By default, 5% of the filesystem blocks will be reserved for the super-user, to avoid fragmentation and "allow root-owned daemons to continue to function correctly after non-privileged processes are prevented from writing to the filesystem" (from mke2fs(8)).
For modern high-capacity disks, this is higher than necessary if the partition is used as a long-term archive or not crucial to system operations (like /home). See this email for the opinion of ext4 developer Ted Ts'o on reserved blocks.
It is generally safe to reduce the percentage of reserved blocks to free up disk space when the partition is either:
Very large (for example > 50G)
Used as long-term archive, i.e., where files will not be deleted and created very often
The -m option of ext4-related utilities allows to specify the percentage of reserved blocks.
To totally prevent reserving blocks upon filesystem creation, use:
# mkfs.ext4 -m 0 /dev/device
To reduce it to 1% afterwards, use:
# tune2fs -m 1 /dev/device
You can use findmnt(8) to find the device name: