Check Battery Health in Windows 11 & 10: Battery Report (CMD) Guide

To check battery health in Windows 11 or Windows 10, open Command Prompt or PowerShell, type powercfg /batteryreport and press Enter. Windows saves a file called battery-report.html. Open it, find Design Capacity and Full Charge Capacity, and divide the second by the first: that is your battery's health. Here is what surprises almost everyone: Windows never shows you that number anywhere in Settings. The battery icon's "100%" means full relative to what your battery holds today, not what it held when new. So a three-year-old laptop can proudly say 100% while holding only 60% of its original charge. And the command most older guides give for this, including the 2015 version of this very page, powercfg /energy, is a power-efficiency trace, not the battery health report.

Ethan's laptop started dying at 40%. Not slowly, either: one minute it said 40%, the next it was black, in the middle of a video call with a client. He was already browsing new laptops when he dropped it on Jake's counter. "It's three years old, the battery's done, I'll just buy a new one." Jake opened a command prompt, typed one line, opened the file it made, and turned the screen around. The battery had been designed to hold 56,000 milliwatt-hours. It now held 30,800. Fifty-five percent health. "Your laptop is fine," Jake said. "Your battery is half a battery, and the meter doesn't know it." A replacement battery cost a fraction of a new machine. That is where this page starts: the one command, how to read every part of the report, what the numbers mean, the PowerShell way to get the percentage in one line, what to do when the report will not run, and the habits that slow the wear down.

You will need a command window for the main method. If typing commands is new to you, nothing on this page can harm your PC: every command here only reads information and writes a report file. Our guide to every way to open Command Prompt covers the basics, and the steps below spell out each click.

Why Windows hides your real battery health

Every laptop battery stores a few numbers inside its own small chip, the battery's fuel gauge. Two of them matter here. The design capacity is how much energy the battery held when it left the factory, measured in milliwatt-hours (mWh). The full charge capacity is how much it holds when fully charged today. Lithium-ion batteries lose capacity a little with every charge cycle, every hot afternoon and every month spent sitting at 100%, so the second number slowly drifts below the first.

The battery icon on your taskbar shows something else: the current charge as a share of today's full charge capacity. When it says 100%, it means "as full as this battery can now get", which on an old battery might be 30,000 mWh instead of the original 56,000. That is why an aging laptop seems to drain faster even though the icon still reaches 100%: each percent is now worth less energy. It is also why sudden shutdowns at 30% or 40% happen. A worn battery's voltage sags under load, and the fuel gauge's estimate of what is left becomes unreliable.

Windows 11's Settings > System > Power & battery page shows your charge level, a battery-usage graph by app, Energy Saver and the power mode, but no health percentage, no design capacity and no cycle count. Some manufacturers' own apps show health. Windows itself keeps those numbers in a report you have to ask for. The good news: asking takes one line, and the report is surprisingly detailed.

How to check battery health with powercfg /batteryreport (Windows 11 and 10)

This is the main method, and the one every other method on this page is measured against. It works on every Windows 10 and Windows 11 laptop and tablet, needs no download, and takes about ten seconds.

1. Open a command window. Right-click the Start button and choose Terminal (Windows 11) or Windows PowerShell (Windows 10), or search for cmd in the Start menu and open Command Prompt. Administrator rights are not required for this command.
2. Type the command and press Enter:

   powercfg /batteryreport

3. Read the reply. Windows answers with a line like Battery life report saved to file path C:\Users\YourName\battery-report.html. The file goes into whatever folder the window was in, usually your user folder.
4. Open the report. Copy that path into File Explorer's address bar, or simply type battery-report.html in the same window and press Enter. It opens in your web browser. Nothing is uploaded; the browser is only used to display a local file.
5. Find the "Installed batteries" section near the top and note the two numbers: DESIGN CAPACITY and FULL CHARGE CAPACITY.
6. Do the math: full charge capacity ÷ design capacity × 100. That is your battery health percentage.

Save the report somewhere easy to find

If you would rather choose where the file goes, add /output with a full path. This puts it on your desktop:

powercfg /batteryreport /output "%USERPROFILE%\Desktop\battery-report.html"

In PowerShell, write the path as "$env:USERPROFILE\Desktop\battery-report.html" instead. Two more switches are useful. /duration 14 makes the recent-usage sections cover the last 14 days instead of the default 3, and /xml writes the same data as XML, which scripts can read. That one is handy for the IT section later on.

If you opened the window as administrator

An administrator window starts in C:\Windows\System32, so the report lands there, mixed in with thousands of system files. That is why people "lose" the report. Use the /output switch above, or run the command from a normal, non-administrator window. If you need a refresher on the two kinds of window, here is how to run Command Prompt as administrator, and when you actually need to.

How to read your battery report, section by section

The report is long, and most guides stop at the first table. Each section answers a different question, though, and a couple of them are more useful than the headline numbers.

Design capacity vs full charge capacity: the health math

Here is Ethan's report, worked through. Design capacity 56,000 mWh. Full charge capacity 30,800 mWh. 30,800 ÷ 56,000 = 0.55, so his battery health is 55%. Put another way, it has lost 45% of its original capacity. A battery designed for 50,000 mWh that now holds 42,000 mWh is at 84%, which is good for a laptop a couple of years old.

One oddity worth knowing: on a brand-new laptop, full charge capacity is sometimes slightly higher than design capacity, giving a health above 100%. That is normal. Design capacity is a conservative rated figure, and fresh cells often beat it a little. It does not mean anything is wrong, and it will settle below 100% with use.

Cycle count: useful when it is there

A charge cycle is one full battery's worth of discharge, though not necessarily in one go: using 50% today and 50% tomorrow is one cycle. The CYCLE COUNT column shows how many the battery has done. Many laptops report it, but some show a dash or zero because the battery's chip does not share it with Windows. If yours shows a dash, rely on the capacity numbers instead; they are what actually matter.

As a rough guide, most laptop makers rate their batteries to keep about 80% of design capacity for somewhere between 300 and 1,000 full cycles, depending on the model and battery type. A battery at 500 cycles and 85% health is aging well. A battery at 150 cycles and 65% health has been treated harshly, usually by heat, and the habits section below matters for its replacement.

Battery life estimates: the honest runtime

Near the bottom, "Battery life estimates" shows how long the battery lasted on a full charge over recent periods, next to how long it would have lasted at design capacity. The last line, "Current estimate of battery life based on all observed drains since OS install", is the most realistic number in the whole report, because it comes from how you actually use the machine rather than from a lab test. On Ethan's laptop it said 2 hours 10 minutes at full charge, against 4 hours at design capacity. That gap was his whole problem in one line.

What is a good battery health percentage?

There is no official cut-off, but this is how the numbers feel in daily use, and how they match what laptop makers and repair shops generally treat as worn.

Two numbers can disagree, and when they do, trust the one that matches your experience. A battery reading 82% that shuts down at 35% has a problem the capacity figure is not showing, often a weak cell that collapses under load. A battery reading 65% that still lasts as long as you need is, for you, a perfectly good battery. The report is a measurement, not a verdict.

Check battery health with a PowerShell command (one line, no report)

"battery health windows 11 cmd" and "battery report powershell" are among the most searched versions of this question, usually from people who want the percentage without opening a file. Windows exposes the same capacity numbers through WMI, the system's management interface, and PowerShell can read them directly. Open PowerShell or Terminal and paste this as a single line:

$d=(Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryStaticData | Select-Object -First 1).DesignedCapacity; $f=(Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryFullChargedCapacity | Select-Object -First 1).FullChargedCapacity; "Design: $d mWh | Full charge: $f mWh | Health: {0:N1}%" -f ($f/$d*100)

It prints something like Design: 56000 mWh | Full charge: 30800 mWh | Health: 55.0%. If you see an "access denied" or "not supported" error, run PowerShell as administrator and try again. Some laptops only share these classes with administrators. The Select-Object -First 1 part takes the first battery; a few business laptops have two, and the full report lists both.

Two more one-liners are worth keeping. The cycle count, where the battery reports it:

Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryCycleCount | Select-Object CycleCount

And the current charge and whether you are plugged in, which works on every Windows PC with a battery:

Get-CimInstance Win32_Battery | Select-Object Name, EstimatedChargeRemaining, BatteryStatus

A BatteryStatus of 2 means the laptop is on AC power, and 1 means it is running on battery. You may notice that Win32_Battery also has DesignCapacity and FullChargeCapacity fields. On most laptops they are empty, which is why the commands above read the root\wmi classes instead. If PowerShell is new territory, our PowerShell beginner's guide explains what each part of a command like this does.

What about the old WMIC battery command?

Older guides suggest wmic path win32_battery get commands. On current Windows 11, that fails with "'wmic' is not recognized", because Microsoft removed WMIC from Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2. The PowerShell lines above are the replacement. Our WMIC-to-PowerShell translation guide covers every other old WMIC command you might find in an old tutorial.

powercfg /energy, /sleepstudy and the other battery reports

The battery report is one of several reports built into the same powercfg tool, and they answer different questions. The 2015 version of this page sent people to /energy, so it is worth being precise about what each one is for.

powercfg /energy watches your PC for 60 seconds and writes energy-report.html, listing power-efficiency problems: devices that will not sleep, programs keeping the processor busy, USB devices blocking power saving. It needs an administrator window. It does include a small "Battery Information" block with design capacity and last full charge, but it buries them among dozens of unrelated warnings. Use it to answer "why does my battery drain so fast?", not "how healthy is my battery?". Close every program before running it, or the report fills with warnings about whatever you had open.

powercfg /sleepstudy is for laptops that use Modern Standby, the phone-like sleep where the PC stays partly awake. It writes sleepstudy-report.html showing how much battery each sleep session used and which components or apps kept the machine busy. If your laptop loses 20% overnight in a bag, this is the report that names the culprit. Add /duration 7 to look back a week.

powercfg /batteryreport remains the one for health. A practical routine: run the battery report for health, then the sleep study if overnight drain is the complaint, then the energy report if daytime drain seems too fast for the battery's health. If drain started suddenly after an update, also read our checklist for battery draining faster after an update.

Battery health apps from Dell, HP, Lenovo, ASUS and Microsoft

Searches like "check battery health hp laptop", "check battery health lenovo" and "check battery health dell" are common, and with good reason: the manufacturer's own tool often shows health in a friendlier way and can run a proper hardware test. All of them read the same battery chip as Windows does, so their numbers should broadly agree with the report.

The pre-boot diagnostics are worth a special mention. Dell's F12 diagnostics and HP's F2 hardware diagnostics test the battery before Windows loads, which separates a battery problem from a Windows problem. If a battery passes there but drains oddly inside Windows, look at software, the sleep study and the energy report. If it fails there, no setting in Windows will save it. Menu names move around between models and app versions, so if a feature is not where the table says, search the maker's support site for your exact model.

As for third-party "battery health" apps from app stores and download sites: most simply read the same numbers as the battery report and display them in a nicer window. Some are fine. Many are wrapped in advertising or bundled software. Since Windows gives you the real figures with one command, there is rarely a reason to install anything.

Can you check battery health online?

No. "Check battery health online" is a popular search, but a website cannot read your battery's design capacity, full charge capacity or cycle count. Browsers do not expose them, for good privacy reasons. At most, a website can see your current charge level and whether you are plugged in. A site that claims to "test your battery health online" is either guessing or trying to get you to download something. The real check runs on your own PC.

Habits that slow battery wear (and the myths to ignore)

Battery wear cannot be stopped, but it can be slowed a lot. Lithium-ion batteries age fastest when they are hot and when they sit at a high charge for long periods, especially both at once. Everything below follows from that.

1. If the laptop lives on the charger, set a charge limit. Holding at 80% instead of 100% for months at a time is the single biggest thing most desk-bound laptops can do. Windows has no universal charge-limit setting, so use the maker's tool from the table above.
2. Keep it cool. Do not charge or game on a bed, cushion or lap that blocks the vents, and do not leave the laptop in a hot car. Heat ages a battery faster than anything else you control.
3. Avoid running it flat often. Occasional deep discharges are fine; making a habit of draining to 0% adds stress. Set a sensible low-battery warning so you plug in earlier. Our guide shows how to change the low-battery alert level.
4. Store it at about half charge. For a laptop going in a drawer for months, leave it around 40-60%, not full and not empty.
5. Use Energy Saver when away from a socket. Windows 11 24H2 and later renamed Battery Saver to Energy Saver. It dims the screen and limits background work, which reduces heat as well as stretching runtime.

And the myths. "Never charge until it is empty" belongs to old nickel batteries; modern lithium-ion prefers shallow cycles. "Leaving it plugged in overcharges it" is false: the charging circuit stops at full. The real issue is time spent at 100% and the heat, which is what charge limits address. "Batteries need regular full cycles to stay healthy" is also false, though one full cycle now and then does help the fuel gauge stay accurate. That is the next section.

Healthy battery, still draining fast? Check these in Windows 11

A report that says 90% health while the laptop barely lasts two hours means the battery is fine and something is using too much power. Windows 11 makes the main suspects easy to find.

1. See which apps use the battery. Open Settings > System > Power & battery > Battery usage. Switch the view between the last 24 hours and the last 7 days, and look at the app list. A browser with dozens of tabs, a chat app that never sleeps, or a game launcher running in the background often tops the list. Each app's menu lets you limit its background activity.
2. Lower the screen's refresh rate. Many newer laptops run their screens at 120 Hz or more. Under Settings > System > Display > Advanced display, set 60 Hz while on battery, or use Dynamic refresh rate if offered. On some models the difference is an hour or more of runtime.
3. Turn the brightness down a notch. The screen is usually the single biggest power user. Our guide to adjusting brightness includes the keyboard shortcuts.
4. Pick the right power mode. Under Power & battery > Power mode, "Best power efficiency" on battery makes a real difference on most laptops. Older Windows 10 machines use power plans instead, covered in our guide to switching power plans.
5. Turn on Energy Saver early. Set it to switch on at 30% or even always on battery. It trims background activity and dims the screen.
6. Check the graphics card. Gaming laptops sometimes keep the powerful graphics chip running for apps that do not need it. In Settings > System > Display > Graphics, set everyday apps to "Power saving".
7. Look at sleep. If the battery drops overnight with the lid closed, run powercfg /sleepstudy as described above to see what kept the machine awake.

Work through these before buying a battery for a laptop whose report says the battery is healthy. A new battery in a laptop with a power-hungry habit just drains faster from a higher starting point.

"Plugged in, not charging": what it means

Hovering over the battery icon and seeing "Plugged in, not charging" alarms people, but it is often deliberate. Here is how to tell which kind you have.

It stops at a set level, like 60% or 80%. That is a charge limit doing its job: Conservation Mode, Battery Health Charging, a custom threshold or the Surface 80% limit. Nothing is wrong. If you need a full charge for a trip, most makers' apps have a one-time "charge to full" option.

It stops at a random level and will not go higher. Check the charger first. A lower-wattage adapter, such as a phone charger on a USB-C laptop or a borrowed charger from a smaller model, can keep the laptop running without having power left over to charge it. Windows sometimes warns "slow charger" in this case. Use the charger that came with the laptop, or one with at least the same wattage.

It shows a red cross or "consider replacing your battery". Windows or the maker's firmware has decided the battery is badly worn or faulty. Run the report: a health figure under about 40%, or a capacity that collapsed suddenly, confirms it.

None of the above. Try the battery driver reset from the errors section below, which fixes many stuck charging states. Then do a full shutdown, not a restart, with the charger unplugged for a minute, and plug back in. On laptops with a removable battery, reseating it also helps. If it still will not charge, the maker's pre-boot diagnostics will say whether the battery, the charger or the charging circuit is at fault.

Battery calibration: when the percentage itself is wrong

Sometimes the battery is fine but its meter is confused. The signs: the percentage jumps (60% to 20% in a minute), the laptop shuts down at a "safe" level, or the report shows a sudden capacity cliff that does not match how long the battery actually lasts. Calibration does not restore lost capacity. It re-teaches the fuel gauge where empty and full are, so the percentage becomes trustworthy again.

1. Charge to 100% and leave it plugged in for another hour or two.
2. Unplug and use the laptop normally until it warns of low battery, around 5-10%. Do not let it sit idle at a low level for hours.
3. Plug in and charge back to 100% without interruption.
4. Run powercfg /batteryreport again and compare.

Some makers include a proper calibration routine. Lenovo Vantage offers a battery gauge reset on ThinkPads, and some BIOS menus have a battery calibration option. Use those where available. Do it once if the readings look wrong, not every month: each deep cycle is a little wear in itself.

Battery report not working? Fixes for 0x10d2 and other errors

When powercfg /batteryreport fails, the cause is almost always one of these.

1. "Unable to perform operation. An unexpected error (0x10d2) has occurred: The library, drive, or media pool is empty." Windows cannot find a battery. On a desktop PC this is normal, because there is no battery to report. On a laptop, it means the battery or its driver is not being detected: go to the next step.
2. Check Device Manager. Right-click Start, choose Device Manager, expand Batteries. You should see "Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery". If it has a warning icon, or is missing, right-click it and choose Uninstall device, then choose Action > Scan for hardware changes or restart. Windows reinstalls it. This also fixes many cases of the battery icon disappearing, which our guide to a grayed-out battery icon covers in detail.
3. "Access is denied" or the file never appears. The window is pointed at a protected folder, usually System32 in an administrator window. Use /output with a path in your user folder or desktop.
4. "powercfg is not recognized". You are in a restricted shell or a typo slipped in. powercfg lives in C:\Windows\System32; try C:\Windows\System32\powercfg.exe /batteryreport.
5. The report opens but capacity shows a dash or zero. The battery chip is not reporting to Windows. Update the BIOS and chipset drivers from the maker's support page, then try the maker's own app or pre-boot diagnostics, which talk to the battery differently.
6. Health looks impossibly low on a new laptop. Run one calibration cycle as above and check again. If it stays low on a laptop under warranty, contact the maker with the report attached.

When to replace the battery, and what it costs compared with a new laptop

Replace the battery when its runtime no longer covers your day, when it shuts down unexpectedly above 20%, or when health falls under about 60%, whichever comes first. A healthy laptop with a worn battery is one of the best-value repairs in computing, which is exactly what Ethan found.

Start with the model name from the top of the report and the battery's own name from the "Installed batteries" section. Buy from the manufacturer or an authorized parts seller where you can. Cheap unbranded batteries are a real safety risk, and capacity claims on them are often inflated. Many modern laptops have internal batteries held in with screws and sometimes adhesive. If yours does, a repair shop is the sensible route unless you are confident with small screwdrivers and ribbon cables. Check the warranty first: some makers cover batteries for a year, and business models can carry longer warranties that include the battery.

If the laptop is old enough that the battery is only one of several problems, slow storage, too little memory, no more Windows updates, that is the moment to price a replacement machine instead. Our honest laptop buying list is written for exactly that decision.

Safety first: a swollen battery

If the touchpad is lifting, the case bulges, the laptop rocks on a flat table, or the keyboard deck has a gap that was not there before, the battery may be swelling. Stop using and charging the laptop, shut it down, and do not press on, puncture or try to flatten the battery. A swollen lithium-ion battery is a fire risk. Take it to a repair shop or the manufacturer, and recycle the old battery at an electronics or battery drop-off point, never in household trash.

For IT admins: battery health across a fleet

Checking one laptop takes ten seconds. Checking four hundred before a hardware refresh deserves a script, and the same data is available remotely.

PowerShell across machines

This collects design capacity, full charge capacity and health from a list of machines over PowerShell remoting and sorts the worst first. It assumes WinRM is enabled, which it is on most domain-joined fleets:

$pcs = Get-Content .\laptops.txt
Invoke-Command -ComputerName $pcs -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue -ScriptBlock {
  $s = Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryStaticData -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object -First 1
  $f = Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryFullChargedCapacity -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object -First 1
  $c = Get-CimInstance -Namespace root\wmi -ClassName BatteryCycleCount -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Select-Object -First 1
  if ($s -and $f -and $s.DesignedCapacity) {
    [pscustomobject]@{
      PC       = $env:COMPUTERNAME
      DesignMWh = $s.DesignedCapacity
      FullMWh   = $f.FullChargedCapacity
      HealthPct = [math]::Round($f.FullChargedCapacity / $s.DesignedCapacity * 100, 1)
      Cycles    = $c.CycleCount
    }
  }
} | Sort-Object HealthPct | Export-Csv .\battery-health.csv -NoTypeInformation

Machines that are off, unreachable or desktops simply drop out; run it again later for the stragglers. For audit trails, the XML form of the report gives the full history per machine: powercfg /batteryreport /xml /output C:\Temp\battery.xml, then collect the files and parse the DesignCapacity and FullChargeCapacity elements.

Intune and endpoint analytics

Organizations licensed for Microsoft Intune's Advanced Analytics get a built-in battery health report in endpoint analytics, with capacity and estimated runtime across the fleet and by model, without any scripting. It is the cleaner option where the licensing exists. Where it does not, an Intune remediation script or a scheduled task that writes the PowerShell output above to a share does the same job.

Two fleet patterns are worth acting on. A model where most units are below 70% at two years old points at a heat or charging-policy problem, which a BIOS charge limit pushed by policy can address for the next batch. And a single user whose battery drops far faster than colleagues on the same model often has a docking or always-plugged-in habit that a charge limit fixes. Replacing batteries proactively before a laptop's fourth year is usually cheaper than the lost hours of a fleet of sudden shutdowns.

Battery health in Windows: frequently asked questions

Ethan's new battery arrived four days later. Jake fitted it in twenty minutes, ran the report again, and the numbers told a different story: design capacity 56,000 mWh, full charge capacity 57,200, health 102%. The laptop that was about to be replaced went straight back into Ethan's bag. He turned on the charge limit in his maker's app before he left, because his laptop spends most of its life on a desk. The best part was not the money saved. It was that the problem had a number on it. A battery that "feels bad" is a guess. A battery at 55% is a decision.

Revision note. Written October 2, 2026, rewriting our 2015 guide for Windows 11 and 10. If your laptop has been dying early, I hope one command just saved you the price of a new one.