Sleep by age
How much sleep you need, according to the people who studied it
Almost every page ranking for this question gives you a single tidy number. The actual recommendations are ranges, they were issued by a professional body after a formal evidence review, and the width of each range is the part worth reading. These pages quote them as published.
In short
Adults should sleep 7 or more hours per night. Teenagers aged 13 to 18 need 8 to 10 hours, children aged 6 to 12 need 9 to 12, and children under 6 have figures given per 24 hours including naps. All of these come from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's consensus statements.
- Hours for adults
- 7+Hours for adultsA floor, not a target
- Hours for teenagers
- 8 to 10Hours for teenagersAges 13 to 18
- Age bands published
- 7Age bands publishedNothing below 4 months
Where these numbers come from, and where they stop
The figures on these pages are from two consensus statements by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine: the paediatric recommendations published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine in 2016, and the adult recommendation published with the Sleep Research Society in 2015. Both were produced by panels reviewing the published literature rather than by a single study, and both are quoted here exactly as issued.
Three things about them are worth knowing before you read a number off a table. They are ranges, and the width is a finding rather than a hedge. They are about duration only, because that is what the evidence base measures, which means they say nothing about when you sleep or how steadily, both of which matter. And there is no recommendation below four months of age, because the panel judged the evidence insufficient to give one.
What none of them are is a personal prescription. A population figure tells you where the evidence sits, not what your body needs, and the honest use of it is as a floor to check yourself against rather than a target to hit exactly. If your sleep is genuinely not working, that is a question for a doctor, and no number on this site is a substitute for one.
The bands, as published
Every one of these pages quotes its figure in the form the consensus statement gives it, and says what changes at that age underneath the total.
Getting the hours is a different problem from knowing them
Almost nobody arrives at this question because they do not know the answer. They arrive because they suspect they are short, and want to know by how much. That is a measurement problem rather than a knowledge one, and it has two parts that are easy to confuse: how long you were in bed, and how much of that you were asleep for.
The gap between them is bigger than people think and almost impossible to estimate from memory, because it is made of the fifteen minutes or so it takes to fall asleep plus the wake-ups you do not form a memory of.Sleep tracking without a wearablecovers what a phone can honestly establish about that, which is less than most trackers imply and considerably more than nothing.
Once you know the number, the arithmetic for fixing it lives in two places depending on which end of your night is fixed. Wake times counts backwards from an alarm you did not choose. Bedtimes counts forwards from a lights-out you did.
Questions people ask
How many hours of sleep do I need?
If you are an adult, seven or more per night. That figure comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and is deliberately expressed as a minimum rather than a range, because the evidence for harm below seven hours is much stronger than the evidence for any particular ideal above it.
Why are the recommendations given as ranges?
Because healthy sleepers genuinely vary. The panels reviewed the published evidence and found real spread within every age band, so a range is the honest summary. A single number would be more quotable and less true, which is why most pages ranking for these queries have one.
Is there a recommendation for newborns?
Not below four months. The paediatric panel declined to issue one because the available evidence did not support it. Any specific figure you see for a newborn is somebody filling in a gap the researchers deliberately left.
Do older adults need less sleep?
No. The seven or more hours figure applies to adults with no upper age limit. Older adults reliably get less sleep, which is a different statement from needing less, and the two are confused constantly.
Does it matter when I sleep, not just how long?
Yes, and the recommendations do not cover it because duration is what the evidence base measures. Regularity and timing both matter independently of total hours, which is why a steady seven hours often beats a variable eight.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- FeaturesSleep scoreThe sleep score is a single number for a night, sitting at the top of that night detail view. Underneath it are the parts that produced it, and across nights the insights cover 21 metrics in 7 groups plus long-run measures like sleep regularity and sleep debt.
- Sleep soundsDistant stormFar-off thunder helps at the start of the night because the slow rolling swells give your attention something easy to follow while it lets go, and it hurts later because every roll is a change in level, which is exactly what surfaces a light sleeper. Tock treats it as a fall-asleep aid and fades it out after half an hour by default.
- Tock for youNew parentsYou do not wake up to an alarm any more, you wake up to a small person, three or four times, and then you have to be a functioning adult by seven. The night is not so much short as it is in pieces.
- AlternativesTock vs RiseChoose Rise if planning your day around energy peaks and a running sleep debt is what actually changes your behaviour. Choose Tock if you want the alarm itself to be smarter, the night recorded from the phone, and a coach that can talk about what it heard.
- RoundupsThe best sleep apps for iPhone, sorted by what you're fixingFor iPhone, the best sleep app depends on the problem. Tock is the best all-round pick when the alarm and the morning are what is broken, Apple Health Sleep is the free place to start, Calm is for people who cannot fall asleep, AutoSleep is for Apple Watch owners, Rise is for sleep debt and SnoreLab is for snoring.
- Wake timesWaking up at 6:30amBedtimes by sleep cycle for a 6:30am alarm.
The number is easy. The nights are the hard part
Tock measures what you actually slept rather than how long you were in bed for, and wakes you at a lighter moment in the half hour before your alarm.