When I am in the middle of working with AI, a question sometimes pops into my head: how much have I actually used up by now?
Claude’s Pro plan has a ceiling on how much you can use within a set stretch of time. If you hit that ceiling halfway through something important, you have to sit and wait for a while. To avoid that, I want to write about how to check your own usage yourself. It is an unglamorous thing to know, but knowing it makes the work far more planned.
What this article covers
- Where you can check your Claude usage
- The difference between the “session” limit and the “weekly” limit
- Why being aware of your usage makes the work easier
First I asked Kuro, and got a surprise
As usual, my first move was to ask Claude — I call him Kuro, my AI partner. I said: right now, roughly what percentage of the five-hour usage have I used?
The answer that came back was not what I expected.
I will be honest with you. The truth is that I cannot see what percentage of your usage has been spent. The usage figures are not something I can check from my side.
That was a genuinely interesting discovery. AI is clever, but it has no idea how much of itself has been used. So where do you look? Kuro told me where the place is.
Usage lives under Settings, then Usage
The place to check turned out to be simple. Open Claude’s Settings, and choose Usage in the left-hand menu. That is all there is to it.
Open it and you see two things.
Current session. What percentage you have used right now, and how many hours and minutes until it resets. On my own screen, for example, it read “58% used / resets in 2 hours 35 minutes”.
Weekly limit. Your usage counted across one week. It shows up in the form “24% used / resets on such-and-such day”.
The point is that there are two of them: the session and the week. A short window, and a seven-day window. Keep both in mind and the ceiling stops ambushing you.
What changes once you know this
When your usage is visible, you can plan the shape of your day’s work.
Say I am about to start something long — writing a batch of articles, or having Kuro look at a pile of images. I check the usage screen first. If there is not much left, I can decide to wait for the reset before starting. If there is plenty left, I can push ahead in one go with an easy mind.
This matters most on days that involve a lot of images. As I wrote before in how AI tokens and images actually work, images consume a great many tokens — tokens being the unit that usage is counted in. Trade a few dozen screenshots back and forth and you approach the ceiling sooner than you would guess. So on a day when I can tell there will be a lot of images, checking the usage screen up front is a relief.
What to do if you hit the limit
Even if you do use it all up, there is no need to panic. Wait, and it comes back. The usage screen tells you how many hours are left until the reset, so all you have to do is wait for it.
There is also a separate case: pasting in too many images and being told that you have exceeded the number of images allowed in this chat. That is a different thing from the usage ceiling. I wrote about how to deal with that one in detail in what to do when Claude says the image limit is exceeded, so have a look at that alongside this. Moving to a new chat, or combining several images into one, will get you past it.
What I take away from it
- Claude does not know its own usage — the human side has to look it up.
- You check usage under Settings, then Usage.
- There are two kinds: the current session, and the weekly limit.
- Check it before long work or image-heavy work and the ceiling will not ambush you.
- Even if you hit the limit, it resets with time, so there is no need to panic.
Simply knowing how much you have left makes working with AI a great deal more relaxed. Even for me, someone who is not good with computers, learning how to read this one screen was what let me take on long stretches of work without worrying. Do go and take a look at your own usage screen once.
If you want the fuller picture of how those ceilings are set in the first place, I wrote about that in Claude’s usage limits explained.
