Sleep by age
How much sleep does a school-age child need?
Children aged six to twelve need 9 to 12 hours a night. This is the first band given per night rather than per 24 hours, and the first where somebody else decides what time the morning starts.
In short
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children aged 6 to 12 years sleep 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. By this age sleep has consolidated into the night, so the figure is effectively a nightly one and the bedtime has to be counted backwards from the school run.
- Hours per night
- 9 to 12Hours per nightAASM, ages 6 to 12
- Typical fixed wake time
- 7 amTypical fixed wake timeSchool decides, not the family
- Lights out for 11 hours
- 8 pmLights out for 11 hoursEarlier than most households assume
School-age children, 6 to 12 years
9 to 12hours per night
As published by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine in its consensus statement on recommended sleep duration. Quoted as a range because that is how it was issued: healthy sleepers in this band sit across the whole span, and a single number would be us inventing a precision the evidence does not have.
Count backwards, because the morning is fixed now
This is the age where sleep stops being something that happens and becomes something scheduled, because school sets the wake time and nothing about it responds to how the night went. The only remaining variable is when the light goes off, and the arithmetic is unforgiving once you actually do it.
A 7am wake and the middle of the recommended range, ten and a half hours, puts lights out at 8:15pm, plus however long the child takes to fall asleep. Most families discover that number is an hour earlier than the bedtime they have, and the gap is not made up anywhere else.
The same backwards arithmetic for adults is at /wake-up-at, and the forwards version at /sleep-at.
Short sleep at this age does not look like sleepiness
An adult who is short on sleep is visibly tired. A child who is short on sleep is frequently the opposite: restless, irritable, difficult to settle, and harder to focus. That mismatch is why insufficient sleep at this age is often read as a behaviour or attention problem first and a sleep problem second.
This is stated as a pattern rather than a diagnosis, and the distinction matters. Nothing on this page can tell you which one you are looking at, and an app certainly cannot. What it can do is remove the guesswork from the one measurable input, which is how many hours the child is actually getting rather than how many the schedule allows for.
The hour before bed is doing most of the work
The gap between lights out and asleep is the part of the schedule nobody budgets for and the part most affected by what happened just before. Bright light late in the evening delays melatonin, and homework or a screen in the last hour reliably lengthens how long falling asleep takes.
That is the same mechanism adults deal with, and the practical version of it is set out at /glossary/blue-light and in the routine at /features/wind-down. Neither of those is a child product, and the physiology behind them does not change with age.
What is actually different at this age
The total is the headline. These are the things that change underneath it, and they are usually what somebody is really asking about.
What changes
- The wake time stops being negotiable, so every adjustment now has to happen at the bedtime end.
- Naps are out of the recommendation entirely, and a child this age napping regularly is usually short at night.
- Screens and homework start competing for the hour before bed, which is the hour that decides how long falling asleep takes.
Where an app stops being the right tool
Stated plainly rather than buried, because a sleep app writing about sleep has an obvious incentive not to.
Limits worth knowing
- Tock is an adult app on an adult phone. It is not a child monitor and nothing about it is designed for a child to use.
- A phone cannot tell one sleeper from another in a shared room.
- Ongoing trouble sleeping, snoring or daytime sleepiness in a child is a conversation for a doctor. It is not something to interpret from an app.
Tock estimates sleep and is not a medical device. Nothing here is medical advice, a diagnosis, or a substitute for one. If sleep is genuinely not working, that is a conversation for a doctor rather than for an app or an article.
Questions people ask
How many hours of sleep does a 10 year old need?
The American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends 9 to 12 hours per 24 hours for children aged 6 to 12. With a 7am wake time, the middle of that range means lights out somewhere around 8:15pm, plus the time it takes to fall asleep.
What time should a school-age child go to bed?
Count backwards from the wake time the school run fixes. For a 7am start and ten and a half hours of sleep, that is about 8:15pm plus twenty minutes or so to fall asleep. The exact figure depends on where in the 9 to 12 hour range your child sits.
Is my child not sleeping enough or just badly behaved?
This page cannot answer that and neither can an app. What is worth knowing is that insufficient sleep in children often presents as restlessness, irritability and poor focus rather than as obvious tiredness, so the two can look similar. Persistent concerns belong with a doctor.
Other age bands
The same consensus statement, read for a different age.
- How much sleep preschoolers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that children aged 3 to 5 years sleep 10 to 13 hours per 24 hours, including naps, on a regular basis. This is the final band where daytime sleep counts toward the total; from age 6 the figures are given per night.
- How much sleep teenagers needThe American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommends that teenagers aged 13 to 18 years sleep 8 to 10 hours per 24 hours on a regular basis. The obstacle is a genuine biological shift: the adolescent circadian rhythm runs later, so a teenager cannot reliably fall asleep at the time an early school start requires.
Elsewhere on the site
A different corner of the same problem.
- Wake tonesBeaconBeacon is a wake tone in Tock: an evenly spaced two-note pulse that your ear identifies as an alarm almost immediately. Tock's alarms are built on Apple's AlarmKit, so Beacon rings on the native full-screen alert even when the phone is on silent, sitting in a Focus, or the app hasn't been opened since last night.
- Head to headRise vs SleepScoreIf you will genuinely change your bedtime because an app asked you to, Rise is the more useful of the two. If you want the night measured properly without wearing anything, SleepScore.
- FeaturesWidgetsTock puts tonight outside the app: 3 Home Screen widgets, Lock Screen and StandBy accessories, 3 Control Center tiles, 8 Live Activities, Siri App Shortcuts, 4 quick actions on the icon and a Focus filter.
- Sleep soundsFanA fan makes broadband noise from air turbulence plus a very quiet periodic thump from the blades, sitting somewhere between pink and brown in balance, which is why so many people sleep to one without ever calling it white noise. Tock uses a recording of an actual fan rather than generating it, because that blade rhythm is the thing that makes it read as a fan at all.
- 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 SnoreLabSnoreLab is better if snoring is the only thing you care about and you want a remedy-tracking loop and a score you can show someone. Tock is better if you want the snoring inside a full night, with the alarm, the estimated stages and the score in one app instead of two running overnight.
Knowing the number is the easy half
Hitting it is the other one. Tock measures what you actually got rather than what the schedule allowed for, and wakes you at a lighter moment inside the last half hour.