Here is the baby sleep schedule by age in the shortest possible form, before any of the explaining: a newborn sleeps 14 to 17 hours a day across four to six naps with wake windows of 45 to 90 minutes. By four months that has become 12 to 16 hours across three or four naps with wake windows of 1.5 to 2.5 hours. By eight months it is two naps and 2.5 to 3.5 hour wake windows. By twelve months most babies are heading toward a single afternoon nap and a stretch of 11 to 12 hours overnight. Everything below that first paragraph is elaboration on those four sentences.
I want to say the thing nobody said to me first, though. Back when my daughter was tiny and went looking for exactly this chart, I found about forty of them, and no two agreed. One said a six-month-old naps three times. Another said two. A third said it depends. That contradiction is not sloppiness on anyone's part — it is the actual state of the evidence. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine publish ranges for total sleep, not schedules, because the schedule part is genuinely individual.
So treat what follows as a map of the normal territory rather than a route you have to walk. The chart tells you whether your baby is somewhere inside the wide band of typical. It does not tell you that you failed if she naps twice at five months when the internet said three. If you want the version that adjusts to your own baby's morning wake-up time, the nap schedule calculator on the homepage does that arithmetic for you.
Your baby's day
4–6 months · typically 1 hr 30 min–2 hr 45 min awake between sleeps
- Morning wake7:00 AM
- awake 1 hr 52 minNap 1about 1 hr 28 min long8:52 AMto 10:20 AM
- awake 2 hr 5 minNap 2about 1 hr 28 min long12:25 PMto 1:53 PM
- awake 2 hr 18 minNap 3about 49 min long4:11 PMto 5:00 PM
- awake 2 hr 30 minBedtime7:30 PM
Three naps is typical. Short 30–45 minute naps are extremely common here and usually are not a problem to solve. These times are an estimate, not a prescription. Bedtime here is worked out by counting backward from your wake time — the method Cleveland Clinic recommends — so the day adds up to a full 24 hours. Wake windows themselves are not a medical consensus: no major body publishes them, and the ones that come closest disagree with each other. Your baby’s tired cues beat any clock. Use this as a starting shape and adjust.
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The master chart
This is the whole baby sleep schedule by age in one grid. Read it by column, not by row. The total sleep column comes from the American Academy of Sleep Medicine's consensus recommendations, which are published as ranges for a reason — a healthy four-month-old sleeping 12 hours and a healthy four-month-old sleeping 16 hours are both inside the recommendation. The wake window and nap count columns are what typical families land on in practice; they are not clinical standards and no professional body publishes them.
One structural note before you read it. Wake windows are not evenly sized across a day. The first one, from morning wake-up to first nap, is almost always the shortest of the day. The last one, from final nap to bedtime, is almost always the longest — often 30 to 60 minutes longer than the ranges below. If you apply the same number to every gap you will end up with a baby who is undertired in the morning and wrecked by evening.
The bedtime column assumes a morning wake-up somewhere between 6:00 and 7:30am. If your baby starts the day at 5:30am, shift everything earlier. If she starts at 8:30am, shift later. The clock times are downstream of when the day begins, not fixed points.
| Age | Total sleep / 24h | Naps | Wake window | Typical bedtime |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0-6 weeks | 14-17 hours | 4-6, irregular | 45-60 min | No fixed bedtime yet |
| 6-12 weeks | 14-17 hours | 4-5 | 60-90 min | 8:00-10:00pm, drifting earlier |
| 3-4 months | 12-16 hours | 3-4 | 1.5-2 hours | 7:00-8:30pm |
| 5-6 months | 12-16 hours | 3 | 2-2.5 hours | 6:30-7:30pm |
| 7-9 months | 12-16 hours | 2 | 2.5-3 hours | 6:30-7:30pm |
| 10-12 months | 11-14 hours | 2 | 3-3.5 hours | 6:30-7:30pm |
| 13-18 months | 11-14 hours | 1-2 | 3.5-5 hours | 7:00-8:00pm |
Why the numbers move so fast before six months
The reason the top half of that chart changes every few weeks and the bottom half barely moves at all is that two different biological things are happening.
Newborns do not have a circadian rhythm. Melatonin production and the body-clock machinery that entrains sleep to the light-dark cycle are not meaningfully running at birth; they come online across roughly the first three to four months. This is why a two-week-old's schedule looks random — it is random, in the sense that it is not anchored to the sun. Nothing you do with blackout curtains or bedtime routines in week two is going to install a rhythm that the brain has not built yet. What it does do is start the association work early, which is fine, just do not expect a result.
The second thing is sleep architecture. Young infants cycle between active and quiet sleep in roughly 50 to 60 minute blocks, considerably shorter than adult cycles. Around three to four months that immature two-stage pattern reorganizes into the more adult-like staged structure, with lighter arousals between cycles. This reorganization is the actual mechanism behind what parents call the four-month regression — nothing regressed, the architecture matured, and a baby who used to sleep straight through a cycle boundary now surfaces at it. Cleveland Clinic's overview of the first year describes this consolidation process in plain language if you want more detail.
By six months, both processes are largely done. That is why the schedule stabilizes: from six months to a year you are mostly watching wake windows stretch by half an hour every couple of months, rather than watching the whole structure rebuild itself.
- Weeks 0-8: no circadian anchor, sleep distributed almost evenly around the clock
- Weeks 8-16: day-night differentiation emerges, night stretches lengthen
- Months 3-4: sleep architecture reorganizes, cycle-boundary wakings appear
- Months 4-6: naps begin consolidating into a predictable three-then-two pattern
- Months 6-12: structure holds steady, wake windows lengthen gradually
When your baby does not match her row
The chart will be wrong for your baby at some point, and there are only a few reasons why. Working through them in order is faster than adjusting the schedule at random.
First, check the total, not the parts. If a seven-month-old naps only twice for 40 minutes each but sleeps 11.5 hours overnight, her 24-hour total is around 13 hours and she is inside the AASM range. The nap column is the flexible one. Short naps with a long solid night are a different situation from short naps with a fragmented night, and only the second one is a problem worth solving.
Second, check whether she is at the edge of a transition. Babies do not step cleanly from three naps to two. They spend two to six weeks in a state where some days need three and some need two, and on the three-nap days the third nap pushes bedtime too late while on the two-nap days the last wake window is brutally long. Both feel like the schedule broke. Neither is. The standard handling is to bridge with an early bedtime on two-nap days — 30 to 45 minutes earlier than usual — and accept the inconsistency for a few weeks.
Third, check whether the wake windows are distributed rather than uniform. As noted above, first window shortest, last window longest. A large share of the schedules that feel broken are actually a uniform wake window applied to a day that needs a graded one.
Fourth, and last, consider that she may simply be a lower-sleep-need or higher-sleep-need baby. The AASM ranges are four hours wide at some ages for exactly this reason. If your baby has been reliably at 12 hours total since four months, is alert and feeding well and growing along her curve, she is probably a 12-hour baby, and trying to force 15 will produce a lot of crying in a dark room and no extra sleep.
How to actually use an age chart without losing your mind
Three practical rules for using a baby sleep schedule by age without turning it into a source of anxiety, and then I will stop.
Use adjusted age if your baby was born early. A baby born at 34 weeks is developmentally closer to a two-month-old than a four-month-old at four months of chronological age. Sleep milestones — circadian onset, nap consolidation, night lengthening — track developmental age much more closely than they track birthdays. Adjust until roughly two years, which is what most pediatric guidance recommends for developmental expectations generally, and ask your pediatrician how they want you to handle it for your specific baby.
Anchor to morning wake-up, not to bedtime. This is the single most useful mechanical change most families can make. Pick a consistent morning start time within a 30-minute window, then build the day forward from it using wake windows. Bedtime becomes an output of the day rather than an input. If you set bedtime first and let the morning float, everything upstream drifts and you can never tell whether a bad night was caused by overtiredness or undertiredness.
And then change one thing at a time, with 72 hours between changes. Sleep responds slowly. If you move bedtime earlier, drop a nap, and start a new wind-down routine in the same week, you will have no idea which of the three helped or hurt. Most schedule changes need three to five days before the signal is readable through the noise. This is unbearably slow advice at 3am, and it is still correct.
If you want the month-by-month resolution rather than these broad age bands — what specifically changes at month seven versus month eight — the by-month breakdown goes finer. If it is the wake window arithmetic you keep getting stuck on, start there instead.
- Use adjusted age for babies born before 37 weeks
- Anchor the day to a consistent morning wake-up, not to bedtime
- Grade the wake windows: shortest first, longest last
- Change one variable, then wait 72 hours before judging it
- Judge the 24-hour total before judging any individual nap
Questions parents ask
At what age can a baby actually follow a schedule?
Meaningful predictability generally arrives somewhere between three and five months, because that is when circadian rhythm is established enough for the same routine to produce the same result twice. Before about eight weeks you are following the baby, not scheduling her — you can keep a consistent wind-down and consistent morning light exposure, but the timing will not hold. Between two and four months a loose rhythm emerges, usually first in the form of a longer, more reliable night stretch and a somewhat predictable first nap. Trying to enforce clock times before that tends to frustrate everyone without changing the outcome.
Should I wake my baby from a nap to protect the schedule?
Often yes, with two conditions. Capping naps is a reasonable tool once your baby is past the newborn stage and gaining weight normally — if a late-afternoon nap is going to run past the point where bedtime becomes impossible, waking her is usually the lesser problem. The two conditions: do not cap naps in the first several weeks unless your pediatrician has told you to wake for feeds, and do not cap the first nap of the day, which is typically the most restorative and the one that sets up the rest of the day. Cap the last nap first, the middle nap second, the morning nap essentially never.
Do wake windows or clock times matter more?
Wake windows matter more before about six months; clock times matter more after. Early on, sleep pressure builds and dissipates faster than the body clock can regulate it, so the interval since last waking is the better predictor of readiness. Once circadian rhythm is fully established and naps have consolidated to two, the clock becomes a genuinely useful anchor — a nine-month-old's body starts expecting a nap around the same time daily. Most families end up using both: wake windows to place naps, clock times as a sanity check that the day has not drifted.
My baby sleeps less than the chart says. Is something wrong?
Not necessarily. The AASM ranges are wide — four hours wide at some ages — precisely because individual sleep need varies substantially. The more informative signals are behavioral: is she generally content when awake, feeding well, hitting developmental milestones, and growing along her curve? A baby at the bottom of the range who is thriving on those measures is likely a low-sleep-need baby. A baby who is chronically irritable, hard to settle, and falling off her growth curve is a reason to call your pediatrician, regardless of what the hour count says.
How much does the schedule change when the third nap drops?
More than any other transition in the first year. Dropping to two naps removes an entire recovery point from the afternoon, which means the final wake window jumps from roughly two hours to roughly three or three and a half almost overnight. Most families handle the gap with a temporarily early bedtime — sometimes as early as 6:00pm — for two to four weeks while the wake windows stretch to fill the space. Expect an inconsistent stretch where some days still need the third nap. That inconsistency is the transition, not a sign it is going badly.
Does a later bedtime mean a later morning wake-up?
Usually not, and this surprises almost everyone. Morning wake time in infants is strongly circadian — governed by the body clock rather than by how long the baby has been asleep — so pushing bedtime later frequently produces the same early wake-up plus a shorter, more fragmented night. The counterintuitive fix for a persistent early morning is often an earlier bedtime, because overtiredness raises the odds of an early final waking. It does not work for every baby, but it is the first thing worth trying before the later-bedtime approach.
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Written by
Sukie Gao
Mom of a daughter, and the person behind every tool on this site.
Sukie Gao has a daughter, and when her daughter was a newborn she was exhausted and completely out of her depth. She spent months piecing together sleep advice from scattered corners of the internet, and built My Baby Sleep Schedule so the next tired mother would not have to search as hard. She writes as a parent from lived experience, not as a clinician.
Last reviewed and updated . Sukie is a parent, not a clinician — check anything that matters with your pediatrician.