About Charge Limit and Optimized Battery Charging on iPhone

To improve the lifespan of your battery, your iPhone learns from your daily charging habits.

How your iPhone battery ages

A battery’s lifespan is related to its chemical age, which is more than just the length of time since the battery was assembled. A battery's chemical age results from a complex combination of several factors, including temperature history and charging pattern. All rechargeable batteries are consumable components that become less effective as they chemically age. As lithium-ion batteries chemically age, the amount of charge they can hold diminishes, resulting in reduced battery life and reduced peak performance. Learn more about iPhone battery and performance and how to maximize battery performance and lifespan.

Improve battery lifespan with Optimized Battery Charging

Optimized Battery Charging is designed to reduce the wear on your battery and improve its lifespan by reducing the time your iPhone spends fully charged. It is available when Charge Limit is set to 100 percent. When the feature is enabled, your iPhone will delay charging past 80 percent in certain situations. Your iPhone uses on-device machine learning to learn your daily charging routine so that Optimized Battery Charging activates only when your iPhone predicts it will be connected to a charger for an extended period of time. The algorithm aims to ensure that your iPhone is still fully charged when unplugged.

When Optimized Battery Charging is active, a notification on the Lock Screen says when your iPhone will be fully charged. If you need to have your iPhone fully charged sooner, touch and hold the notification and then tap Charge Now.

iPhone lock screen with Optimized Battery Charging notification

Optimized Battery Charging is on by default when you set up your iPhone.

To change your charging option with iPhone 15 models and later, go to Settings > Battery > Charging and choose an option. You can choose a charge limit between 80 percent and 100 percent in 5 percent increments. When the charge limit is 100 percent, Optimized Battery Charging is available.

The Charging screen, with a slider for charge-limit options

To change your charging option with iPhone 14 models and earlier, go to Settings > Battery > Battery Health & Charging and turn Optimized Battery Charging on or off.

Turning off charging optimizations can increase wear on your battery and reduce its lifespan.

Improve battery lifespan with Charge Limit

With iPhone 15 models and later, if the charge limit is 100 percent, you can also turn on Optimized Battery Charging. Your iPhone has these settings by default.

Your iPhone will charge to within a few percentage points of your chosen limit and then stop charging. If the battery charge level drops more than 5 percent while connected to power, charging will resume, again charging to within a few points of your chosen limit.

If iOS determines that a charge limit will help preserve your battery's lifespan, you'll see a recommendation. For example, you might see "Based on your iPhone habits, a charge limit of 95% is recommended to help preserve your battery."

If you have Charge Limit set to less than 100 percent, your iPhone will occasionally charge to 100 percent to maintain accurate battery state-of-charge estimates.

If Optimized Battery Charging doesn't activate

Optimized charging is designed to engage only in locations where you spend the most time, such as your home and place of work. The feature doesn't engage when your usage habits are more variable, such as when you travel. Because of this, some location settings must be enabled for Optimized Battery Charging to activate.* None of the location information used for this feature is sent to Apple.

Follow these steps:

  • Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services and turn on Location Services.

  • Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services and turn on System Customization.

  • Go to Settings > Privacy & Security > Location Services > System Services > Significant Locations and turn on Significant Locations.

Learn more

* Optimized Battery Charging needs at least 14 days to learn your charging habits, so it won't engage before then. Also, your iPhone needs to experience at least 9 charges of 5 hours or more in a given location for Optimized Battery Charging to engage.

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