FPSCalc › Streaming Upload Bandwidth Calculator
Your bitrate is not your upload requirement. This adds the RTMP chunk headers, the TLS records and the TCP/IP headers on top of your video and audio, sizes the keyframe burst, and tells you which quality tier your line can actually carry.
Sets the published bitrate ladder and the hard cap.
Newer codecs need roughly 30% less bitrate for the same quality.
Picks the platform's published bitrate for that tier.
What you set in OBS. CBR is assumed — VBR spikes are what break a marginal line.
Twitch: 96 kbps for compatibility, 160 kbps maximum. YouTube: 128 kbps stereo.
Smaller frames mean more headers per second, so faster frame rates cost slightly more overhead.
Twitch and YouTube both ask for 2 seconds and say not to exceed 4.
From a speed test run at the hour you stream, over the same cable or Wi-Fi.
Twitch's own guidance: upload should be bitrate + 30%.
Larger chunks mean fewer headers. This is the one overhead you can often control.
Other traffic sharing the same uplink
A 128-tick shooter sends roughly 40–100 kbps upstream.
Discord's default is 64 kbps. Set 0 if you are not in voice.
Overhead layers to include
Leave Ethernet off if your speed test already reports IP-layer throughput, which most do.
| Metric | Value | How it is worked out |
|---|
| Layer | kbps | Share of payload |
|---|
| Quality tier | Video bitrate | Upload needed | Fits? |
|---|
Each row is priced with your current audio, overhead and headroom settings. "Fits?" asks whether your measured upload covers it.
| Platform | Resolution & frame rate | Published video bitrate | Audio |
|---|
Twitch figures are from Twitch's Broadcasting Guidelines help page (checked November 2026). YouTube figures are from YouTube Help, "Choose live encoder settings, bitrates, and resolutions" (checked November 2026); the second number in each cell is the AV1 / H.265 figure. Kick publishes hard limits rather than a per-resolution ladder: H.264 only, CBR only, 1,000–8,000 kbps, up to 1920×1080 at 60 fps, 2-second keyframes — read from Kick's help centre via secondary sources and marked as reported rather than verified first-hand.
Because 6,000 kbps is only the compressed video. On top of it you are sending audio, the game's own upstream packets, and three layers of headers: RTMP splits every frame into chunks and prepends a header to each, RTMPS wraps the result in TLS records, and every TCP segment and IP packet carries its own header. Together those typically add 3–5% to the payload. Then you need slack on top, because home upload speeds fluctuate with the time of day and with whatever else is on the line.
Twitch's own FAQ says your upload should be the bitrate plus 30%, so 6,000 kbps wants at least 8 Mbps. That is a reasonable default. Go higher if you stream over Wi-Fi, share the line with other people, or have an ISP whose speeds sag in the evening — 50% is not excessive in those cases.
Slightly, yes. RTMP headers are per chunk, so a 128-byte chunk size on a 60 fps 1080p stream produces around 98 chunks per frame and roughly 0.9% overhead on video. At a 4096-byte chunk size that falls to about 0.1%. It is a small absolute saving, but it is free, and it also cuts CPU work on both ends.
It changes the size of the burst, not the average. A keyframe is coded without reference to other frames, so it is several times larger than the frames around it — 4× is a typical figure. That frame has to cross your uplink as one lump, so it briefly occupies the line for longer than a normal frame does. Keep the interval at the 2 seconds your platform asks for: long intervals also delay viewers joining mid-stream and make seeking worse.
Multiply the sustained upload rate by 0.45 to get decimal gigabytes per hour, which is how ISPs bill: 6.5 Mbps is about 2.9 GB an hour, so a four-hour stream is roughly 11.6 GB. Four of those a week comes to around 200 GB a month, which is enough to matter on a capped plan.
At the same bitrate, yes — YouTube's own table recommends about 30% less bitrate for AV1 or H.265 than for H.264 at every resolution. But check your platform accepts it: Kick takes H.264 only, and Twitch's higher-bitrate tiers are tied to specific setups. AV1 also costs far more CPU or needs recent hardware to encode in real time.