iOS 27: with Share Across Devices on, the figure can include your iPad and Mac.
Example: 3 hr a day
6 years, 3 months
of your remaining life on your phone.
A population average, not a forecast of your life: based on about 50.3 years of remaining life expectancy at age 30 (example age; average of the female and male tables, our choice; United States life tables 2024, NCHS).
For comparison, a 2025 study measured 314 and 336 minutes a day for the iPhone users in its two groups, in the United States and Canada, before it began; the authors call that very similar to the average American smartphone user. A motivated study sample, not a national average.
A projection if nothing changes, not a diagnosis: no calculator can judge whether your use is a problem.
How it’s calculated
The math: 50.25 years × 180 ÷ 1,440 ≈ 6.3 years; a year: 180 min × 365 ÷ 60 ≈ 1,095 hr.
Phone only, not computer or TV. The share of waking time uses your sleep, or 8 hours if you enter none (our assumption).
The big number counts whole days of 24 hours. Calculators that count only waking hours show larger numbers.
Your input stays in your browser. We see none of it.
Where do I find my screen time?
- iPhone with iOS 27: Settings › Screen Time › Daily Average, then Week. If Share Across Devices is on, the report can include your iPad and Mac; Apple’s iOS 27 guide describes no view of the iPhone alone.
- iPhone with iOS 26: Settings › Screen Time › See All App & Website Activity, then Week. Under Devices you can choose the iPhone alone.
- Android: Settings › Digital Wellbeing. The chart shows today’s use; Google’s guide describes no weekly average. Add up the days of a normal week and divide by seven. The steps can vary by device.
- Use the weekly average, not a single day: it includes both weekdays and the weekend.
- You can also enter the total of all your screens. The projection works the same way, but the comparisons on this page are for phones only.
If you live elsewhere, the result is the average for the country you pick, not for yours; the line under the number names the table.
Example age: enter your own.
Only for your share of waking time.
Enter apps one by one (optional, up to five)
Enter each app’s daily figure (its weekly total ÷ 7), from the weekly view of your screen time. The names stay on your device and never go on the card. Check “needed” for time you cannot or do not want to take back, such as navigation, work or calls: it counts toward your phone years, not toward the time you take back.
What that gives back
2 years, 1 month
of time without your phone, counted over your remaining years, if it stays this way. That is 365 hours a year: on paper, enough for a new language in 2.6 to 3.3 years, from Dutch (24 weeks) to Spanish (30 weeks), by the NFATC estimate for native English speakers.
Your plan for the next 30 days
- A pause before the appStart with the app that takes up most of your time. Add a few seconds of waiting before it opens, with the option to cancel right there. The app one sec from the study below does this, for example.In a field study of the app one sec, participants closed the app again in 36% of their attempts to open it; after six weeks they tried to open it 37% less often than in the first week. There was no control group, and one of the authors created the app. In the same paper’s controlled online experiment, with social media video clips, the option to cancel did the most; a message prompting reflection did not work.
- Two weeks without mobile internetBlock the internet on your phone, both Wi-Fi and mobile data. Calls and SMS still work; iMessage and chat apps need the internet. The internet on your laptop stays: if you need chat or email for work, use them there for these two weeks. The study used a blocking app (Freedom); turning off mobile data and Wi-Fi in your settings does the same job.In a randomized trial with 467 people in the United States and Canada, well-being improved within two weeks for 75% of the group asked to block, but also for 47% of a comparison group that had not blocked yet. It was not easy: only 119 kept the block on for at least 10 of the 14 days.
- A limit that reminds youiPhone: Settings › Screen Time › Time Allowances (iOS 27) or App Limits (iOS 26). Android: Digital Wellbeing › App timers.We have no evidence of an effect, so we promise none. Apple’s iOS 26 guide itself says the limits can be ignored by default. Use them as a reminder of the line you drew in steps 1 and 2.
For the reminder, enter your own time above. The calendar file then names your minutes a day in its text and its link, nothing else.
Android: If your phone does not open the file, email it to yourself and import it into Google Calendar on a computer, under Settings › Import & Export. Google says: “You can import with ICS and CSV files on a computer.”
What goes on the card?
The card is made as an image on your device. It shows only the numbers on the card you pick, never apps, age, life table or country.
Dieses Tool auf Deutsch: Bildschirmzeit-Rechner
What the number means
The big number projects your phone time today onto the years you statistically have left. It rests on the remaining life expectancy for your age from an official life table, a population average: anyone who spends 3 hours a day on their phone spends 180 of the 1,440 minutes of every day there at that pace, and so the same share of their remaining time. It counts whole days of 24 hours. Calculators that count only waking hours therefore show larger numbers; the calculator shows your share of waking time separately, with your sleep or 8 hours of it. Next to it is what your time adds up to today: at 3 hours a day, 1,095 hours a year, 45 full days. Only the phone counts, not the computer.
That is not a forecast. The three tables are period life tables, and the Office for National Statistics explains what that means: “Period life expectancy is the average number of additional years a person can be expected to live for if he or she experiences the age-specific mortality rates of the given area and time period for the rest of his or her life.” So the number does not say how long you will live. It says how much of your time today’s habit takes if it stays. That is exactly what makes it changeable.
How the screen time calculator works
Years on the phone = remaining life expectancy × minutes per day ÷ 1,440. The remaining life expectancy comes from the official life table of the country you choose, as the statistics office shows it. For the United States that is the column “Expectation of life at age x” of the United States life tables 2024 from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), one decimal place. For the United Kingdom it is the ONS national life tables for 2022 to 2024, released December 10, 2025, two decimal places; the ONS describes the column as the average number of years “that those aged x exact will live thereafter based on the mortality rates experienced in the three year period to which the National Life Table relates.” For Germany it is the life table 2023/2025 of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis), published July 7, 2026, two decimal places.
Average is our mean of the female and male tables. Destatis and the ONS publish no combined table in these releases; the NCHS does, but one rule for all three countries keeps the choice comparable, so this is our choice, not the statistics offices’. The result is rounded once, at the end: half up to whole months, with no rounded steps in between.
For your share of waking time we assume 8 hours of sleep, so 16 waking hours, unless you choose your own sleep in the calculator (5 to 10 hours); the 8 hours are our assumption, not a source’s. The calculator takes at most 16 hours of phone time a day, and never more than your waking time. For the hours a year we count 365 days; a full day is 24 whole hours, and a partial day does not count. Apps you mark as needed count toward your phone years, but not toward the time back: the calculator does not suggest cutting navigation you need.
For the comparison with a language we use the estimate of the National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC), the U.S. Department of State’s training center, whose language school teaches government staff: “The Directorate of Language Studies (LS) provides language and culture training to U.S. government employees with job-related needs.” For languages close to English it states: “Category I Languages: 24-30 weeks (552-690 class hours) Languages close to English.” A typical week, in its words, is “23 hours per week in class and 17 hours of self-study.” The range runs from Dutch (24 weeks) to Spanish (30 weeks); the NFATC list reads “Danish (24 weeks) Dutch (24 weeks) French (30 weeks) Italian (24 weeks) Norwegian (24 weeks) Portuguese (24 weeks) Romanian (24 weeks) Spanish (30 weeks) Swedish (24 weeks)”. 24 to 30 weeks of 40 hours each make 960 to 1,200 hours; that is our calculation. The estimate is for native English speakers and for level 3 of the ILR scale in speaking and listening. The calculator shows the comparison only when the language would take at most ten years and at most half of your remaining life expectancy; otherwise it gives the hours a year alone. It works as an order of magnitude, not as a promise.
Years on your phone by age and daily time
Generated with the same calculation as the calculator above, from the female and male United States life tables 2024. The columns give the phone time a day; each cell gives how many years of the remaining life go to the phone at that daily time, rounded to one decimal place.
On narrow screens the tables leave out the remaining life expectancy column; the calculator above names it with every result.
| Age | Remaining life expectancy | 1 hr | 2 hr | 3 hr | 4 hr | 5 hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 62.1 | 2.6 | 5.2 | 7.8 | 10.4 | 12.9 |
| 30 | 52.4 | 2.2 | 4.4 | 6.6 | 8.7 | 10.9 |
| 40 | 42.9 | 1.8 | 3.6 | 5.4 | 7.2 | 8.9 |
| 50 | 33.7 | 1.4 | 2.8 | 4.2 | 5.6 | 7.0 |
| 60 | 24.9 | 1.0 | 2.1 | 3.1 | 4.2 | 5.2 |
| 70 | 16.9 | 0.7 | 1.4 | 2.1 | 2.8 | 3.5 |
| 80 | 9.9 | 0.4 | 0.8 | 1.2 | 1.7 | 2.1 |
| Age | Remaining life expectancy | 1 hr | 2 hr | 3 hr | 4 hr | 5 hr |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 57.4 | 2.4 | 4.8 | 7.2 | 9.6 | 12.0 |
| 30 | 48.1 | 2.0 | 4.0 | 6.0 | 8.0 | 10.0 |
| 40 | 39.0 | 1.6 | 3.3 | 4.9 | 6.5 | 8.1 |
| 50 | 30.3 | 1.3 | 2.5 | 3.8 | 5.1 | 6.3 |
| 60 | 22.1 | 0.9 | 1.8 | 2.8 | 3.7 | 4.6 |
| 70 | 14.9 | 0.6 | 1.2 | 1.9 | 2.5 | 3.1 |
| 80 | 8.6 | 0.4 | 0.7 | 1.1 | 1.4 | 1.8 |
The same calculation for 3 hours a day across the three countries: the differences come from the life tables alone.
| Age | United States | United Kingdom | Germany |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 | 7.5 | 7.7 | 7.7 |
| 30 | 6.3 | 6.5 | 6.5 |
| 40 | 5.1 | 5.3 | 5.3 |
| 50 | 4.0 | 4.1 | 4.1 |
| 60 | 2.9 | 3.0 | 3.0 |
| 70 | 2.0 | 2.0 | 2.0 |
| 80 | 1.2 | 1.1 | 1.1 |
Two examples
Example 1: age 22, female table, United States, 4 hours and 30 minutes a day. Remaining life expectancy is about 60.2 years. At this pace, 11 years, 3 months of the remaining time is phone time, 28% of the waking hours and 1,643 hours a year today. With 1 hour less a day, 2 years, 6 months of time come back on paper, 365 hours every year.
Example 2: age 58, male table, United Kingdom, 2 hours a day, 30 minutes of it navigation marked as needed. With about 24.4 years of remaining life expectancy, 2 years of the remaining time is phone time. Taking back 2 hours a day works only with the 90 minutes that are not marked as needed: that gives 1 year, 6 months of time on paper and 548 hours a year.
What helps you use your phone less, and how good the evidence is
A pause before the app. The app one sec puts a short wait in front of an app you choose, plus the question whether you really want to open it. In a field study (Grüning and colleagues, PNAS 2023), 719 new users signed up; behavioral data over six weeks exist for 280 of them. The result: “First, on average 36% of the times participants attempted opening a target app, they closed that app again after one sec interfered.” Over six weeks, the users tried to open the apps less often: “Second, over the course of 6 wk, users attempted to open target apps 37% less than in the first week.” Actual openings fell by 57%. Three limits apply: the field study had no control group, the authors themselves name a self-selection bias, and one of the authors created the app. In the same paper’s controlled online experiment, 500 people watched social media video clips; there the option to stop watching did the most. The wait helped too, while a message prompting reflection did not.
Two weeks without mobile internet. Castelo and colleagues (PNAS Nexus 2025) asked 467 people in the United States and Canada, all with iPhones, to block the internet on their phone with an app (Freedom), both Wi-Fi and mobile data, for two weeks; calls and SMS still worked, and so did the internet on a computer. They were recruited through the online platform Prolific, and most of them already wanted to use their phone less. A comparison group blocked only afterward. In those first two weeks, more people improved in the group asked to block than in the comparison group, counting everyone who completed the surveys, whether or not they kept the block on: 75% versus 47% in well-being, 68% versus 52% in mental health and 59% versus 46% in attention, where the difference was not statistically significant (p = 0.062). Another figure from the study is quoted more often: “The intervention improved mental health, subjective well-being, and objectively measured ability to sustain attention; 91% of participants improved on at least one of these outcomes.” It compares before with after, across both groups (again only those who completed all surveys) and without a comparison group; the evidence for the effect is the comparison above. It was not easy: only 119 of 467 had the block active on at least 10 of the 14 days. In the group asked to block first, measured screen time fell from 314 to 161 minutes a day and then rose again to 265, staying below where it started; these are the means of the 92 people in that group who uploaded all three screenshots of their screen time. The researchers conclude: “Rather, simply reducing mobile internet use may be sufficient.”
Your phone’s own limits. iPhone and Android come with limits: Time Allowances from iOS 27, App Limits in iOS 26 and App timers in Digital Wellbeing. How much they do on their own we cannot show, so we promise nothing. Apple’s iOS 26 guide itself says: “Note: By default, Screen Time limits can be ignored once reached.” Apple’s iOS 27 guide to time allowances has no such note. On Android: “When you run out of time, the app closes and its icon dims.” Use the limits as a reminder of the line you draw with the first two steps.
Frequently asked questions
How many years of my life will I spend on my phone?
At 30 with 3 hours a day, it comes to 6 years, 3 months of your remaining life with the United States life tables 2024, 6 years, 6 months with the UK national life tables 2022 to 2024 and 6 years, 6 months with the German life table 2023/2025, each as the average of the female and male tables. It is a projection of today’s habit, not a forecast. There is no single number for everyone: figures like “about nine years” come from surveys whose method we could not check, so we do not use them.
How much screen time is too much for adults?
None of our sources sets a limit for adults; there are only averages. In Bitkom’s 2026 survey in Germany, smartphone users aged 16 and over estimated their use at 180 minutes a day, and those aged 16 to 29 at 216; these are self-estimates given by telephone, not measurements. In one 2025 study of motivated US and Canadian iPhone users, measured screen time was 314 and 336 minutes a day in its two groups before it began; that is a study sample, not a national average. Whether your time is too much is not decided by a number alone, but by what those hours give you or take from you.
Is 5 hours of screen time a day bad?
Not by itself, and a number of minutes is not a diagnosis. At 30, 5 hours a day add up to 10 years, 6 months of your remaining life with the United States life tables 2024 (average of both tables), and to 31% of your waking time at 8 hours of sleep. That is 300 minutes: above every age group’s self-estimate in Germany’s Bitkom survey (the highest was 216 minutes, for ages 16 to 29), but a little below the 314 and 336 minutes one 2025 study measured among motivated US and Canadian iPhone users before it began (a study sample, not a national average). Navigation, work and calls count too, which is why the calculator lets you mark them as needed.
What is the average person’s screen time per day?
There is no official figure we could check for the United States or the United Kingdom. A 2025 study measured 314 and 336 minutes a day in its two groups of US and Canadian iPhone users before it began, and the authors call that “very similar to the screen time of the average American smartphone user”; it was a motivated study sample, not a national survey. In Germany, Bitkom’s 2026 telephone survey of 1,006 people aged 16 and over found that the 861 smartphone users estimated 180 minutes a day: 216 for ages 16 to 29, 192 for 30 to 49, 177 for 50 to 64 and 113 for 65 and over. That is self-reported, not measured.
How is screen time calculated?
Your phone counts the minutes an app is on screen, the useful ones included. On an iPhone with iOS 27 the report can combine your iPhone, iPad and Mac if Share Across Devices is on; Apple writes: “This means your screen time schedules, time allowances, and usage data are shared across your devices.” With iOS 26 you can pick the iPhone alone under Devices. This calculator then works with the daily average you enter: years on the phone = remaining life expectancy × minutes per day ÷ 1,440, with the remaining life expectancy for your age from the official life table of the country you choose.
How do I check how much time I spend on my phone?
On an iPhone, in Settings under Screen Time; on Android, in Settings under Digital Wellbeing. With iOS 27, tap Daily Average there; Apple puts it like this: “Go to the Settings app on your iPhone. Tap Screen Time, then tap Daily Average.” With iOS 26 the item is called See All App & Website Activity. Android shows today’s use: “The chart shows your device use today.” For a weekly average, add up seven days and divide by seven. Google adds: “Important: Some of these steps may vary based on your device.”
How can I cut down my screen time?
Of the three steps here, a break from mobile internet is the best studied, in one randomized trial with iPhone users in the United States and Canada: well-being improved within two weeks for 75% of the group asked to block, against 47% of a comparison group that had not blocked yet. Measured screen time fell from 314 to 161 minutes a day and then rose again to 265 (means of 92 people), and only about a quarter kept the block on. A short pause before the app that takes up most of your time helped in a field study without a control group: users closed the app again in 36% of their attempts to open it. Your phone’s own limits work as a reminder; we have no evidence of an effect.
What if my phone use worries me?
Talk to your doctor or a licensed mental health professional; that is a good first step. No calculator can judge whether your use is a problem, this one included.
What happens to your input
The calculator runs entirely in your browser: hours, minutes, age, life table, country and app names are neither sent nor stored, and while you use it, the page writes none of them into the address bar. The share card is made as an image on your device and shows only the numbers on the card you pick, never app names, your age, your life table or your country. The calendar reminder is the one exception, and it exists only once you enter your own time. The file holds an event 30 days from now. Its text names your minutes a day, and in its link they follow the “#” sign, so you can compare next time. The file holds nothing else, not even your age. Your browser saves the file on your device; it reaches your calendar only when you open it. Your browser does not send the part after “#” to our servers, and the page removes it from the address bar once it opens; your browser history may keep the link. If you agreed to the site statistics, they count which parts of the tool were used (for example, that a card was shared or a reminder saved), never your values.
Sources
All sources retrieved October 21 and 22, 2026; we saved a copy of each page and checked every quote word for word against it.
- National Center for Health Statistics: Table 2. Life table for males: United States, 2024 and Table 3. Life table for females: United States, 2024, data tables of National Vital Statistics Reports vol. 75 no. 5, column “Expectation of life at age x”.
- Office for National Statistics: National life tables, UK, released December 10, 2025, worksheet 2022-2024, columns ex for males and females.
- Federal Statistical Office of Germany (Destatis): Statistischer Bericht Sterbetafeln 2023/2025, published July 7, 2026 (in German), tables 12613-b01 (male) and 12613-b02 (female), column ex.
- Bitkom: Das Smartphone wird 180 Minuten pro Tag genutzt, press release of March 5, 2026 (in German).
- Grüning, Riedel, Lorenz-Spreen (2023): Directing smartphone use through the self-nudge app one sec, PNAS 120(8).
- Castelo, Kushlev, Ward, Esterman, Reiner (2025): Blocking mobile internet on smartphones improves sustained attention, mental health, and subjective well-being, PNAS Nexus 4(2).
- National Foreign Affairs Training Center (NFATC), U.S. Department of State: Foreign Language Training, section NFATC’s Experience with Language Learning.
- Apple Support, iPhone User Guide: Set up Screen Time for yourself on iPhone (iOS 27), Get started with Screen Time on iPhone (iOS 26), Set Screen Time Schedules and Time Allowances in Screen Time on iPhone (iOS 27), Set schedules with Screen Time on iPhone (iOS 26).
- Android Help: Manage how you spend time on your Android phone with Digital Wellbeing; Google Calendar Help: Import events to Google Calendar.
Published October 25, 2026
A projection of today’s habit, not a forecast of your life: a period life table describes the mortality of its years and makes no assumptions about the future. Our assumptions are stated next to the calculation: the average of a country’s two life tables, 8 hours of sleep (unless you choose your own), 365 days a year and the study hours derived from the NFATC figures. The content is general information and does not replace individual medical, legal, tax or financial advice.
More from the garden
You can find all our calculators under Tools. To make the first step a habit, the habit formation calculator shows how long that took people in a real-life study. To decide what the time you get back is for, try the wheel of life. And if your phone keeps you up at night, see the sleep calculator.
