How this is calculated
Screen time isn't free, even when it doesn't cost money. It costs hours, and hours have a price — the same price you'd put on any other hour of your life. This calculator multiplies your daily non-work screen time by that price and projects it across a year and across a fifty-year span. The numbers are large. They're meant to be.
The formula has three parts. First, annual hours: daily hours × 365. We use 365, not 365.25, because over the horizons we care about the difference is rounding noise. Second, annual dollar value: annual hours × the hourly value you set. Third, lifetime: annual hours and annual value both × 50, the conventional figure for the rest of an adult lifespan.
The critical input is daily hours. Don't guess. Almost everyone underestimates by a factor of two when they guess. iPhones report this in Settings → Screen Time → See All Activity. Android reports it in Digital Wellbeing. The number that matters is non-work screen time — the social, news, video, and game time that isn't part of your job. If you do work on the same device you scroll on, you'll have to estimate the split. A reasonable default is to subtract the hours you'd be at a desk anyway and call the rest non-work.
The hourly-value input deserves more thought than people usually give it. The simple option is your true hourly wage from the job — if your job pays you $30 an hour for your time, your free time is worth at least that much. The harder, more honest option is what you'd charge to give up an hour of free time. That number is almost always higher than your wage, because free hours are rarer and you've already sold your work hours; the next hour of free time has higher marginal value. Most users find $30–$60 is the right range; some go higher. Pick whatever you think is honest. The output is sensitive to this number — that's the point.
A fifty-year horizon is intentionally long. It's roughly the remaining adult lifespan of someone in their thirties or forties. If you're older, the number is conservative; if you're younger, it's the right ballpark. The horizon is fixed because we don't ask for your age — this is a deliberately quick tool, and adding inputs would lower completion rates. If you want a more personal version of the calculation, the Lifetime Hours calculator on this site uses your actual age.
We don't model substitution. Some screen time is genuinely valuable — staying in touch with family, learning, watching the kind of show that's actually art. Some is the digital equivalent of staring at a wall. The calculator doesn't distinguish, because the distinction is yours to make. The dollar value is a price tag, not a verdict. Looking at it should help you decide which screen hours feel worth it and which don't.
A few honest caveats. First, the dollar value isn't money you'd actually have if you stopped scrolling — the alternative isn't necessarily paid work, and most people don't want to convert all of their free time into income. The number is closer to a measure of opportunity cost: the hours you spend scrolling are hours you're not spending on anything else, and "anything else" has value. Second, the calculator implies that all screen time is fungible, which it isn't. A two-hour movie with someone you love is not equivalent to two hours of doom-scrolling alone in bed.
Third, screen time isn't always the cause of underuse — sometimes it fills a gap that would otherwise feel worse. If you're tired or recovering or grieving, scrolling can be the most accurate response to what your nervous system can handle. The calculator doesn't account for that. Use it as a measurement, not a moral.
The useful question to ask after seeing the number: which hour of screen time, today, was the lowest-quality hour? Cutting the bottom hour is often easy, and the savings compound.