How does a VPN connection affect your phone's battery life?

Contents

Our test setup Standby Testing Standby battery life test (hh:mm)Web browsing test Web browsing battery life test (hh:mm)conclusion

Whether for security reasons or more practical reasons like avoiding geographic restrictions, VPNs have become an invaluable tool for many modern internet users.

We all know how a VPN works and what its benefits and uses are, so we won’t focus on that here. Examining the effects of VPNs on network speeds is also nothing new.

We tried to find out if running a VPN connection constantly on your smartphone has any significant impact on battery life, and to what extent. It turns out that the question is not that simple.

Does using a VPN affect your phone's battery life?

Our test setup

We used NordVPN for this test, one of the most popular service providers in the region. Setting it up was very easy – it just takes a few clicks in their mobile app.

We have selected four phones in different price segments with different grade chipsets. This list includes Motorola Edge 50 Pro, Realme GT 6, Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G and Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra.

We tested battery life with a VPN But And Close In two different use cases.

was the first Standby TestingWhere we evaluated whether battery consumption increases when you are not using your phone but have the VPN connection running in the background.

the second was Active web browsing test Loading pages, scrolling pages and repeatedly touching the screen. The screen was set to 200nits so this reflects casual indoor daytime web browsing and social media scrolling.

Standby Testing

Let’s first look at the standby test results – the numbers below represent how many hours the phone will last until the battery is completely drained.

Keeping the VPN connection always on doesn’t seem to make any difference to the phone’s battery life. If there was a difference, it was so small and insignificant that we couldn’t detect it.

Web browsing test

However, active web browsing proved to be a different matter. Again, the numbers you see below are the hours the phone’s battery will last you through your day before it needs to be charged.

And using a VPN connection in the background has a negative impact on battery life. And yes, we ran each test two-three times to verify the results.

As far as its effect is concerned, there was a twist in the results. We were surprised to see that its effect would vary greatly depending on the device being used.

The Motorola Edge 50 Pro showed only a 1.13% decrease in its runtime. The Realme GT 6 also lost a modest 3.75% of its total runtime.

At the other end of the spectrum was the Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra, which had a 10.57% shorter battery life. And the Xiaomi Redmi Note 13 Pro 5G had a 17.56% shorter battery life with the VPN on.

Remember, this test represents using a full battery charge for web browsing. Since you probably won’t be using your phone for 8-14 hours straight, the overall impact of keeping the connection always on may not be that great. As we’ve seen, when your phone is idle and not in active use, a VPN connection doesn’t have any impact on battery life.

conclusion

There are several important benefits to subscribing to a service like Nord VPN:

The information you transmit and receive online is secure and anonymous and cannot be intercepted.
Your ISP has difficulty seeing how much of your data cap has been used or whether speed throttling has been applied.
You keep your web browsing history to yourself.
You get access to geo-blocked online services.

So keeping these benefits in mind, it is wise to always keep the VPN connection on, especially if you are traveling and you may be relying on open Wi-Fi networks that may be compromised. This way, you don’t have to remember to turn it on every time you use such an unsecured network.

And yes, VPN connection Desire Your phone’s battery life does take a hit. How much it is will depend on the device you’re using, but it can reduce your battery life by anywhere from 1% to 17%. But this is worst when you’re actively using your phone without giving it a minute to rest. And yet, the compromise is worth it.

If you want to give NordVPN a try, check out this VPN deal which also includes their eSIM solution, Sealy.