Battery life is one of the most important things on a new laptop. You don't want to be plugged into an outlet or a USB-C power bank all day. You'll want to live a life free of the charger. So, if the Surface Laptop 5 is on your list of laptops to buy, you might be questioning does the Surface Laptop 5 have good battery life? Well, the answer to that question is yes, it does. Battery life on the Surface Laptop 5 for what Microsoft calls "typical device usage" is rated at 18 hours on the 13.5-inch model, and 17 hours on the 15-inch model.

In this guide, we'll dive deeper into the battery life of the Surface Laptop 5. We'll look at the technical aspect of it and help you understand how you can get the most out of your battery on your new Surface.

The technical aspect and real-world Surface Laptop 5 battery life

As a reference before we go deeper, last year's Surface Laptop 4 was rated at 17 hours of battery life for 13.5-inch models with the Intel CPU. The 15-inch Surface Laptop 4 with Intel CPU was rated at 16.5 hours of battery life. In our Surface Laptop 4 review, we got to 8 hours of day-to-day use with the 13.5-inch Intel model. This means that on paper, battery life is improved between generations with the Surface Laptop 5 versus the Surface Laptop 4, but in our real-world tests with the new Surface Laptop 5, it came out to about the same.

Anyway, there are three things to consider with the Surface Laptop 5 battery. The first is the size of the battery, rated in watts-hour (Wh,) then the second is which size of the device you choose. The third is the way you end up using your laptop (we have an example from our review period.) That'll be our focus here on why the Surface Laptop 5 has good battery life.

On the first part of things, unlike other laptops on the market, both the 13-inch and 15-inch Surface Laptop 5 share the same battery capacity of 47.4 Wh, the same as last year's Surface Laptop 4 model. As a reference, a 13-inch XPS 13 Plus has a 55wh battery and the 15-inch XPS 15 has a beefier 86Wh battery (though it has a dedicated GPU.) Either way, the battery on the Surface Laptop 5 is the typical size of what you'd find on productivity laptops. Microsoft likely opted for this size to help keep the weight of the device down a bit. A bigger battery means more weight, but a smaller battery means less battery life.

Then, with the size differences on the Surface Laptop 5, you need to consider that the 13-inch model will end up getting better battery life. We say that because the screen is a lower resolution at 2256 x 1504. On the 15-inch model, it's a bit higher at 2496 x 1664. Pushing out those extra pixels means the Surface Laptop 5 15-inch will be behind in battery life a bit. It's why Microsoft rated the 15-inch model with one hour less of battery life than the 13-inch model.

The final thing to take into account is how you end up using your Surface Laptop 5. In our review period with the 15-inch model, we got to between 5 hours and 6 hours and 50 minutes of total usage before needing to recharge. That's about the same as what we got with last year's Surface Laptop 4. This is for day-to-day usage, with web browsing as well as productivity tasks. As you can tell, it's well off Microsoft's actual estimate, but everyone uses a laptop differently. If you always have your screen at high brightness and are doing CPU-intensive tasks like photo editing or light gaming, then you won't get the best battery life. If you tune down your brightness settings and use Windows 11's power settings to recommend, then you'd probably end up getting more than that.

All this explained, if you feel like you're now confident and want to buy a Surface Laptop 5, you can use the link below. There are other options, though, as some of the other Surface devices we've reviewed can get much better battery life.