How much sleep do I need? The complete range by age

Most adults need 7–9 hours a night, teenagers 8–10, and school-age children 9–11. Those are ranges, not averages — your own number sits somewhere inside your band and barely moves for decades. The table below covers every age group, including the hours that are borderline and the hours that aren't enough.

How much sleep do I need, by age band

The most-cited sleep requirements by age come from the National Sleep Foundation's duration recommendations, which do something useful: instead of one number per age, they publish three ranges. A recommended window that suits most people, an outer window that may still be appropriate for some, and a range that isn't appropriate for anyone in the band. For children under about five, the totals include naps. For everyone older, read them as nighttime sleep.

Age band	Recommended	May be appropriate	Not recommended
Newborn (0–3 months)	14–17 h	11–13 h or 18–19 h	Under 11 h, over 19 h
Infant (4–11 months)	12–15 h	10–11 h or 16–18 h	Under 10 h, over 18 h
Toddler (1–2 years)	11–14 h	9–10 h or 15–16 h	Under 9 h, over 16 h
Preschool (3–5 years)	10–13 h	8–9 h or 14 h	Under 8 h, over 14 h
School age (6–13 years)	9–11 h	7–8 h or 12 h	Under 7 h, over 12 h
Teen (14–17 years)	8–10 h	7 h or 11 h	Under 7 h, over 11 h
Young adult (18–25 years)	7–9 h	6 h or 10–11 h	Under 6 h, over 11 h
Adult (26–64 years)	7–9 h	6 h or 10 h	Under 6 h, over 10 h
Older adult (65+ years)	7–8 h	5–6 h or 9 h	Under 5 h, over 9 h

Pediatric guidance from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, cuts the bands slightly differently — 12–16 hours for infants 4–12 months including naps, 11–14 hours for ages 1–2, 10–13 for 3–5, 9–12 for 6–12, and 8–10 for 13–18 — and declines to name a figure for babies under four months, because the evidence there is too thin. Where the two sets disagree, they disagree at the edges, not in the middle.

What "may be appropriate" actually means

People search "how much sleep do I need" expecting one number, and the three-column structure is the honest reply. The recommended range is where the evidence holds for most people in that band. The middle column is real individual variation: defensible for some, but thinner ground. The third column marks durations associated with worse outcomes across the board.

The trap is mistaking familiar for fine. Six hours can feel survivable because chronic restriction dulls your sense of how impaired you are — how sleepy you rate yourself levels off while reaction time and sustained attention keep sliding. Feeling okay on six hours is weak evidence that you need six hours. True short sleepers, who run well on five or six because of a rare genetic variant, do exist, but they're uncommon enough that assuming you're one is a bad bet.

How much sleep does a teenager need

Eight to ten hours, and the school schedule usually makes that arithmetic impossible. Puberty pushes circadian timing later: melatonin release shifts toward the late evening and sleep pressure builds more slowly, so a 15-year-old sent to bed at 9:30 often can't fall asleep, screens or no screens. Wake time, meanwhile, is set by the bus.

Run the numbers. A 6:15 alarm with the eight-hour floor means asleep by 10:15 and in bed before 10:00 — every night, homework included. That gap is why the American Academy of Pediatrics has recommended since 2014 that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m., and why some states and districts have since moved their bells later. The long weekend lie-in most teenagers take isn't laziness. It's a debt payment.

How much sleep do adults need as they age

Recommended hours of sleep by age barely shrink across adult life: 7–9 from 18 through 64, then 7–8 at 65 and over. That's a one-hour trim at the top of the range after five decades.

What changes is the sleep itself. Slow-wave sleep — the deep stretch early in the night — declines steadily from young adulthood onward. Awakenings become more frequent and longer, so the gap between time in bed and time asleep widens. Circadian phase advances as well, which is why sleepiness arrives earlier in the evening and waking arrives earlier than anyone asked for.

The result is more clock time in bed to bank the same night's sleep. The requirement didn't drop; the efficiency did. Reading "I sleep less than I used to" as "I need less than I used to" is the most common misreading of sleep needs by age.

Finding your own number inside the band

Each adult band is two hours wide, which is a lot of room. Three ways to locate yourself in it.

The no-alarm stretch

Keep a fixed bedtime, drop the alarm, and hold it for ten to fourteen days — a vacation works best. The first several mornings will run long, because you're clearing accumulated debt. By the second week your natural wake time settles, and the interval you're sleeping then is your number. Write the times down; memory rounds toward whatever you expected to see.

The weekday–weekend gap

If you sleep more than an hour longer on free days than on work days, week after week, your weekday schedule is shorter than your requirement. The size of that gap is the measurement.

Daytime evidence

Falling asleep in under five minutes at lights-out looks like efficiency and usually signals debt; typical onset runs roughly 10–20 minutes. The same goes for needing an alarm every single day, going under in a warm quiet room mid-afternoon well past the ordinary post-lunch dip, or leaning on caffeine after noon to hold a normal day together. If you're consistently hitting your number and still sleepy, that's worth raising with a doctor rather than solving with more hours.

Add the overhead

Your number is sleep, not time in bed. Falling asleep plus normal night awakenings costs most people 20–30 minutes, so a 7.5-hour target needs roughly 8 hours of opportunity to actually land.

Turning your number into a bedtime

Fix the wake time first — it's the anchor, and the harder end to move. Then subtract your number plus the overhead, and what you get is a bedtime rather than an intention. A 6:30 wake with a 7.5-hour need puts you asleep by 11:00 and in bed around 10:30. Holding that seven nights a week instead of five is the whole point of a sleep schedule.

The hard part isn't the subtraction, it's noticing 10:30 while you're mid-episode. That's the job of Bedtime Reminder, a bedtime reminder app for iPhone — enough to turn a number you calculated once into something that interrupts you at the right moment.

FAQ

Is 6 hours of sleep enough for an adult?

For nearly everyone, no. Six hours sits in the "may be appropriate" column for adults 18–64, meaning it falls outside the range that suits most people and is defensible only for a minority. Below six hours, you're in the not-recommended range for every adult age up to 65 — the 65-plus band's floor is a notch lower, at five hours.

How many hours of sleep do I need if I'm over 65?

Seven to eight. The recommended band for 65-plus is only an hour narrower at the top than a younger adult's, even though the sleep tends to be lighter and more broken. Time in bed often has to be longer to reach the same total.

Do naps count toward the recommended hours of sleep by age?

For infants, toddlers and preschoolers, yes — those totals are 24-hour figures that include daytime sleep. From school age upward the guidance describes the main sleep period, so a nap is extra rather than a replacement for a short night.

Can you sleep too much?

The bands do cap the top end: over 10 hours for adults 26–64, over 9 for 65-plus. Long sleep is more often a marker of something else — illness, or nights so fragmented that eleven hours in bed yields seven hours of sleep — than a problem on its own. Regularly needing far more than your band is worth a conversation with a doctor.

How long does it take to recover from a week of short sleep?

Longer than one weekend. A single long night restores much of how alert you feel, while measures of attention and reaction time can take several consecutive nights of full sleep to return. Recovery is easier to spread across a normal week than to cram into a Saturday.