For years, one of the easiest arguments against leaving a VPN switched on has been battery life. The logic sounds reasonable: encrypting traffic, maintaining a secure tunnel and reconnecting as a phone moves between Wi-Fi and mobile networks must consume a noticeable amount of power.

A new West Coast Labs evaluation suggests that, on modern flagship devices at least, the effect is far smaller than many users assume. The study, commissioned by NordVPN and conducted by West Coast Labs, found that keeping NordVPN connected throughout a scripted 24-hour day increased battery consumption by 1.4% on Android and 1.8% on iOS.

The laboratory tested six devices: the Samsung Galaxy S24 and S25 Ultra, Google Pixel 9, iPhone 15, iPhone 16 and a recent iPad. Its simulated day included sleep, commuting, work and home use, with each scenario repeated without an active VPN to establish a baseline. Researchers also connected hardware instruments directly to the devices rather than relying solely on the battery figures reported by their operating systems.

That is a useful result for travelers, particularly those who connect to airport, hotel and café Wi-Fi but regularly disable their VPN because the battery screen makes it look unusually hungry.

Why the VPN gets blamed

The most interesting finding was not simply the small overall difference. It was the gap between what the phone reported and what measuring equipment recorded.

During a one-hour streaming session, Android and iOS attributed an average of roughly 49% of the session’s battery use to NordVPN. Hardware-level measurements, however, placed the VPN’s actual additional power draw at between 1.6% and 2.1%.

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The explanation is fairly simple. When a VPN is active, internet traffic from streaming, browsing and email passes through the VPN process. The operating system can therefore assign much of that network-related activity to the VPN app, even though most of the energy would have been consumed by the same activity without the encrypted tunnel.

“Your phone makes VPN battery use look a lot scarier than it actually is,”

NordVPN CTO Marijus Briedis said in comments accompanying the findings.

This does not mean battery dashboards are useless. It means their app-level attribution should not always be read as a direct hardware measurement, especially when one app is acting as the route for nearly everything else.

The commuter test

Network switching is where a mobile VPN has more work to do. Each move from Wi-Fi to cellular data can require the encrypted connection to be re-established, making a commute a more demanding test than sitting on one stable network.

West Coast Labs simulated a two-hour journey with network changes approximately every nine minutes. NordLynx, NordVPN’s default protocol, recorded an overhead of 5.1% per transition on Android and 6.8% on iOS. Those percentages describe the brief reconnection event, not additional drain sustained across the entire journey. In context, the full simulation used around 5% more energy than the same trip without a VPN, equivalent to less than 1% of total battery capacity. Reconnection succeeded in more than 99% of transitions.

Protocol choice mattered. NordLynx, which is based on WireGuard, used 31% less battery per gigabyte than OpenVPN on Android and 24% less on iOS in the test. WireGuard was designed as a leaner, more performant alternative to older tunnelling technologies, while wider research has generally found it delivers stronger throughput and lower resource use than OpenVPN—although results still vary by implementation and hardware.

A wider industry shift

NordVPN is not alone in pushing lighter mobile protocols. ExpressVPN markets its Lightway protocol around fast reconnection and reduced resource use, while Proton VPN has removed OpenVPN from its Android app in favour of WireGuard and Stealth. Mullvad went further, ending OpenVPN support in January 2026 to concentrate on WireGuard.

That trend matters more than the marketing contest between individual VPN brands. Mobile privacy tools are gradually being designed as always-on infrastructure rather than applications users activate only when they remember. Faster reconnection, lower resource use and better handling of changing networks are becoming basic product requirements.

Still, this report should not be treated as a universal battery guarantee. It tested one VPN service on six relatively new devices under controlled conditions. People using ageing batteries, budget phones, weak cellular signals, intensive threat-blocking features or legacy OpenVPN configurations may see a larger difference.

The next useful step would be a published cross-provider benchmark covering older and mid-range phones, several network conditions and longer real-world testing. Clearer disclosure of commissioning arrangements and access to complete raw datasets would also make comparisons easier. West Coast Labs itself notes that the findings represent a snapshot based on the particular hardware, software and configurations used during testing.

Conclusion

The strongest takeaway is not that NordVPN uses exactly 1.4% or 1.8% more battery for everyone. It is that modern VPN overhead can be small enough to disappear beneath the much larger effects of ordinary screen use, weak signal, video streaming and battery health.

NordVPN’s results fit the direction already visible at Proton VPN, Mullvad, ExpressVPN and across the WireGuard ecosystem: the industry is moving away from heavy legacy protocols toward mobile-first connections designed to stay active. Users who need obscure compatibility features may still have reasons to keep OpenVPN available. For ordinary travelers, however, switching off protection to save a theoretical percentage point increasingly looks like solving the wrong battery problem.