Here's How Much Data TikTok Uses Per Hour

When the videos being pushed to you are almost eerily attuned to your interests, it's easy to get sucked into a hole scrolling your For You feed on TikTok without realizing just how much data you've used. But if you have a limited data plan or metered internet connection, then you're going to want to be careful, as streaming content on video platforms can be fairly data-intensive. This is especially the case if you're watching videos at a higher resolution or video quality.

We set up a testing environment to find out how much data TikTok uses for each hour of streaming. To do this, we set it away to auto-scroll, with the video quality set to Auto. With these settings, TikTok used 323 megabytes (MB) of data for the hour. If you're streaming regularly, it's easy to see how you could eat through your data plan.

Exactly how much data gets used per hour of TikTok scrolling will vary a little on a case-by-case basis. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, the quality you watch videos at can change how much data is used. Secondly, the way you have your app set up could affect how much data is used, or even which version of the app you're using. No need to worry, though – there are a few steps you can take to limit how much data you use while exploring TikTok.

One way you can try to conserve data is by turning the video quality down as low as you can handle. Lower-quality videos use less data. So, choosing quantity over quality could be just the ticket here. The app's built-in Data Saver mode is useful for limiting video quality across all uploads, while also loading videos more slowly to save even more data. The only catch is, it doesn't work while you're connected to Wi-Fi.

Another way you can save data is by using TikTok Lite, which is more data-friendly than the regular version of the app. TikTok Lite is designed to work well if you have a weak connection, and therefore uses up less data while streaming videos, making it useful for metered connections and limited data plans. You can switch over to TikTok Lite by grabbing the TikTok Lite app.

You have one more option which is a little less practical than the others but could still be helpful if you find yourself going back to the same TikToks over and over. Try using TikTok's simple feature that lets you save videos to watch without Wi-Fi. You can download anywhere between 50 and 200 videos to watch while offline, so you can build up a solid collection to watch without using data. Be careful to do this on an unmetered Wi-Fi connection, though, as you could burn through your data doing this.