How to Generate a Battery Health Report in Windows with powercfg /batteryreport
You want to know how healthy your laptop battery is — how much capacity it has lost compared to when it was new.
Why: Windows tracks your battery’s design capacity, current full-charge capacity, and usage history. A built-in powercfg command exports all of it to a readable HTML report — no third-party app required.
Fix 1: Generate the battery report
Open Command Prompt or PowerShell (right-click > Run as administrator), then run:
powercfg /batteryreport /output "%USERPROFILE%\battery-report.html"powercfg /batteryreport generates an HTML report of battery usage characteristics over the lifetime of the system. Open the file it names (here battery-report.html in your user folder) in any browser. Running the command with no /output simply drops the HTML in the current folder instead.
Fix 2: Read the numbers that matter
In the report, find the Installed batteries section and compare two values:
- Design Capacity — what the battery held when new.
- Full Charge Capacity — what it holds now, fully charged.
The gap between them is your battery wear. If Full Charge Capacity has fallen well below Design Capacity (for example to half), short runtime is expected and a replacement — not a software tweak — is the fix. The report’s Battery capacity history and Battery life estimates sections show this decline over time.
Fix 3: Narrow the report to recent days
To analyze a specific window instead of the whole history (the maximum is 14 days):
powercfg /batteryreport /duration 7This focuses the usage and life-estimate sections on the last 7 days — handy after a change you want to measure.
FAQ
Where is the file saved? Wherever you point /output; with no path it lands in the folder your prompt is in (run cd %USERPROFILE% first if unsure). The report is plain HTML — open it in any browser.
What counts as a “bad” battery? There’s no single threshold, but a Full Charge Capacity far below Design Capacity, plus very short runtime, means the battery is worn. Microsoft also warns that severely deteriorated batteries may visibly swell — if yours has expanded, stop using the device immediately.
Can I also see what drains the battery in sleep? Yes — powercfg /sleepstudy produces a separate Modern Standby drain report. The battery report here is about capacity/wear, not standby drain.
Sources: Microsoft Learn — Powercfg command-line options, Microsoft Support — Caring for your battery in Windows