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A single 1080p security camera uploading continuously to the cloud uses roughly 300 to 650 GB a month — about 10 to 22 GB a day. The same camera set to record only motion events uses under 10 GB a month. A camera recording to a microSD card or a local recorder uses effectively none, because the video never leaves your network. The difference between those three numbers is not the camera; it is the recording mode, and it is the only setting in this discussion that really matters.
The arithmetic, so you can work out your own
Camera data usage comes from one number: the video bitrate, in megabits per second. Everything else is multiplication. One megabit per second equals 0.125 megabytes per second, which is 450 MB per hour, or 0.45 GB per hour.
| Resolution and codec | Typical bitrate | Per hour | Per day, continuous | Per month, continuous |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1080p, H.265 | 1 Mbps | 0.45 GB | 10.8 GB | ~325 GB |
| 1080p, H.264 | 2 Mbps | 0.9 GB | 21.6 GB | ~650 GB |
| 2K, H.265 | 2.5 Mbps | 1.1 GB | 27 GB | ~810 GB |
| 2K, H.264 | 4 Mbps | 1.8 GB | 43 GB | ~1,300 GB |
| 4K, H.265 | 6 Mbps | 2.7 GB | 65 GB | ~1,950 GB |
| 4K, H.264 | 12 Mbps | 5.4 GB | 130 GB | ~3,900 GB |
Two things fall out of that table immediately. The codec matters as much as the resolution. H.265, also called HEVC, achieves roughly the same picture quality at about half the bitrate of the older H.264, so a 2K H.265 camera can use less data than a 1080p H.264 one. If your camera app has a codec setting, this is the single most effective change you can make.
And 4K continuous cloud recording is impractical on a normal home connection. A single 4K camera streaming H.264 around the clock would use several terabytes a month, which no residential plan is built for. Cameras that do record 4K continuously almost always write to a local recorder rather than to the cloud, for exactly this reason.
Event recording is a different scale entirely
Most consumer cameras do not stream constantly. They detect motion, record a clip of 10 to 60 seconds, upload it, and go quiet. That changes the arithmetic completely because the camera is only transmitting for a few minutes a day.
| Events per day | Clip length | Per day at 2 Mbps | Per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10 — quiet back yard | 30 s | 75 MB | ~2.3 GB |
| 30 — normal front door | 30 s | 225 MB | ~6.8 GB |
| 100 — street-facing, wide zones | 30 s | 750 MB | ~22.5 GB |
| 100 | 60 s | 1.5 GB | ~45 GB |
| 300 — badly tuned zones | 60 s | 4.5 GB | ~135 GB |
The realistic conclusion is that event recording is not a data problem for almost anyone. Even a household with six cameras on event mode is unlikely to exceed 100 GB a month. The row worth noticing is the last one: a camera with the motion zones left at their defaults, watching a public street, can record several hundred times a day and turn a trivial data load into a substantial one — while also producing notifications so frequent that people mute the app. Narrowing the motion zones fixes the data usage, the battery life and the alert fatigue in one action.
Upload speed is the constraint, not the cap
For most households the binding limit is not how much data the cameras use in a month but how much they can push at once. Cameras upload, and residential broadband is heavily asymmetric: a cable plan advertised at 300 or 500 Mbps down may provide only 10 to 35 Mbps up. That upload figure is what your cameras share with everything else that sends data — video calls, cloud backups, game uploads.
| Setup | Sustained upload needed | Comfortable on |
|---|---|---|
| 1 camera, 1080p events | Under 1 Mbps average | Anything |
| 4 cameras, 1080p events | 1–2 Mbps average | Anything |
| 2 cameras, 2K continuous | ~5 Mbps | Most cable plans |
| 4 cameras, 2K continuous | ~10 Mbps | Better cable, fiber |
| 8 cameras, 2K continuous | ~20 Mbps | Fiber, or record locally |
| Any 4K continuous cloud | 6–12 Mbps each | Fiber only, and rarely sensible |
The symptoms of running out of upload are not an error message. They are live views that take ten seconds to appear, notifications arriving after the visitor has left, and everyone else in the house complaining that video calls stutter. If that describes your setup, the fix is either fewer cameras on continuous cloud recording or a switch to local storage.
Local storage uses no internet data at all
This is the part that resolves the whole question for most people. A camera that records to a microSD card in its own body, or to a base station, or to a network recorder over Ethernet, moves video across your local network — which is not metered, not capped and typically a hundred times faster than your internet connection.
With local recording, the only internet data you use is what you deliberately consume: opening the app to check a live view, downloading a clip to share, and a small amount of background traffic keeping the camera reachable. A house with eight cameras recording continuously to a recorder can use less internet data in a month than a single cloud camera does in a day.
That is why a wired PoE system is the answer for genuine 24/7 coverage, and it is covered in our PoE system picks. The wireless equivalent is a camera with a microSD card — the field is in can you use a security camera without a subscription, and the doorbell version in doorbell cameras without a subscription.
Local storage also removes the second cost people forget: a camera that uploads everything is a camera whose footage is held by a company. That is a privacy question as much as a bandwidth one, and it is one the Federal Trade Commission has already had cause to act on — its May 2023 settlement with Ring required a $5.8 million payment and a comprehensive privacy and security program over allegations that employees and contractors accessed customers' private videos and that inadequate safeguards let attackers take over customer cameras. FTC press release on the Ring settlement. Keeping the video on your own network avoids the bandwidth bill and that exposure at the same time.
Seven ways to cut camera data use
- Switch from continuous to event recording where you can. This is worth an order of magnitude on its own.
- Enable H.265 if the camera offers it. Roughly half the data for the same picture. Check that your phone and any viewing device support it.
- Narrow the motion zones. Exclude the street, the sidewalk and the neighbor's driveway. Fewer events means less upload, longer battery life and fewer useless notifications.
- Drop the substream resolution for live viewing. Most apps stream a lower-quality substream by default and a high one on tap; make sure it is not set to always use the main stream.
- Record locally and upload only what matters. Several brands will keep everything on a card and push only flagged events to the cloud.
- Do not leave a live feed open on a wall tablet. A continuously open stream is the most expensive thing a camera does.
- Never put a continuous cloud camera on a cellular hotspot. It will exhaust any mobile plan within days.
How much local storage do you need?
The same bitrate math answers this, since a gigabyte written to a card is a gigabyte either way. A 128 GB microSD card holds roughly 5 days of continuous 1080p H.265 footage, or several months of event clips. A 2 TB drive in a recorder holds about two to three weeks of continuous footage from four 2K cameras. Cameras loop and overwrite the oldest footage automatically, so the practical question is how long you want to be able to look back — and for most households two weeks is more than enough. Our guide on how long cameras store footage covers what each brand does by default.
One caution that costs people footage: security cameras rewrite a card constantly, which wears out ordinary consumer microSD cards far faster than a phone does. Buy a card sold as high-endurance or surveillance-rated, and check occasionally that clips are actually being written, because a failed card fails silently.
We never buy, install or physically handle the products we write about. Figures on this page are calculated from published camera bitrate specifications and standard data conversions — see how we rank.
More from this hub: Smart Home & Security · Do cameras record all the time? · Wired vs wireless cameras · Why a Wi-Fi camera keeps disconnecting · Security camera subscription costs · How we rank