How to check screen time on Windows 11

Windows 11 does record how long your screen is on, but it files the figure under battery information, so it's easy to miss. If you're wondering how to check screen time on Windows 11 on a laptop, tablet or 2-in-1, these steps take under a minute.

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   Step 1: Open Settings

   Press Windows + I, or open Start and select Settings.

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   Step 2: Go to Power & battery

   Select System, then Power & battery. On a desktop this page is just called Power and has no Battery usage section, because there's no battery; desktops are covered further down.

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   Step 3: Expand Battery usage

   Select Battery usage to open it. A chart of your battery level appears, with a bar for each hour.

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   Step 4: Pick the time period

   Use the Time period menu to switch between Last 24 hours and Last 7 days.

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   Step 5: Read Screen on

   Under the chart, Screen on is your total for that period, shown beside Screen off and Sleep. Hover over or select any bar to see the screen-on time for that hour.

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   Step 6: See time per app

   Scroll to Battery usage per app and set Sort by to In use. Each app shows its share of the battery while in use and in the background, with the minutes in brackets.

Microsoft's own battery tips page points to the same place, as a battery tool rather than a screen time one. That difference matters once you read the numbers.

The Battery usage page exists to explain where your battery went, not to keep time. That shapes both of its numbers.

Screen on is the more trustworthy of the two. It's the time the display was lit in each hour, and it keeps counting while the laptop charges. What it can't do is tell whether you were looking, so a video left playing counts until the screen turns off.

App usage time on Windows 11 is a rough ranking

The minutes beside each app come from the same battery accounting, and they leave a lot out. On the Windows 11 25H2 laptop we checked while writing this, Screen on showed just over nine hours for the last 24 hours, yet the in-use minutes of all 36 listed apps added up to under half an hour.

Much of that day was spent plugged in, and time on mains power barely registers in the list. Even the hours on battery came out far short. So use it to see which apps lead, not how many minutes they took.

The Background figure shows apps working while you weren't looking at them: battery use, not screen time. And the whole page reaches back only 7 days.

Windows can also write a full battery report, a hidden built-in that goes much further back than Settings. It won't name apps, but it shows how long the PC was awake each day, on battery and plugged in: a useful upper limit on your time at the laptop.

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   Step 1: Open Command Prompt

   Open Start, type cmd and select Command Prompt. You don't need to run it as administrator.

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   Step 2: Run the report

   Type powercfg /batteryreport and press Enter. Windows replies with the path of the file it saved, battery-report.html, usually in your user folder.

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   Step 3: Open the file

   Double-click it in File Explorer. It opens in your browser, but it's a file on your PC, not a web page.

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   Step 4: Read Usage history

   Scroll to Usage history. Recent days get a row each, with Active time on battery and on AC (mains power); older periods are grouped into longer spans. Recent usage, further up, lists every wake, sleep and switch to or from mains over the last 7 days.

Microsoft lists the command, with its options for a different file name or number of days, on its powercfg reference page.

Plenty of advice points you to Task Manager, and its App history page does look like a usage log. Press Ctrl + Shift + Esc, select App history, and you'll see apps listed with CPU time and Network columns.

Those are resource totals: how long the processor worked for each app, and how much data it moved, since the history was last cleared. Neither is time on screen. An article you read for an hour needs almost no processor time, while a sync tool in the background can pile it up without ever opening a window.

By default the page lists only some kinds of apps; Show history for all processes in Task Manager's own settings adds the rest. It's good for finding an app that eats your battery or data, not for seeing how you spent your day.

Up time, on the Performance tab, isn't screen time either. It counts from when Windows last started, and with Fast startup on, shutting down normally may not reset it.

To see how long a child spends on their PC, Windows has a proper report through Microsoft Family Safety. Its activity reporting shows daily and weekly screen time, the apps and games used, and, in a supported browser, the websites visited and searches made on Bing.

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   Step 1: Set up a family group

   Sign in to Microsoft's family page with your Microsoft account and add your child to your family group.

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   Step 2: Have them sign in on their PC

   Your child signs in to Windows on their own PC with their Microsoft account, so the device joins the family.

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   Step 3: Turn on activity reporting

   In the Family Safety app on your phone, or on the family page, select your child and turn on the Activity reporting toggle for Windows.

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   Step 4: Check the report

   Open your child's card to see their screen time by day and by week, and the apps and games behind it.

Only the family group's organisers can turn reports on and read them, and the reports cover the members they manage, usually children, so this isn't a way to see your own screen time. In a September 2026 update, Microsoft said reports had been widened to take in all the apps used on a child's PC, and that better accuracy for usage time was still on the way.

Microsoft covers the details in its activity reporting article. Family Safety can also set limits for a child; our guide to screen time limits on Windows walks through them.

Windows 10 has an older version of the same battery page, and it says less. Go to Settings > System > Battery and select See which apps are affecting your battery life, then choose a Time period of 6 hours, 24 hours or 1 week.

Each app shows its share of the battery as a percentage. There's no screen-on total and there are no minutes, so it tells you which apps used the most battery but not how long you spent in them.

Task Manager's App history, the battery report and Family Safety work on Windows 10 much as they do on Windows 11. Windows 10 reached the end of support on 14 October 2025; if your PC can run Windows 11, the upgrade also brings the more detailed battery page.

Put together, the built-in tools leave real gaps for anyone tracking their own time:

• Websites. Your browser is one line in the battery list, whether you spent the hour in a spreadsheet or on a video site. Only Family Safety breaks out sites, and only for an account an organiser manages.
• Desktops. A PC without a battery has no Battery usage page, so there's no screen-on figure at all.
• Pickups and notifications. Windows doesn't show how often you come back to your PC, or how many notifications each app sends.
• Which app filled each hour. The chart shows when the screen was on, not what was on it.
• Longer history. Per-app figures stop at 7 days, with no comparison against last week.
• Whether you were there. Screen on can't tell reading from an empty chair until the display times out.

Filling those gaps takes an app that tracks the window in front of you directly. Our comparison of screen time apps for Windows weighs the options, free and paid.

We make TimeWell, so weigh our view accordingly. TimeWell is a screen time app for Windows that counts what's actually in front of you, app by app and site by site, on a desktop as well as a laptop.

The Overview page answers how long you've been on your computer today: today's total against your average, a daily goal ring (a gentle target, not a limit), your pickups and notifications, and an hour-by-hour chart.

The Activity page goes deeper: day and week totals, hourly bars coloured by category, the change from last week, and a Most used list of apps and websites, or of categories. Click any hour to see what filled it.

• Counted the way you'd count it. Time counts while an app is in front of you and the screen is on and unlocked, reading and watching included. A quiet stretch is dropped only when the screen turns off, the PC locks or sleeps, or the quiet runs past an allowance (15 minutes by default).
• Websites too. In Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi, Arc and their relatives, it reads the address bar and keeps only the domain, never the full address, the page or what you type.
• Pickups and notifications. Your first pickup of the day, pickups per hour and the first app you open after each one, plus notification counts per app and per hour. Notification contents are never read or stored.
• Private and light. Your activity stays in a small database in your user folder, with no telemetry; only the trial and licence checks go online, never your activity. The tracker sits at about 0% CPU while you work.

It runs on Windows 10 and Windows 11 (64-bit, x64 and Arm64). It is free to download, with everything for 7 days and TimeWell Free for good after that; Pro is a one-time payment, with no subscription. It doesn't block apps or websites, enforce time limits or sync to the cloud or your phone, and it's Windows only. The home page has every feature and the privacy details.

For more on time per site, see our guide to tracking time on websites. Once you know your numbers, reducing screen time on your PC is the natural next step.