How much does YouTube compress your video?
Nobody can tell you, because YouTube has never published the number.

That is the whole answer, and it is worth stating before the tables. YouTube publishes a complete ladder of recommended upload bitrates, SDR and HDR, standard and high frame rate, from 360p to 8K. It publishes the container, the profile, the GOP structure, the chroma subsampling and the audio codecs it wants. It states in its own words that it always re-encodes. It has never published a single figure for the bitrate that leaves its servers and arrives at a player, at any resolution.

We checked again on 4 September 2026, on the recommended upload encoding page, the page about video resolution, the page about videos looking low quality after upload, and the Premium benefits page. The closest thing to a delivered figure on any of them is an audio number, 256 kbps for Premium music videos and Art Tracks, plus a sentence saying 1080p Premium is an enhanced bitrate version of 1080p that provides more information per pixel. No megabits. No per-rendition table. Nothing for video.

So when a page tells you YouTube compresses your 4K master by 70 percent, or that it delivers 13 Mbps, it is not quoting Google. It is quoting a measurement, or quoting someone who quoted a measurement. Measurements are useful and we have taken our own. They are just not the same kind of object as a published specification, and a page that blurs the two is not worth reading on anything else either.

The rest of the spec is just as specific, and it tells you something on its own. YouTube asks for MP4 with the moov atom at the front of the file, H.264 in High Profile, progressive, two consecutive B frames, a closed GOP, CABAC entropy coding and 4:2:0 chroma subsampling. Audio should be AAC-LC, Opus or Eclipsa Audio, at 128 kbps mono, 384 kbps stereo or 512 kbps for 5.1. The recommended SDR colour space is BT.709. Content should be encoded and uploaded at the frame rate it was recorded at, from the common list of 24, 25, 30, 48, 50 and 60 fps, and interlaced material must be deinterlaced first.

Notice the chroma line. Before a frame of your work reaches Google, the recommended path has already discarded three quarters of the colour resolution, because 4:2:0 keeps one colour sample per two by two block of pixels. That is normal for consumer delivery and it is not a criticism of YouTube. It is worth knowing if you spent the afternoon on a grade. Our explainer on what video compression actually removes walks through the mechanism.

The most useful sentences YouTube publishes about quality are not numbers, they are plain statements about process. Three of them settle questions that fill forums.

Two practical consequences. First, sending a client a link within minutes of uploading means sending them the low-quality pass, which is the single most common cause of the panicked message about a film looking soft. Wait for the higher resolutions to appear in the quality menu. We wrote up the other causes in why your video looks worse after upload. Second, a perfectly compliant upload does not buy an exemption. It buys the encoder a clean source, which is worth something, and nothing more.

Now you can spot the error yourself. When an article says YouTube streams 4K at 35 Mbps, or that 1080p60 gets 12 Mbps, it has lifted the live encoder table and relabelled the column. The tell is that the numbers match this table exactly. A second tell is that the same article usually cannot name the page it came from, because naming it would show the heading says live streaming.

This matters beyond pedantry. Ingest bitrates are generous by design, since YouTube wants a rich source to encode from. Delivery bitrates are conservative by design, since YouTube has to serve them to a phone on a train. Using one as a proxy for the other overstates what viewers see, and it is the specific reason a lot of filmmakers believe their 4K uploads are being delivered close to their export.

Apple’s HLS Authoring Specification for Apple Devices is the fairest external yardstick available, because it is Apple telling the whole industry what a good streaming ladder looks like, and it is not a claim about YouTube. Its example HEVC ladder tops out at 16,800 kbps for 3840 by 2160 in SDR and 20,000 kbps in HDR, with 1080p rungs at 4,500 and 5,800 kbps SDR. Its H.264 ladder stops at 1080p and 6,000 kbps. Streaming as a discipline is built around a ceiling in that region. A 100 or 200 Mbps master is an order of magnitude above anything a delivery ladder is designed to carry, whoever operates it.

Vimeo is the useful contrast on transparency rather than on quality. Vimeo publishes its maximum delivery bitrates per rendition: up to 22 Mbps at 4K on the H.264 ladder, up to 12 Mbps at 2K, up to 7 Mbps at 1080p60, and up to 16 Mbps at 4K on the HDR and HEVC ladder. It also states that the listed figures are maximums and that a video may transcode lower depending on image complexity. You can therefore reason about Vimeo with real numbers, which is what our page on Vimeo’s 4K bitrate does. You cannot do the same with YouTube, and that is a disclosure difference, not a quality verdict.

For completeness: our own measurement of a 4K YouTube stream in August 2026 landed around 13 Mbps. That is uncompressed.io’s measurement, taken on our equipment on our connection. It is not a YouTube figure, it is not a specification, and it should not be repeated as one. One stream on one day tells you the order of magnitude and nothing more precise than that.

The distinction is the audience, not the format. A hiring producer opening your link, a client approving a grade, a festival programmer watching a submission: each one is judging image quality as part of judging you. Sending them a stream whose bitrate you cannot state, wrapped in a competitor’s recommendations, is a poor way to present work you spent weeks on. Sending the same film to the public on YouTube, at the same time, is simply correct.

The honest caveats, because a no-transcode host has real ones. Playback depends on the viewer’s own hardware decoder, so a browser-decodable codec is required and a very high bitrate master can outrun an older machine. There is no adaptive ladder, which means a slow connection buffers rather than quietly dropping to a mushy rendition; that trade is deliberate, and it is the wrong trade for a public audience. Uploads are MP4 or MOV in H.264, HEVC or AV1, up to 50 GB per file, so a camera RAW master is finished to HEVC or ProRes before it goes up. And it costs money, where YouTube costs nothing. Storage is the only thing metered; views, viewers and bandwidth are not.

Most people we talk to end up running both, which is the sane answer. The public cut lives on YouTube for reach. The client link, the festival screener and the reel that decides a hire live somewhere the bitrate is knowable. If that is the split you are after, the longer version is in video hosting that does not compress and in YouTube 4K bitrate for client delivery.