How much data do you need for a work trip?

A work trip is not a holiday with a laptop. On holiday the heavy thing is video you chose to watch. On a work trip the heavy thing is video you did not choose: a meeting you were added to, a screen someone else is sharing, a VPN that routes everything through head office, and a laptop that gets its internet from your phone. That last one is the whole difference. A phone throttles itself; a laptop does not.

Short version, per working day: meetings only stays under 1 GB, a sales rep on the road runs 1 to 2 GB, an engineer tethering a laptop runs 3 to 6 GB and can go well past it. The rest of this page is where those numbers come from, so you can redo the arithmetic for your own week instead of trusting ours.

If you want the general, non-work breakdown of which app eats what, that is a separate page: how much data your apps really use. This one only covers the parts that change when the trip is for work.

The conversion, so you can check every figure here

Vendors publish bandwidth, in kilobits or megabits per second. Nobody buys a plan in kilobits. The bridge is one line of arithmetic:

1 Mbit/s sustained for one hour is 450 MB.

So 58 kbit/s for an hour is about 26 MB, and 2.5 Mbit/s for an hour is about 1.1 GB. Every per hour number below is a published bitrate run through that multiplication, in both directions where the call is two-way, because your plan is billed on both. Where a vendor publishes a range, the range is kept.

One honest caveat that applies to all of it: these apps adapt. Microsoft states plainly that Teams prioritises audio over video when bandwidth is short, and that usage rises when more bandwidth is available. The recommended rows below are therefore a ceiling on a good connection, not a prediction. On a phone on a congested foreign network, real usage tends to sit nearer the minimum.

How much data does Teams use per hour

From Microsoft's own network planning documentation, converted at 450 MB per Mbit/s per hour, counting both directions.

The gap between the last two rows is the useful part. The same meeting is a 160 MB hour or a 2.9 GB hour depending entirely on what the connection allows and how many cameras are on. This is why "an hour of Teams" has no single answer, and why turning your camera off is the one lever that reliably moves the number.

Microsoft also notes that a Teams event streamed to a large audience should be planned at roughly 2 Mbit/s per viewer, or 3 Mbit/s for 1080p. Converted, that is about 900 MB to 1.35 GB for an hour of watching an all-hands from a hotel room. Watching a company broadcast is one of the most expensive things you can do on a work trip, and it is the one nobody budgets for.

How much data for a 1 hour Zoom call

From Zoom's published system requirements, converted the same way.

So a one hour Zoom call is anywhere from 70 MB to over 3 GB, and the single biggest factor is not the call, it is the resolution the app settles on. A 1080p one to one call costs about six times a 720p one. If you are on a metered connection in a hotel, the setting to find before the call is the one that stops Zoom sending HD.

Screen sharing, where the two vendors seem to disagree

Zoom lists screen sharing without video at 50 to 75 kbit/s, about 23 to 34 MB an hour. Microsoft lists screen sharing in a meeting at a recommended 2,500 kbit/s each way, about 2.2 GB an hour. Both are correct and they are not measuring the same thing.

Zoom's figure is the incremental cost of a mostly static shared screen: a slide that sits there, a document someone is reading. Microsoft's figure is a provisioning recommendation for a full meeting in which the shared content runs at adaptive frame rates up to 30 frames per second, which is what happens when someone shares a scrolling log, a live demo or a video.

The practical rule: sharing slides is cheap, sharing motion is video. A demo of your product, screen shared, costs roughly what streaming a film costs, because that is technically what it is.

The VPN does not do what most people think

A corporate VPN adds a little protocol overhead, and that part is small enough to ignore next to everything else on this page. What it actually does to your data bill is route traffic that would otherwise have gone straight out through your company's network and back, so nothing gets to take a local shortcut, and nothing gets offloaded.

Microsoft's own recommendation is to keep real time media out of it. Their network preparation guidance recommends a split tunnel VPN for Teams, on the grounds that VPNs are typically not designed for real time media, add a second layer of encryption on top of already encrypted media, and can route you to a distant service front door. That is an instruction for your IT department rather than for you, but it is worth quoting to them before a trip, because a Teams meeting dragged through a VPN concentrator in another country is both worse and more expensive than the same meeting going direct.

Does Google Maps use much data abroad?

Less than people fear while navigating, and the number worth knowing is a different one: the download. Google's own help pages say to download offline areas over Wi-Fi rather than mobile data, note that depending on the area a download can be up to 1.5 GB, and warn that offline you get no live traffic, so travel times are estimates calculated as if there were no congestion.

That is the whole trade. Download the city at the hotel or before you leave, accept that you lose live traffic, and navigation stops being a line in your budget. For per hour navigation figures, see the general page linked at the top; they are small enough that they never decide the size of a plan.

How much data do I need for a week abroad, if the week is work

Three travellers, five working days. Method: the hours in a plausible day multiplied by the per hour figures above, plus a flat allowance for mail, chat, browsing and background sync, then rounded up. These are built figures, not measurements, and they are ranges on purpose.

The third row is the one that breaks plans, and it breaks them in a single event rather than gradually. One operating system update, one container image, one large repository clone can be more than the rest of the day combined. If you are the engineer, the useful habit is not rationing: it is doing the big downloads on hotel Wi-Fi the night before and leaving the tethered connection for work that is genuinely interactive.

The tethered laptop changes every number above

A phone on mobile data is quietly conservative. It defers updates, compresses images, holds back background sync. A laptop that thinks it is on a normal network does none of that: it syncs the whole drive, updates itself, pulls every attachment, and keeps twenty browser tabs alive. The same person with the same work uses several times more data through a hotspot than through the phone alone.

Two settings fix most of it. Mark the hotspot connection as metered on the laptop, which makes the operating system and most sync clients hold back. And pause file sync while tethered, resuming it on Wi-Fi. What else to check before you rely on tethering for a working day is in using an eSIM as a hotspot for a laptop or tablet.

One last thing, because it is the failure people actually hit rather than running out of gigabytes: whatever carries your data abroad, keep your work line switched on with data roaming turned off on it. Two factor codes from the bank, the travel portal and the company's own login arrive as SMS on that number, and a traveller who disabled the line to avoid a roaming bill has locked themselves out of their own systems instead. Our own plans are data only, with no number, no calls and no SMS, which is precisely why the work line stays in the phone.

Sources: Microsoft Learn, "Prepare your organization's network for Teams", bandwidth requirements table and split tunnel VPN recommendation, page dated 26 May 2026. Zoom, "System requirements for Zoom Meetings" bandwidth requirements section, accessed 29 September 2026. Google Maps Help, "Download areas and navigate offline in Google Maps", accessed 29 September 2026, for the Wi-Fi recommendation, the up to 1.5 GB area size and the absence of live traffic offline. All per hour figures are the published bitrates converted at 450 MB per Mbit/s per hour, summed across both directions for two way calls; the per day and per week totals are built by adding those hours together with a flat allowance for mail, chat and background traffic, and are ranges rather than measurements.

Quick answers

Is an audio only call really that much cheaper than video?

Yes, by a factor of twenty or more. Microsoft's recommended rate for a Teams audio call converts to about 50 MB an hour against about 2.9 GB for a video meeting, and Zoom's audio figure converts to roughly 55 to 70 MB. Cameras off is the only lever on this page that changes the answer by an order of magnitude.

Should I buy by the day or by the gigabyte for a work trip?

By the gigabyte when the days look alike, which is most sales and meeting trips. By the day when one day is a tethered laptop and the next is a phone in a pocket, because a daily allowance absorbs the spike without you having to predict which day it lands on.

Why did my last trip use far more than these numbers?

Almost always one of three things: a laptop tethered without being marked as metered, so it updated and synced; a company broadcast or all hands watched from the hotel, which is streaming by another name; or a screen share of something moving rather than something static. None of them show up in a per app breakdown, which is why they surprise people.