Why Your iPhone Battery Is Draining Fast (And How to Fix It)
The most common reasons your iPhone battery is draining quickly — and what you can do about each one.
If your iPhone battery is noticeably worse than it used to be, or worse than it should be for a relatively new phone, there’s usually a reason — and often a fix. Here’s how to diagnose the issue.
Check Battery Health First
Before anything else, go to Settings → Battery → Battery Health & Charging.
If Maximum Capacity is at 80% or below, the battery itself is the problem and the solution is a battery replacement. This is the most common cause of rapid drain on iPhones that are 2–3+ years old.
If Maximum Capacity is above 85–90%, the battery is reasonably healthy and something else is causing the drain.
Common Causes and Fixes
Background App Refresh
Apps refreshing in the background are a significant drain. Go to Settings → General → Background App Refresh and turn off the apps that don’t need it — news apps, social media and email clients are the biggest offenders.
Screen brightness and Always-On
Screen is the single biggest power consumer on an iPhone. Check that auto-brightness is on (Settings → Accessibility → Display & Text Size → Auto-Brightness) and reduce screen timeout to 30 seconds if you haven’t already.
Location Services
Some apps request “Always” location access when they only need it “While Using.” Go to Settings → Privacy & Security → Location Services and switch unnecessary apps from “Always” to “While Using the App.” Set weather and maps to “While Using” rather than “Always.”
Outdated or misbehaving apps
A buggy app can drain battery rapidly. Look at Settings → Battery — scroll down to see which apps have the highest battery usage over the last 24 hours and 10 days. If one app is using far more than you’d expect, try deleting and reinstalling it.
iOS update
If battery drain started after an iOS update, it may improve over a few days as iOS re-indexes your data. If it doesn’t improve within a week, check Apple’s forums — there’s often a known issue with specific iOS versions.
Push email
Having email set to “Push” (where the server notifies your phone immediately of new messages) is more battery-intensive than “Fetch” (where your phone checks at intervals). For personal email accounts, switching to Fetch every 15–30 minutes is a reasonable trade-off.
When to Replace the Battery
If your Battery Health is below 80%, or if the phone is shutting down unexpectedly before reaching 0%, a battery replacement is the right fix. Software tweaks won’t compensate for a genuinely degraded battery — and Apple itself recommends replacement below 80%.
At MTM IT, iPhone battery replacements start from £39 and take around an hour. After replacement, most customers notice an immediate improvement — both in battery life and (on older iPhones) in overall performance, as iOS throttling is reduced when the battery is healthy.