How much sleep do you need by age?

A clear, age-by-age chart of recommended sleep — and how to turn it into the right bedtime tonight.

How much sleep you need changes a lot across your life. The ranges below are the widely cited recommendations from the National Sleep Foundation's expert consensus — they're the same guidelines clinicians and sleep trackers reference.

Stage	Age	Recommended sleep
Newborn	0–3 months	14–17 hrs
Infant	4–11 months	12–15 hrs
Toddler	1–2 years	11–14 hrs
Preschool	3–5 years	10–13 hrs
School-age	6–13 years	9–11 hrs
Teen	14–17 years	8–10 hrs
Young adult	18–25 years	7–9 hrs
Adult	26–64 years	7–9 hrs
Older adult	65+ years	7–8 hrs

How to read these numbers

They're ranges, not targets. Some healthy adults do fine at 7 hours; others need a full 9. Where you fall is partly genetic.
Quality counts as much as quantity. Fragmented sleep at 8 hours can leave you worse off than solid sleep at 7.
Consistency matters most. A steady sleep and wake time keeps your body clock aligned, which makes the hours you do get more restorative.

Quick way to apply it: pick a wake time you can keep every day, subtract your age-appropriate sleep need, then add ~15 minutes to fall asleep. That's your target bedtime. The calculator does this for you and aligns it to complete sleep cycles.

Why waking mid-cycle feels awful

Sleep runs in roughly 90-minute cycles. Wake up in the middle of deep sleep and you get that groggy, drugged feeling (sleep inertia). Wake at the end of a cycle and you feel clearer — even on the same total hours. That's the whole idea behind a sleep-cycle calculator.

Calculate my ideal bedtime