Microsoft's own number is 400 MB for one hour. It appears in the storage-planning section of the Teams recording storage documentation, stated flatly: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB."
That one sentence is the only size estimate Microsoft gives for meeting recordings in the documentation cited here — and it is worth knowing exactly what kind of sentence it is before you build a plan on it. It sits in a page written for admins sizing OneDrive and SharePoint capacity, immediately followed by: "Make sure you understand the capacity required for recorded files and have sufficient storage available in OneDrive and SharePoint."
In other words, it is a capacity-planning figure, not a spec sheet entry.
The numbers, at a glance
| What | Value | Official source |
|---|---|---|
| Size of a one-hour recording | 400 MB | Recording and transcript storage and permissions |
| Maximum recording length or size | "4 hours or 1.5 GB" | Limits and specifications for Teams |
| What happens at that limit | "the recording ends and automatically restarts" | Limits and specifications |
| Meeting length limit (the meeting, not the recording) | 30 hours | Limits and specifications |
| File type | ".mp4 file" | Play, share, and download recordings |
| Storage it consumes | Your OneDrive and SharePoint quota | Recording storage page |
| Default expiration | 120 days | Recording expiration policy |
| Resolution, frame rate, bitrate, codecs | Not stated on these pages — check the official documentation | — |
What the 400 MB figure does not come with
Three things are missing from that sentence, and all three matter if you are trying to predict your own file sizes:
- No quality premise. The page attaches no resolution, no frame rate and no bitrate to the 400 MB. So you cannot reverse the number into a bitrate and then re-derive sizes for other settings — any arithmetic like that is yours, not Microsoft's.
- No indication of whether it is an average or a ceiling. The wording is a plain statement: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB." Treat it as a planning midpoint.
- A container is not a codec. Microsoft describes the output as an ".mp4 file", which tells you the container and nothing about what is inside it. The encoder Teams uses is not stated in the documentation cited here — more on that in what file format Teams recordings use.
The practical consequence: 400 MB per hour is good enough to answer "will 50 hours of recordings fit in my quota," and not good enough to answer "will this look sharp on a 4K display."
The hard stop: 4 hours or 1.5 GB
Teams does not let a single recording run indefinitely. The limits page states: "Meeting recording maximum length 4 hours or 1.5 GB. When this limit is reached, the recording ends and automatically restarts."
Two details people get wrong here:
It is "or", not "and". Either condition alone trips it. You do not need to be four hours in and at 1.5 GB — whichever arrives first ends the file.
The recording does not stop, it splits. The official wording is "ends and automatically restarts". So coming out of a long session with two or three separate files is designed behaviour, not a failure you need to troubleshoot.
Now combine the two official numbers. At Microsoft's own estimate of 400 MB per hour, 1.5 GB arrives at roughly 3.75 hours — slightly before the four-hour clock. That arithmetic is ours, not Microsoft's, but it comes from two of Microsoft's own figures and it explains why long meetings tend to split a little earlier than the "4 hours" headline suggests.
For rough planning, scaling the single official figure gives you:
| Meeting length | Approximate size |
|---|---|
| 30 minutes | ~200 MB |
| 1 hour | 400 MB (the official figure) |
| 2 hours | ~800 MB |
| 3 hours | ~1.2 GB |
| ~3.75 hours | ~1.5 GB — the cap |
Only the one-hour row is official. The rest is straight multiplication, and real files will vary with content.
What to do when the file is too big to move
Recording files are not free-floating: "Teams meeting recording files live in OneDrive and SharePoint and are included in your quota for those services." A few hundred hours of meetings is a real line item.
Sending one outside your organisation has its own friction. Microsoft's guidance on sharing recordings says plainly: "External sharing isn't designed for the distribution of large files or a large number of files." If the recipient just needs to watch the discussion, re-encoding a 1.4 GB file down to something mailable is usually less painful than fighting sharing permissions.
Try it right here
Runs in your browser. Your file is not uploaded anywhere.
This runs entirely inside your browser tab — the file is read from disk, re-encoded locally and handed back. Nothing is uploaded, which matters for meeting recordings more than for most video. If you want the reasoning behind the settings rather than a preset, see how to compress a video without losing quality, or browse all Clapr tools for the conversion side of things.
Gotchas worth knowing before you plan
Long recordings can outgrow automatic transcription. Microsoft's page on video transcripts gives two different size limits in two different sections of the same page: "The size limit for running automatic transcripts is 1GB and 4 hours" in one place, and "Transcript and closed caption generation are only supported for videos less than 4GB in size and less than 4 hours" in another. The duration matches at 4 hours; the size does not. A four-hour recording at 400 MB per hour lands around 1.6 GB — between the two numbers. Plan against the lower one.
Two different file-size numbers in the limits page itself. The "Messaging" chat table lists a "File size limitation" of 100 MB, while the "Storage" table lists a "File upload limit (per file)" of 250 GB across every plan column. Microsoft notes that "Because Teams runs on a SharePoint backend for file sharing, SharePoint limitations apply to the Files section within a Team", but the exact scope of each number is not spelled out — so check the official page rather than assuming which one governs your upload.
Emailing a channel is the tightest path of all. In that same limits page, the "Emailing a channel" table caps the size of each file attachment at "Less than 10 MB". No recording of any length clears that.
The transcript is a separate file, in a separate format. Organizers and co-organizers can download a transcript "as a .docx or .vtt file" — so if your editing tool expects SubRip, you will need a VTT to SRT conversion first. More platform ceilings are collected in the limits archive.
FAQ
How big is a one-hour Teams meeting recording? Microsoft's storage-planning documentation states: "The size of a one-hour recording is 400 MB." No resolution or bitrate is attached to that figure on that page, so treat it as a planning estimate rather than a guarantee.
Why did my long meeting produce two recording files? Because a single recording maxes out at "4 hours or 1.5 GB", and at that point "the recording ends and automatically restarts". Either condition alone triggers it. Two files is the documented behaviour.
What resolution and bitrate does Teams record at? The Microsoft pages cited here describe the output as an ".mp4 file" and give the 400 MB per hour planning figure, but no resolution, frame rate, bitrate or codec. Check the official documentation for anything more specific.
Do Teams recordings use up my OneDrive storage? Yes. Microsoft states that recording files "live in OneDrive and SharePoint and are included in your quota for those services." Recordings and transcripts also have a default expiration of 120 days, which admins can change.
Can I attach a recording to a Teams chat? Depends on the number that applies. The limits page lists 100 MB in its chat table and 250 GB in its storage table, without spelling out the boundary between them. Compressing first, or sharing the OneDrive link instead of the file, avoids the question entirely.
All figures quoted from Microsoft's official Teams documentation on learn.microsoft.com and support.microsoft.com, checked 16 September 2026. Microsoft revises these pages regularly — verify against the official page before planning storage around them.
