29 September 2025 · Roshni Mahtani Cheung
Cofounder, Little Rei · Mother of one
Is My Baby Getting Enough Sleep?
Almost every parent asks this in the same week. They've downloaded an app, added up the day, and found a number that looks lower than the one in the article they read. The total counts for much less than most sources imply, and the published ranges are wide because babies differ, not because nobody has measured properly.
How much sleep does a baby need by age?
These are the consensus 24-hour ranges, day and night added together, used by paediatric sleep bodies. Treat them as the middle of a distribution and never as a target to hit.
| Age | Total sleep | Naps | Longest stretch |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-3 months | 14-17 hours | 4-6, irregular | 2-4 hours |
| 4-6 months | 12-16 hours | 3, settling into a pattern | 5-8 hours |
| 6-9 months | 12-15 hours | 2–3 | 6-10 hours |
| 9-12 months | 12-15 hours | 2 | 8-11 hours |
| 1-2 years | 11-14 hours | 1–2 | 9-12 hours |
| 3-5 years | 10-13 hours | 0–1 | 10-12 hours |
The width is the point. At six months, one baby sleeping twelve hours and another sleeping fifteen are both entirely normal, and the difference between them is roughly a fifth of the day. If your baby is consistently outside the range in either direction, talk to your doctor, but the bottom of the range isn't a problem to be fixed.
Why the total is a poor measure on its own
Two babies on the same daily total can be in entirely different situations, which is exactly the reason the number reassures nobody who looks it up at midnight.
- Nobody counts accurately. Parent-reported totals routinely differ from device-measured ones by an hour or more in both directions, because the gaps at the edges of a nap are invisible from outside the room.
- Sleep isn't banked evenly. A baby can get a low total on Tuesday, a high one on Wednesday, and average out fine across the week. Judging on a single day makes almost every baby look under-slept.
- Night waking isn't the same as sleep loss. A baby who wakes four times and resettles in two minutes each time has lost eight minutes. A baby who wakes twice and is up for forty minutes has lost far more.
- Growth spurts, teeth, illness and development all move the number temporarily. A fortnight is a better unit of judgement than a night.
Elsewhere on sleep
The number gave me something to fail at
For a while I logged all of it. Every nap, every waking, in an app, on the theory that if I could see the number I'd know whether we had a real problem, and what the number gave me was something to fail at. Shan slept less than the chart said she should, most days, and every time I opened the app it told me so again. She was feeding well, and she was gaining. She was alert between naps and perfectly happy in the daytime. Every single thing that counts was fine, and I couldn't see any of it past a total that was a couple of hours short of a printed average.
I deleted the app. Of everything I tried that year, that's the intervention that worked fastest.
The signs that tell you
A baby getting enough sleep, over a normal week, mostly looks like this:
- Wakes on their own more often than not, and doesn't always need waking.
- Is alert and sociable for most of the awake window, with the grizzly patch arriving near the end of it and not the start.
- Feeds well and is gaining weight along their own curve.
- Settles for naps without a long fight most days.
- Is recognisably themselves by mid-morning, not still bleary an hour after waking.
The signs pointing the other way, which need acting on even if the total looks fine on paper:
- Fighting every nap, then falling asleep instantly in the car or pram: a classic overtiredness signature.
- Waking after exactly one sleep cycle, repeatedly, and not resettling.
- Early-morning waking that has crept earlier across weeks, and not days.
- Sudden clinginess or a shorter fuse with no other explanation.
- Falling asleep during feeds well past the newborn weeks.
If you want one figure to work with, use the awake window, how long a baby comfortably stays up between sleeps, not the daily total. It's the lever you can pull, since overshooting it by twenty minutes is the most common cause of a bedtime that has suddenly become hard for reasons nobody in the house can name. I may be wrong about most, though it was certainly ours.
| Age | Awake window |
|---|---|
| 0-6 weeks | 45-60 minutes |
| 2-3 months | 1-1.5 hours |
| 4-6 months | 1.5-2.5 hours |
| 6-9 months | 2-3 hours |
| 9-12 months | 3-4 hours |
| 12-18 months | 4-6 hours |
Watch the baby and not the clock. These are starting points, and a baby who's happy and calm at the top of the range doesn't need to be put down because a number says so.
Sleep questions are mostly reassurance questions, which is not a criticism, because reassurance is the thing you need at four in the morning. A few patterns need a professional, and an internet search won't do: snoring, mouth-breathing or pauses in breathing during sleep; a baby who's persistently difficult to rouse; weight gain that has flattened; or sleep that has deteriorated sharply and stayed that way for more than a couple of weeks without an obvious cause. Trust the instinct that something is off, which counts for more than it is given credit for.
This guide is general information, written to help you understand a topic and ask better questions. It is not medical advice and does not replace your own doctor, midwife or paediatrician. Anything that worries you about your baby belongs with them.