How many tokens is 1% of your Claude Code limit?

说明与用途

Claude Code 用户无法直接将使用百分比转换为令牌数量，导致预算管理困难。作者测得 5 小时窗口 1% 的限制相当于约 166,000 个新令牌或 11.2M 个缓存令牌，其中新令牌占所有令牌的 2.5% 但占限制的 63%。这有助于优化子代理使用、会话长度和上下文大小。

问题

Users cannot directly translate Claude Code usage percentages into token counts, making it hard to gauge how much of their token budget is consumed by different token types.

结果

The study found that 1% of the 5‑hour limit equals roughly 166k new tokens or 11.2M cached tokens, with new tokens accounting for 2.5% of all tokens but 63% of the limit. Subagents, long sessions, and large starting contexts significantly impact token consumption.

工作流

• 1. Record status‑line percent readings from Claude Code over time.
• 2. Extract token counts (input, cache writes, cache reads, output) from transcripts for each model call.
• 3. For each interval where the 5‑hour percent rose, compute the rise and split the tokens into new (input, cache writes, output) and cached (cache reads).
• 4. Perform a least‑squares fit (no intercept) of rise in % ≈ a × new tokens + b × cached tokens.
• 5. Derive % of the 5‑hour limit per million new and cached tokens and compute tokens per 1%.
• 6. Use the resulting ranges (≈165–200k new tokens, 10.7–11.2M cached tokens per 1%) to assess token usage.
• 7. Apply insights to optimize subagent usage, session length, and context size.
• 8. Optionally use the limitcast CLI to automate data collection and fitting.
• 9. Share findings to compare ratios across plans.

证据

1% of the 5-hour limit was about 166,000 new tokens, or about 11 million cached tokens.

来源

New tokens (input, cache writes, output) 2.5% of everything Claude Code sent, and they used about 63% of my limit.

来源

Subagents sent about a third of my tokens (33%), but nearly half of my new tokens (48%), and used an estimated 42% of my limit.

来源