GB - well under 1 TB. Add a second streamer at 4K and you can reach 600+ GB.
Video streaming dominates at about 3 GB per hour for 1080p and 7 GB per hour for 4K. Video calls (0.8-1.4 GB/hr), gaming downloads and cloud backups are the next biggest consumers.
No. General web browsing uses about 60 MB per hour, which is 50 times less than 1080p video streaming. Even heavy browsing for 8 hours a day only adds about 14 GB per month.
Most ISPs either throttle your speed to 1-5 Mbps, charge overage fees ($10-15 per 50 GB) or offer an unlimited upgrade. Comcast adds $30/month for unlimited, while some fiber providers have no caps at all.