How Much Sleep Do I Need by Age?

Quick lookup by age

Type an age and get the published range for that band. It is a pure lookup — the tool restates published recommendations and adds nothing on top:

The short answer

For a healthy adult aged 18–60, the consensus recommendation from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM) and the Sleep Research Society is 7 or more hours per night — a floor, not a band. For teenagers (13–18), the published range is 8–10 hours. For school-age children (6–12), it is 9–12 hours. Younger children need more still, and the youngest bands count naps toward the total. The full chart, band by band, lives on our sleep hours by age reference page, and the ranges there are restated from the CDC's sleep pages, which in turn cite the underlying consensus statements.

If you take nothing else from this page: those numbers are consensus recommendations for populations. They are the ranges that expert panels, reviewing the available evidence, published as reasonable targets for people in each age band. They were never meant to be a pass/fail line for any individual night — or any individual person.

Why ranges, not one number

Sleep need is like shoe size: strongly patterned, but spread across a range, and nobody's foot reads the average exactly. The expert panels behind the published figures looked at what happens across populations at different durations and drew bands where the evidence supported a recommendation. Within a band, individuals differ — one healthy 34-year-old may settle at 7¼ hours and feel fine while another needs a full 8. Both are inside the recommendation; neither is doing it wrong.

A second reason ranges are honest: duration is only one dimension of how sleep actually goes. Two people can spend identical hours in bed and have very different nights — one sleeps straight through, the other wakes three times. Published duration recommendations deliberately sidestep sleep quality, because it is much harder to measure and standardize. A diary sidesteps it too, but at least it shows you your own wakings instead of hiding them.

Finally, the recommendation for an age band is not a claim about what every person in that band needs. It is closer to a reference range on a lab form: most people sit inside it, people sit outside it for all sorts of reasons, and being outside it is information to look at, not a verdict in itself.

Reading each age band

Adults (18–60): 7 or more hours

The adult figure is published as a floor. The AASM and Sleep Research Society consensus statement recommended at least 7 hours for healthy adults, and the CDC page summarizes it exactly that way. Practically, most adults land between 7 and 9. The floor framing matters: it tells you where the published consensus stops making a positive recommendation downward, not an optimum everyone should chase upward toward.

Teenagers (13–18): 8–10 hours

Teen sleep is the band where biology and schedules argue most. The published range runs 8–10 hours, and adolescent body clocks tend to shift later — a well-documented developmental pattern. A teen sleeping 10 p.m.–6:30 a.m. logs 8.5 hours and sits comfortably inside the range; one sleeping midnight–6:30 does not, no matter how normal that schedule feels socially. The social jetlag guide covers exactly this gap between body clock and alarm clock.

School-age children (6–12): 9–12 hours

From age 6 the recommendation refers to overnight sleep — naps are no longer counted, and most children this age have dropped them anyway. The band is wide (9–12) because this is the stretch of childhood where individual variation is at its most visible: two same-age classmates can both be entirely typical at 9.5 and 11 hours respectively.

Preschool and under: 10–17 hours, naps included

The youngest bands have the highest numbers and the widest bands, and they count total sleep in 24 hours — overnight sleep plus naps. A toddler who sleeps 10 hours at night and 2 at daycare logs 12, inside the 11–14 band. This is also the band where parents most often compare their child to others' children; the range exists partly to reassure that both the 10-hour toddler and the 13-hour toddler can be doing just fine.

Older adults (61–64: 7–9; 65+: 7–8)

The consensus figures for older adults come from the National Sleep Foundation's age-band table and sit slightly tighter than the general adult floor. Common experience adds a wrinkle the numbers can't capture: sleep in later decades often fragments into more, shorter segments — earlier bedtimes, earlier wakings, an afternoon nap reappearing. The band still describes total nightly sleep, and how an individual's nights assemble themselves is a pattern worth observing rather than correcting on paper.

Measuring your own nights

The chart gives you the reference; your own number takes two weeks of logging. The method is almost embarrassingly simple, which is exactly why sleep clinics have used paper diaries for decades:

• Each morning, write down when you went to bed, when you got up, how many times you remember waking, and a one-word impression of how rested you feel.
• Keep it up for two weeks. A single night is an anecdote; fourteen rows are a pattern.
• Read the hours-in-bed column against the range for your age. Remember the gap: hours in bed counts the whole window, including the minutes spent falling asleep and awake at night.
• Look for your own typical, not your best or worst night. The rows that stand out usually have a story — travel, a deadline, a sick kid — and they belong to the story, not the pattern.

You can do this on paper with our free printable sleep diary or fill the same rows in your browser — entries stay on your device either way. The how-to guide walks through each column, and if your rows turn out to swing wildly from day to day, the schedule consistency self-check is built for exactly that reading.

One boundary worth keeping: comparing yourself to the chart is observation, not diagnosis. The ranges say nothing about what your nights mean for your health — that interpretation belongs to you and, where it matters, to a professional who can see the whole picture. If you bring a completed diary to that conversation, you arrive with organized data instead of vague recollections.

A worked comparison

Here is what combining the chart with a diary looks like on a real (sample) week. Say you are 40, so the published figure for your band is 7 or more hours. Your diary rows for a typical week read:

Sample data, for illustration only — not stored anywhere.

Reading it against the chart: six of seven nights sit at or above the published floor, one dips under. Bedtimes drift about 90 minutes from Wednesday to Saturday, and wake times drift further — the weekend rows are doing most of the moving. That is a complete, honest description of the week: mostly within the recommendation, one short night, a visibly sliding schedule. What it means — whether to act, what to change, whether to mention it to anyone — stays with you, or with a professional you choose to show it to. The chart and the diary together produced the description; neither produced a verdict.

Common questions

Where these numbers come from

The age-band figures restated on this site trace to three consensus publications: the National Sleep Foundation's 2015 recommendations, the AASM's 2016 pediatric consensus, and the 2015 joint statement from the AASM and Sleep Research Society on adult sleep duration. The CDC sleep pages summarize all three with links to the originals, and that is the reference this site verifies against. Our chart page carries the source list and its last-verified date.