How Much Sleep Does a Baby Need?
Last updated: October 2026 · Written by Olivia Mackintosh, Level 6 Paediatric Sleep Practitioner
"How much sleep does my baby need?" is one of the most common questions parents ask, and it's a good one. The National Sleep Foundation publishes guidelines on sleep duration by age group, and they're a useful reference point. But look a little closer at those recommendations and you'll notice something important: the ranges are wide. Very wide. And that tells you something fundamental about baby sleep that most generic advice ignores.
The National Sleep Foundation Recommendations
The National Sleep Foundation's 2025 guidelines recommend the following total sleep per 24 hours:
Newborns (0–3 months): 14 to 17 hours
Infants (4–11 months): 12 to 15 hours
Toddlers (1–2 years): 11 to 14 hours
Preschoolers (3–5 years): 10 to 13 hours
The foundation also notes that slightly more or less may be appropriate for some children, extending those ranges further still.
What Those Ranges Actually Tell Us
Take infants as an example. The recommended range is 12 to 15 hours; a three-hour difference between the lower and upper end of what's considered normal and healthy. For a baby who needs 12 hours, that might look like 11 hours overnight and one hour of naps. For a baby who needs 15 hours, that's a completely different routine; more nap time, potentially a longer night, a different bedtime altogether.
Put those two babies side by side and give them the same routine, and one of them is going to struggle. Not because anything is wrong with them, but because the routine was built for a different sleep need. If every baby of a given age needed roughly the same amount of sleep, the recommended ranges would be narrow. They're not, and that's the point.
This is the problem with following a generic online routine or a wake-window chart. Those tools are built around the middle of the range and your baby could sit anywhere within it. This is also exactly why I don't use age-based averages as the foundation for the families I work with.
So Where Does Your Baby Sit?
The only reliable way to find out is to track it. By logging your baby's actual sleep over at least five days and averaging the total, you get a number that belongs to your baby specifically, not to the average of their age group. That number is then the foundation for building their routine, rather than a chart that was never designed with your baby in mind.
I cover exactly how to do this, step by step, in How to Calculate Your Baby's Sleep Need and Build a Routine Around It. And if you'd like to understand why getting this right matters so much before you attempt any sleep training, Why You Must Calculate Sleep Need Before Sleep Training explains the connection in full.
The Takeaway
The National Sleep Foundation recommendations are a helpful reference, but their most useful feature isn't the numbers themselves; it's the width of the ranges. That width is the proof that sleep need is individual, and that any approach to baby sleep that doesn't account for your specific baby's needs is always going to be an imperfect fit.