How much does it cost to charge your smartphone for a year?

Smartphones are very energy efficient. It costs less than a dollar to fully charge a smartphone battery every day for an entire year. This is true for iPhones, Samsung Galaxy phones, and other Android phones.

Most of us charge our phones without a second thought because they are an indispensable part of modern life. But how much do we spend each year to keep them fully charged and ready for action?

Smartphones using incredibly low power

Of all the electrical things you use around the house – computers, TVs, smart speakers, even analog things like light bulbs and ceiling fans – we're extremely confident that nothing is as energy efficient as your smartphone. This is true whether you use an iPhone, a Samsung Galaxy phone, or another type of Android phone.

In fact, we're just going to spoil the surprise right off the bat lest we keep you in too much suspense. You probably pay less than a dollar a year to charge your phone. Not less than a dollar a week or less than a dollar a month. under a dollar annually.

With energy prices soaring and the significant amount of power wasted even by idle devices, we should all be keeping an eye on things, but worrying about wasting money charging your phone shouldn't be a part of it. at the top of the list – or on the list at all.

Here's how to calculate it yourself

How can we say with such confidence that charging your phone is so cheap? Well, two ways. You can replicate both yourself at home.

One requires a bit of back-of-the-envelope math, and the other requires you to use an actual power meter to monitor your charger. However, you'll probably find using a power meter much more valuable when measuring larger devices like televisions.

Calculate the theoretical cost of fees

The most accurate way to measure the cost of charging your smartphone is to use a physical tool to measure actual power consumption, which takes into account the energy lost during the charging process. But in practice, it's such a small amount of power, and small, low-voltage chargers are usually quite efficient, so there's not much overhead.

With that in mind, we feel pretty comfortable using battery capacity as a benchmark for calculating how much power you're using to charge it. You will need to find the capacity and voltage in milliamp-hours (mAh) of your phone's battery.

As an example, we'll use the iPhone 13 Pro battery as a benchmark. The iPhone 13 Pro has a 3 mAh battery that operates at 095 volts.

You can find the battery capacity of your particular smartphone model and substitute this value in the calculations. Rather than wasting time digging through search engine results, we recommend that you visit GSMArena.com, a huge database of phone statistics, and search for your particular phone model to see the battery capacity in inventory and more.

The GSMArena statistics not only lists the mAh value of the battery, but also the watt-hours (Wh), which will allow you to skip one of our calculations.

But suppose you do everything from scratch. First, we need to figure out how many watt-hours of energy your phone's battery can store. To do this, we first need to convert milliamp-hours to watt-hours by multiplying battery capacity by voltage and dividing by 1.

(mAh * V) / 1000 = Wh

Based on this equation, our 3mAh/095V iPhone battery has a capacity of 3,83Wh. It's the same amount of stored energy no matter how we label it, we just change the units from mAh to Wh because your electricity consumption is metered and charged in kilowatts.

Now let's calculate how much it costs you to charge an 11,85 Wh battery, assuming it's completely depleted. Let's convert Wh to kWh, the unit used by your electricity company to bill you.

Wh / 1000 = kWh

So the battery capacity of our iPhone is 0,019 kWh. You can then, in turn, determine how much this amount of electricity is costing you by referring to your electricity bill for the value of the cost per kWh. We will use the national average, which is $0,12 per kWh.

Battery Capacity in kWh * Cost-per-kWh =  Charge Cost

Our iPhone 13 Pro, based on our perfectly efficient charging scenario here, costs $0,0023 to go from completely dead to fully charged.

Assuming you drain your battery every day of the year and then recharge it, it will cost you $0,83, not even a dollar.

But you're probably not even spending that much. I don't know about you, but with the larger batteries in modern smartphones, I rarely fully discharge my battery every day and usually put it back on the charger when it's still around 50% charged.

So perpetually charging half the battery every day only incurs half the charging cost. That means, in my case at least, I'm not even spending that 83 cents a year to charge my phone, but rather 40-50 cents.

Measure the charger with a power meter

All calculations in the previous section are based on raw numbers and do not account for inefficiencies in the billing process.

As we mentioned above, the inefficiency of small phone chargers is pretty insignificant, but if you really want to know down to $0,001 how much it costs to charge your phone, you'll need a power meter.

Generally, when using a power meter, you can get a fairly accurate reading right away. If you want to see your TV's power consumption, all you have to do is plug it in, turn on the TV, and see how many watts the TV is consuming under load.

But if you're metering a charger, you'll need to leave it connected for at least one full charge cycle. And in the case of a very small battery like the one found in a phone, you probably want to leave the power meter plugged in for at least a few dozen charge cycles to get a more accurate idea of ​​how much the charger is charging and the charging process costs you over time.