Battery Drain on 16 pro max after iOS26 update

No, certainly not. It’s normal for there to be high battery usage after an iOS upgrade. There are background activities that are associated with the upgrade that generally take 48 to 72 hours to complete. The estimate is assuming you’re leaving your iphone plugged into a charger, connected to WiFi and in sleep/lock mode and not turned off. A lot of intensive background activity will be scheduled at night so as not to interfere with the daily operation of your iPhone. However, if you turn off the device or disconnect from WiFi, the processes will run during the day and you may notice slow performance, excess heat and other performance restrictions.

If after 72 hours your battery still is experiencing higher consumption than normal, please do a forced restart and wait another 24 to 48 hours for activities to revert to normal.

Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

Shiv.thesnakeeyes wrote:

Have already done it and it is more than 72 hours in ios 26 and 48 hours in ios 26.0.1

battery life is horrible.

i used to get 7 -8 hour screen on time in ios 18

now its hardly 4 hours

[Edited by Moderator]

After you did the update, did you Force Restart your iPhone? I do so after EVERY iOS update and I've never had an issue from an update in all these years. Do this and make it part of your routine after you update your iPhone --> Force restart iPhone - Apple Support

Please follow this path,

iPhone > Settings > Battery > View All Battery Usage > screen shoot of apps and percentages and graphs

Here’s mine,