A display device and a method for driving the same are discussed. The display device includes a display panel including data lines, gate lines crossing the data lines, and pixels, and source driver integrated circuits (ICs) which are connected to a timing controller through data line pairs, recover control information of a control data packet input from the timing controller, and supply a data voltage to the data lines. The timing controller sets the number of control data packets transmitted in a horizontal blank period to be less than the number of control data packets transmitted in a period except the horizontal blank period. The source driver ICs read the number of control data packets based on start information transmitted prior to the control data packet.