How To Check Battery Capacity On Iphone

How to show battery percentage on your iPhone

Check its remaining juice with just a glance

(Image: © DenPhotos / Shutterstock)

The iPhone battery icon gives a useful estimate of its remaining power levels. Sometimes, though, you need to know exactly how much power your phone has left.

On older iPhones, you can have the battery percentage display by default – and we'll show you how. On newer models, there isn't enough room in the status bar thanks to the notch, but there are shortcuts and widgets that make the percentage easy to find or display permanently.

We would thoroughly recommend adding a battery widget to your homescreen - the feature moved in when iOS 14 landed in 2020, and it's something most iPhone users have been getting involved with to improve their day to day experience - and the battery widget is among the most useful.

The good news is that the iPhone 13 range - and the iPhone 13 Pro Max in particular - has incredibly good battery life for a phone made by Apple, and we thoroughly recommend you check it out if you're fed up with running out of battery and want a new iPhone.

If you want the battery percentage to appear by default on your main home screen on newer iPhones, you'll need to make room for one of the new iPhone widgets.

Tap and hold an empty portion of the Home screen, then tap the + icon in the top-left. Scroll down until you find 'Batteries' and choose that option.

You can choose between three different battery widgets. All three show the percentage, but the larger widgets will also show the exact percentage of synced devices' batteries, such as your Apple Watch 6 or AirPods.

If you think a larger option is taking up too much space on the homescreen, you can always put it to the left on the 'Today' panel that's pervasive on all iPhones - but give it a go on the home screen and we bet you get some use out of it if you regularly connect anything to your iPhone - it'll work with some third-party Bluetooth headphones too.

Choose your favorite, hit 'Add Widget', rearrange the apps on your Home screen as you see fit, and you'll have a constant battery percentage summary without having to swipe or scroll.

How to show the iPhone battery percentage in the status bar

On the iPhone SE 2020, or on the iPhone 8 or earlier, you can have the battery percentage display permanently.

Open the Settings app and the Battery menu. You'll see an option for Battery Percentage. Toggle it, and you'll see the percentage in the top-right of the Home screen at all times.

The battery percentage also appears by default when Low Power mode is activated to stop you from accidentally ignoring the pictorial version of the battery meter.

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How to find the battery percentage on newer iPhones

On the iPhone X, iPhone 11, iPhone 12 and their various sibling phones, you can find the battery percentage in the Command Center. Simply swipe downwards from the top-right of the screen to pull up the menu; there, you'll find the battery percentage in the top-right corner.

That's the fastest method. Another method is to swipe left-to-right on the Home screen to pull up the Today View. In iOS 14, this view contains various Apple app widgets, including a battery widget that displays the current percentage.

You may need to scroll down to find the battery widget in Today View, but you can tap and hold it, then drag it to the top so that it is more immediately visible.

The iPhone battery widget — (Image credit: Future)

Michael Hicks began his freelance writing career with TechRadar in 2016, covering emerging tech like VR and self-driving cars. Nowadays, he works as a staff editor for Android Central, but still writes occasional TR reviews, how-tos and explainers on phones, tablets, smart home devices, and other tech.