How much data Google Maps really uses
A full day of turn-by-turn navigation costs less than most travellers fear — it is the endless panning and Street View that add up. This separates the two.
Kurz erklärt
- Turn-by-turn navigation uses roughly 3–10 MB an hour — far less than almost anything else on your phone.
- The real cost is browsing: panning for restaurants, loading place photos and Street View, together roughly 15–30 MB per 10 minutes.
- Download the city's offline map over Wi-Fi before you go and a whole trip stays in the low hundreds of megabytes.
| What you are doing | Roughly how much | A 7-day trip at this rate |
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Häufige Fragen
Does leaving Google Maps open in my pocket all day burn data?+
If it is still in navigation mode it keeps refreshing traffic and continues to use roughly 3–10 MB an hour. If the app is merely open and not navigating, the data cost is close to nothing — the heavy bill there is battery, from GPS.
Do offline maps expire?+
Yes — a saved area expires after about a year and the app tries to refresh it as the date approaches. If you set Download preferences to Over Wi-Fi only, that refresh waits for Wi-Fi, which is exactly what you want.
Is Apple Maps lighter than Google Maps?+
For navigation the two sit in the same range — a few megabytes an hour. The difference that matters more is that downloading a whole city offline is not available on every iOS version of Apple Maps, so for trips where signal may vanish, Google Maps is usually easier to plan around.
How much of a 7-day plan should I set aside for Google Maps?+
With offline maps downloaded and places saved in advance, roughly 200–300 MB is comfortable. With nothing downloaded and a habit of browsing for somewhere to eat, budget roughly 700 MB to 1 GB. Put your own numbers into the data calculator to see the whole trip at once.
Instagram and TikTok have no web share button, so we open your phone's share sheet or copy the link instead.