Most people either buy far too much data or panic-buy too little and top up twice. Here are the actual figures so you can size it once.
What things really cost
Rough hourly consumption:
| Activity | Data per hour |
|---|---|
| Messaging (WhatsApp, iMessage) | 1–5 MB |
| Email, no big attachments | 5–10 MB |
| Web browsing and maps | 20–60 MB |
| Google Maps navigation | 5–10 MB |
| Music streaming | 40–150 MB |
| Social media scrolling | 100–250 MB |
| Video calls | 250–500 MB |
| Video streaming, standard | 500 MB–1 GB |
| Video streaming, HD | 1.5–3 GB |
The pattern is obvious once you see it: video is everything, text is nothing.
Navigation surprises people by being cheap. Google Maps downloads an area once and tracks your position locally, so a full day of walking directions is maybe 50 MB — less than three minutes of HD video.
Typical daily totals
Light — around 200 MB/day. Messaging, email, maps, occasional lookups, photos uploaded on hotel Wi-Fi. A week: about 1.5 GB.
Moderate — around 500 MB/day. The above, plus social media through the day, some music, a short video call. A week: about 3.5 GB.
Heavy — 1.5 GB or more per day. Video calls, streaming on the move, uploading photos and video as you go, hotspotting a laptop. A week: 10 GB and up.
Most holidaymakers are moderate. Most people buy as though they were heavy.
A quick way to size it
Look at your own numbers rather than guessing.
iPhone: Settings → Cellular, scroll to Cellular Data Usage. Reset the statistics, use your phone normally for two days at home, then check.
Android: Settings → Network & internet → Data usage.
Then adjust for travel, because travel changes the mix in both directions:
- More maps, translation, ride-hailing, searching for places
- More photo and video uploads if you post as you go
- Less streaming, because you are out doing things
- Much less overall if your hotel Wi-Fi is decent and you use it
A reasonable rule: take your normal daily average, add 30%, multiply by the number of days, and round to the nearest plan size.
Four ways to use much less
Download before you go. Offline maps for your destination, your playlists, anything you plan to watch on the plane. All free on home Wi-Fi.
Turn off auto-play video. Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook all stream automatically as you scroll. Disabling that in each app’s settings is the single biggest saving available to a normal user.
Stop background app refresh. iOS: Settings → General → Background App Refresh. Android: per-app data settings. Apps updating themselves in the background can quietly consume hundreds of megabytes.
Never let cloud photo backup run on mobile data. iCloud Photos and Google Photos will happily upload a week of holiday video over your travel plan. Set both to Wi-Fi only before you leave.
Should you just buy unlimited?
Sometimes — but read what “unlimited” means. Almost every unlimited travel plan has a fair use threshold, after which speed drops sharply, often to something barely usable. If the threshold is 1 GB a day and you needed 500 MB, you have paid for a promise you never touch.
Unlimited earns its price when you genuinely cannot predict usage, or when you will be hotspotting a laptop. For a normal trip, a right-sized plan is cheaper.
The practical answer
For a week away, most people are comfortable on 3–5 GB. Two weeks, 5–10 GB.
Buy in that range, check your usage on day two, and top up if the trend says you will run short. That beats overbuying by a wide margin — and topping up mid-trip takes about a minute.