Baby Sleep Chart by Age – How much sleep is Normal?

Do you want to find out how much your baby should sleep? Then this baby sleep chart is for you.

I have used the best scientific studies to put together this interactive baby sleep chart. I hope this gives you an easy and accurate way to check the average hours of sleep for your baby at different ages.

One of the first steps when trying to solve a sleep problem is to check a sleep chart and make sure your baby is sleeping a normal amount.

Perhaps you believe that your baby needs to sleep for longer than what is normal. You might be allowing too many naps during the day or it could be that you put your baby to bed too early in the evening.

This, in combination with not having the basics in place, such as a dark bedroom and a good bedtime routine, leads to problems for your baby to fall asleep. It is also likely to cause early morning awakening.

It is, therefore important for you to know how many hours a baby sleeps and naps for.

Number of Naps and Night Time Feeds

Evidence-based baby sleep chart

It is easy to think that most baby sleep charts that you come across are correct and based on science. This is very often not the case.

Most charts are based on guessing and the opinion of the “sleep expert”. They often overestimate the average sleep time by a few hours. This gives parents unrealistic expectations.

I have, for example, seen charts that recommended that a 12-month-old sleeps for 16 hours. The research that I have based my baby sleep chart on tells us that the average is 13.5 hours.

In short, be very skeptical of the baby sleep charts you find if the author can’t provide a good source.

The two best scientific studies that I have come across are:

“Children’s sleep patterns from 0-9 years: Australian population longitudinal study, Price AMH, Brown JE, Bittman M 2013”
and
“Sleep Duration From Infancy to Adolescence: Reference Values and Generation Trends, Iglowstein I, Oskar G, Jenni, Luciano Molinari, Remo H Largo 2003”

My baby sleep chart is based on them and shows the average time a baby sleeps.

The gauges above display a mix of sleep times from the two studies. I have done this in order to be able to show times for all of the months.

The table with naps and night time feeds are based on my own experience and research. It is also in agreement with what most experts recommend, e.g. Rachel at mybabysleepguide.com.

How to compare the result with your baby’s sleep.

To put the information in this article to good use you first need to know how much your baby sleeps.

I recommend grabbing a pencil and a piece of paper and take notes for a few days and nights.

1. Write down when your baby goes to sleep, wakes up and has a feed during the night.
2. Then calculate how long each episode of sleep was.
3. Add both the night time sleep episodes and the daytime naps together to find out the total sleep over 24 hours. In my example below, it adds up to 13 hours.
4. Add up the naps to find out the total time napping.
5. Count the number of feeds during the night.
6. Finally, count the number of daytime naps.

Something like this:

You are now ready to compare your baby’s sleep with the average sleep of babies of the same age. So how much sleep does an 8 month old need?

Conclusion

There are no studies on what the perfect amount of sleep is so the only way to know if your child sleeps healthily is to compare it to other babies’ sleep. Other factors like whether your baby uses a co-sleeper and the sound and light in the environment also come into play.

Babies have individual needs and the number of hours a baby needs to sleep varies greatly. Studies have for example shown that breastfed babies sleep less vs. formula fed babies. The same goes for co-sleeping babies; They sleep less than babies in their own cot.

If your little one sleeps plus or minus 1 hour of the average time, then the sleep is within the normal range.

Is my baby sleeping too much?
If your baby sleeps more than the average, then you are doing a good job. There is usually no reason to be concerned about too much sleep as long as your baby feeds and grows well.

It is, however, a good idea to try to figure out the reason if your baby sleeps less than the average in this baby sleep chart. Make sure you have the basics in place – set routines, a dark bedroom and why not use some white noise to help your baby sleeps. Baby massage can also be a huge help to relax your baby and make her sleep for longer.

How does your baby sleep compared to the average? Leave a comment below!