What bitrate should I export 4K video at?
The published numbers, and where they survive the trip.

Two different questions hide inside one search. The first is what number gives a platform’s encoder enough to work with. The second is what number gives your viewer the best picture. On YouTube, on Vimeo, on any host that builds its own renditions, those questions have different answers, and only the first one is under your control.

The recommendations below are upload targets published by platforms that re-encode. They are not delivery bitrates, and they are not quality ceilings for a file you keep. Treat them as the brief you are writing for somebody else’s encoder.

A second platform publishes a comparable table with a wider 4K range and a different codec list. Rather than restate it here, the numbers and the playback ceilings that go with them are on the Vimeo export bitrate page. The point both tables make is the same one: the platform is telling you what its encoder wants to be fed, not what your audience will receive.

This is the whole difference between the two answers at the top of the page. A platform rebuilds your upload into a ladder of renditions sized for connections it has to serve at scale, so headroom above its recommendation is spent on upload time and storage and then discarded. Here nothing is rebuilt, which means the headroom is the deliverable.

Bandwidth is not metered on any plan, and views, uploads and viewers are unlimited, including on the free tier. A 200 Mbps film costs the same whether one person opens it or two hundred do. What you pay for is storage, which is why the export bitrate is a storage question here rather than a delivery question.

Starter is free with 5 GB of hot storage, which holds a ten-minute 4K film exported at 45 Mbps with room left over, or a shorter one at 200 Mbps. Lite is $9 a month for 100 GB and Pro is $25 a month for 500 GB. Past a plan, hot storage is $40 per TB a month and cold archive storage is $20 per TB a month.

Working backwards from that table is usually the faster way to decide. A ninety-minute feature at 200 Mbps is 135 GB of hot storage, which is a real line on a bill; the same feature at 100 Mbps is 67.5 GB and, on a browser-decodable codec, still arrives at more than twice any published platform recommendation for 4K.

If the export is going to a client for approval rather than to a platform, the decisions shift again, toward what opens reliably on an unknown machine and what the reviewer needs to see. Those are covered in export settings for client review, and the mechanics of what a bitrate controls are in video bitrate explained. For why the number holds all the way to the viewer here, see video hosting that does not compress.