--- title: "How long will this upload take?" description: "It is arithmetic, and the mistake almost everyone makes is mixing up megabits and megabytes. The formula, a table to skip it, and why the bar looks frozen when nothing is wrong." topic: "Guides" published: "2026-07-28T09:00:00.000Z" updated: "2026-08-22T06:29:23.757Z" reading_minutes: 3 canonical: "https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-upload" --- # How long will this upload take? > It is arithmetic, and the mistake almost everyone makes is mixing up megabits and megabytes. The formula, a table to skip it, and why the bar looks frozen when nothing is wrong. "How long will this take?" is the question everyone asks after starting a large upload and watching a progress bar that does not appear to move. The answer is arithmetic, and it is worth being able to do in your head before you commit an afternoon to it. ## The number you need is your upload speed Most connections are asymmetric: download is fast, upload is a fraction of it. The figure on your broadband bill is almost always the download one, and it is not the number that matters here. Run a speed test and look at the **upload** figure. A "500 Mbps" home line might upload at 20. Business fibre is often symmetric; cable and DSL rarely are. ## The formula The two units differ by a factor of eight, which is where most bad estimates come from: files are measured in **megabytes** (MB), connections in **megabits** per second (Mbps). ``` minutes = (file size in MB x 8) / (upload Mbps x 60) ``` A rougher version you can do while talking: **divide your Mbps by 8 to get MB per second**. At 20 Mbps that is 2.5 MB/s, so a 1 GB file takes about 1000 / 2.5 = 400 seconds, near enough seven minutes. ## A table to skip the maths | File | 5 Mbps | 20 Mbps | 50 Mbps | 200 Mbps | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | 100 MB | 3 min | 40 sec | 16 sec | 4 sec | | 1 GB | 27 min | 7 min | 3 min | 40 sec | | 10 GB | 4.5 hrs | 70 min | 27 min | 7 min | | 50 GB | 22 hrs | 6 hrs | 2.2 hrs | 33 min | Add roughly 10-20% to whatever this says. Protocol overhead, encryption, and the fact that nobody sustains their theoretical maximum all take a cut. ## Why it is slower than the table - **You are sharing.** A household streaming video, or an office of forty people, is using the same upstream. - **Wifi is not the connection.** It is a shared radio between you and the router, and on a busy 2.4 GHz band it can be a fraction of your line speed. Ethernet removes this variable entirely. - **Small files have overhead.** Ten thousand small files take much longer than one file of the same total size, because each one costs a round trip. - **Distance costs.** Higher latency to a far-away server reduces throughput, particularly on a single connection. ## Why the bar seems stuck Two different things get read as "frozen". **Progress that only updates once per chunk.** If a tool sends the file in 6 MB slices and only moves the bar when a slice completes, a slow connection means the number sits still for a minute at a time. Nothing is wrong; the reporting is just coarse. A bar that climbs continuously through each chunk is telling you the same truth in a more useful way, which is why it is worth having. **The stall at 99%.** Usually the bytes have arrived and the server is reassembling and verifying them. For a large file this genuinely takes a moment. Closing the tab here is the one thing that can turn a finished upload into a failed one. ## Making it faster - **Plug in.** Ethernet over wifi is the single biggest improvement available to most people. - **Send less.** A 1080p review export instead of the master turns hours into minutes, and is usually what the recipient wanted. See [sending large video files](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-to-send-large-video-files). - **Upload once, share many times.** A link sent to eight people is one upload, not eight. - **Start it and walk away** — but only if the transfer resumes after an interruption. Chunked uploads with automatic retries make an overnight upload a reasonable plan; a single-stream upload does not. - **Stop your own machine sleeping.** Plug the laptop in and check the sleep settings. ## When the answer is "too long" If the honest estimate is over a day, reconsider the shape of the job: send selects now and the full set overnight, or put a disk in a courier bag. There is no shame in the physical option — for a few terabytes it is still the fastest thing available. Related: [why large uploads fail](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/why-large-file-uploads-fail) for when it is not just slow, and [how to send large files](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-to-send-large-files) for the methods. ## Read next - [How to send large files without email getting in the way](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-to-send-large-files): Email gives up at around 25 MB, and every workaround costs you something different. Here are the five real ways to get a big file to another person, what each one asks of you and of them, and how to choose. - [How to send large files for free, and where the free tiers stop](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-to-send-large-files-for-free): Every service has a free tier and they are not the same shape. What free actually buys you, the things worth checking besides the size limit, and how to get a big file across today without paying. - [How to send a whole folder, with the structure intact](https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-to-send-a-folder): Email cannot attach a folder and most upload widgets flatten one into a pile. Structure is information, so here are the two honest ways to keep it, and the details that trip people up. --- Canonical HTML version: https://betterfiletransfer.com/blog/how-long-does-it-take-to-upload BetterFileTransfer · https://betterfiletransfer.com