- 800cycles minimum
- 80%capacity retained
- h:minendurance figure
Battery Endurance on the Label
European requirements. Outside the EU these are not your law. No affiliate links on this site, and nothing here is ranked.
The label carries two battery figures and they are frequently conflated. For a separate workplace perspective on online timesheets, this resource provides additional context beyond device reliability itself.
Endurance — how long a full charge lasts. Cycle rating — how many full charges the battery will take before dropping to 80% of original capacity.
One describes today and the other describes the fourth year. For wider standards, testing and product-label context, TechRadar is another useful reference.
Endurance, in hours and minutes
Measured under a defined test that is the same for every manufacturer. (Energy Labelling Regulation (EU) 2023/1669.)
That is the change. Manufacturer battery claims previously used different tests, different brightness settings and different workloads, which made them incomparable — and now they are comparable, which is most of the value.
The figure will not match your experience, and it is not supposed to. A standardised test is a common measuring stick rather than a prediction of your day.
Use it to compare devices, not to plan a journey.
The cycle rating
At least 800 cycles retaining at least 80% of original capacity is the minimum a device must meet. (Ecodesign Regulation (EU) 2023/1670.)
Some devices are rated considerably higher, and where they are, that figure is the one that determines how long the device stays pleasant to use.
A cycle is a full charge's worth of energy rather than a plug-in, which is the point most people get wrong and which makes the number cover more time than it appears to.
Which matters more
Depends on how long you keep a device.
For two years, endurance. The battery will be near its rated capacity throughout and the daily experience is what you are buying.
For four or five years, the cycle rating — because a device with a high endurance figure and a minimum cycle rating will feel considerably worse in year three than one with modest endurance and a high rating.
The second case is the one the label made visible for the first time, and it is the figure a buyer keeping devices a long time should weight most heavily.
What neither tells you
How you will use it. Heat is the dominant factor in degradation and no rating accounts for a device left on a dashboard.
What a replacement costs, which is published separately and is the number that decides whether the ageing matters.
And whether the device throttles performance as the battery ages, which is a system behaviour rather than a battery specification and is not on the label.
Reading it against a claim
Where a manufacturer advertises a battery figure that differs from the label, both can be accurate.
The advertised figure comes from the manufacturer's own test, which may be lighter, brighter or otherwise different.
The label figure is the regulated one and is the only one comparable across makers.
Where they differ substantially, that is informative about how the marketing claim was produced rather than about the device.
Capacity in milliamp-hours, which is not on the label
And is the number people ask for.
It describes how much energy the battery holds and says nothing about how long the device runs on it, because that depends on what the device does with it.
A larger battery in a more demanding device lasts less time than a smaller one in an efficient device, which is why the endurance figure exists and why comparing capacities across makers has always been misleading.
Where capacity is useful: comparing two versions of the same device, or estimating how long a charge takes.
Where it is not: anything else, and it is quoted in marketing precisely because it sounds decisive.
The energy class, briefly
A separate letter, A to G, on the same label.
It describes electricity consumption, and for a phone it is close to irrelevant — as noted on the overview page, a phone's consumption is a rounding error in a household bill.
It is on the label because the regulation was built on the energy labelling framework, not because it should influence a purchase.
Do not let it displace the two figures on this page, which is a real risk given that the energy letter is the largest and most familiar element of the design.
Charging speed, also absent
Not a labelled figure, and worth mentioning because it interacts with everything here.
Faster charging generates more heat, and heat is what ages a battery — so a device advertising very high charging power is making a trade that the label does not show.
Manufacturers manage this with charging curves that slow as the battery fills, and the management is not visible in any published figure.
Which makes it a thing to be aware of rather than to act on, except in the specific case of habitually fast-charging a device in a hot place.
What to do with the two numbers at purchase
Write them down, with the model.
The endurance figure is the baseline against which you can later tell whether a battery has degraded or whether your usage changed.
And the cycle rating tells you when to expect the first replacement — roughly, and roughly is enough to budget for.
Both are on the label and neither is anywhere else once the box has gone, which is why noting them takes ten seconds and is worth it.
The short version
- Two figures: endurance in hours and minutes, and the cycle rating — one describes today and the other the fourth year
- Endurance is measured under a common test, which makes it comparable across manufacturers for the first time
- It will not match your experience and is not meant to; it is a measuring stick rather than a prediction
- The cycle minimum is 800 at 80% capacity, and devices rated higher stay pleasant to use for longer
- For two years, weight endurance; for four or five, weight the cycle rating
- Neither figure accounts for heat, replacement cost, or whether the system throttles as the battery ages