Guide

How to check your laptop's battery health with one command

Published 21 October 2026

A dark Windows terminal window showing the powercfg battery report command and the line saying where the report was saved

Short answerType powercfg /batteryreport in a terminal, open the report it saves, and compare Design Capacity with Full Charge Capacity. A common rule of thumb says a battery below about 80 percent of its design capacity is worn.

Your laptop has been keeping a report on how worn out its battery is. Windows never shows it in Settings, but one command opens it. It takes about a minute and it works on any Windows laptop.

This is for laptops only. A desktop PC has no battery, so the command will say that none is installed.

Step 1: Save the battery report

Open Terminal, PowerShell or Command Prompt and type:

PowerShell

powercfg /batteryreport

Windows saves the report as a web page and tells you where. By default it lands in the folder your terminal opened in, which is usually your user folder, as battery-report.html.

Example output (yours will show your own user name):

Example output

Battery life report saved to file path C:\Users\dev\battery-report.html.

Step 2: Open it

Type this in the same terminal window, or double-click the file in File Explorer:

PowerShell

start battery-report.html

It opens in your browser.

Step 3: Compare two numbers

Find the section called Installed batteries. Two lines matter:

Design capacity is how much charge the battery held when it was new.
Full charge capacity is how much it holds today.

The numbers below are an example. Yours will differ.

	Example value
Design capacity	50,000 mWh
Full charge capacity	38,000 mWh

Divide the second by the first. Here, 38,000 divided by 50,000 is 76 percent. A common rule of thumb is that a battery below about 80 percent of its design capacity is worn out. It is a rule of thumb, not a hard limit, and some laptops last well for years below that.

Check how long a charge should last

Scroll down to Battery life estimates. It shows how long a full charge should last at design capacity, next to how long it lasts today. If the two are close but your laptop still dies early, the battery is probably fine and a heavy app is draining it. If they are far apart, the battery is the problem.

On a Mac

Mac laptops have their own command. It shows the cycle count, the condition and the maximum capacity:

Terminal

system_profiler SPPowerDataType

What to do if the battery is worn

You can keep using the laptop plugged in, or have the battery replaced. Check your warranty first, and use the maker's or a trusted repair shop's replacement battery.