GoKawiilThe habit of charging your phone overnight probably needs to go to sleep. That's because the charging speed on most phones released over the last three years has stepped up so much that you legitimately might fill your phone's battery by as much as 76% within a 30-minute charge.
CNET
Now, to be clear, I'm not saying that you must stop charging your phone overnight. While some reports support how you can lengthen your battery's overall lifespan by charging it less, Android and iOS each have settings like charge limits and the ability to slow down charging speeds to help prolong battery life even if you charge overnight every day. You might even want to use features like StandBy mode in iOS, which makes your phone act like a bedside alarm clock while charging.
I use a sleep tracking app that recommends being plugged in while it listens to how long I snore. In short, if overnight charging makes sense, I'm not here to stop you.
But if your sole reason for charging overnight is to ensure that your phone's battery makes it through the next day, you likely don't need to. Our CNET Labs data from the 115 phones we've tested since 2023 shows that most handsets recharge fast enough that charging your phone in the morning is fine.
Samsung and Apple's newest phones charge considerably faster than their predecessors. Andrew Lanxon/CNET
Faster-charging phones are broadly accessible
Two years ago, I wrote about how I wanted the fast wired charging I found in testing niche gaming phones to be on mainstream handsets. Phones like the 2024 Asus ROG Phone 9 Pro support 65-watt speeds and, in my tests, recharged its battery from empty to 67% in 30 minutes. OnePlus phones have supported these speeds for years but require a proprietary power adapter.
Now in 2026, I see phones charge faster in general -- even some sub-$600 phones support 65-watt charging speeds. But a phone's charging speed is just one indicator of how much time it'll take someone to recharge a battery. How long a phone takes to charge has as much to do with its battery size, what it is made of, its cooling system and its software as it does with the maximum supported charging speed.
To take all these variables into account, we run the phones we review at CNET in a 30-minute charging test using the cable that comes with the phone and a wall plug that supports its top charging speed. And using data going back years, we found that phones released in the past year charge faster in our tests than those from two or three years ago.
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