How to Check Screen Time on iPhone

You can check your screen time on an iPhone by opening Settings and tapping Screen Time, where your daily total appears at the top. The full breakdown, including per-app usage and weekly averages, is one tap further in. The whole thing takes about a minute.

• If you have never switched it on, you will need to turn on App & Website Activity before any history is recorded.

1. Open Settings.
2. Tap Screen Time. Your daily total sits at the top of the screen.
3. Tap See All App & Website Activity for the full breakdown.
4. Tap Week or Day at the top to switch views.
5. Tap Devices to pick which device you are looking at.
6. If Screen Time has never been switched on, turn on App & Website Activity when prompted. Nothing is recorded before you do, so your history starts from that moment.

• Adding a Screen Time widget to your Home Screen puts the daily figure in front of you without opening Settings. The bigger the widget, the more detail it carries.
• Apple sends a Weekly Report notification, which opens straight into your summary when tapped. If you dismissed it, it will still be in Notification Centre.
• Activity that iOS cannot categorise shows up grey in your summary, so a portion of your total may have no app attached to it.
• Browser time is logged against the browser. Three hours in a browser appears as three hours in that browser, with nothing about where those hours went. If most of your usage is web-based, the report will tell you almost nothing about the content of it.
• The report covers four things: total screen-on time, time per app, how many times you unlocked the phone, and how many notifications arrived.
• Unlock count is often the most revealing figure. Eight hours spread across four sittings is a different habit from eight hours spread across two hundred pickups.
• Notifications received, broken down per app, shows you which apps are initiating contact rather than waiting to be opened.
• History depth varies. iPhone lets you swipe back through past weeks.
• There is no agreed threshold for what counts as high screen time. Research often uses four hours a day as a marker, and federal US data from the CDC found that 50.4% of teenagers aged 12 to 17 report four or more hours a day outside schoolwork. A more practical test is whether screen use is eating into sleep, movement, work or time with people.
• Both Apple and Android offer limits alongside the reporting, but they work exactly as long as you want them to. When an iPhone App Limit runs out, the app shows a screen with an Ignore Limit option. One tap and you have another fifteen minutes, or the rest of the day.
• In iOS 27, released in September 2026, Screen Time was rebuilt around schedules and categories. Screen Time Schedule replaces Downtime, and Time Allowances replace App Limits. To use these features, all your devices need to run iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27.

Where exactly do I find my screen time? Open Settings, tap Screen Time, and your daily total appears at the top. Tap See All App & Website Activity for the full breakdown.

Why is my screen time showing nothing? If Screen Time has never been switched on, you will see a prompt to turn on App & Website Activity first. Nothing is recorded before you do, so the history starts from that moment.

Can I see which apps I use the most? Yes. Tap See All App & Website Activity, then use the Week or Day tabs at the top to switch views and see time per app.

Can I check screen time for a child's iPhone? A child's Screen Time is set up separately, under Settings, then Family. From there you can see how much time your child has spent on their phone during the last day and the last week.

Does the total tell me everything? No. The total is the least useful number on the screen. Unlock count, notifications received, and time per app tell you far more about your habits.