Baby Sleep Schedule by Month: Sample Days for Months 1 Through 12

Before the charts: three things that make them usable

Wake windows are graded, not uniform. Across essentially every month below, the gap between morning wake-up and first nap is the shortest of the day, and the gap between the last nap and bedtime is the longest — often 30 to 60 minutes longer than the day's average. Applying one number to every gap is the most common reason a schedule that looks right on paper produces a baby who fights the first nap and melts down before the last one.

The day is built forward from morning wake-up. Bedtime is the output. If you fix bedtime and let the morning float, you lose the ability to diagnose anything, because a rough night could equally be overtiredness or undertiredness and you will not be able to tell which.

Naps get capped from the back. When a day is running long and something has to give, shorten the last nap first, the middle nap second, and leave the first nap alone. The morning nap tends to be the most restorative and the one that structures everything downstream.

And use adjusted age if your baby arrived before 37 weeks. Sleep development tracks weeks since conception far more closely than weeks since birth. A baby born at 33 weeks will generally sit two months behind the chronological chart for most of the first year, and that is expected rather than delayed.

Month 1: there is no schedule, and that is the correct answer

A one-month-old has no circadian rhythm. The body-clock machinery that ties sleep to the light-dark cycle is not meaningfully running yet, and will not be for another two to three months. Sleep is distributed almost evenly around the clock in stretches of roughly two to four hours, driven by hunger and by sleep pressure that builds and releases very fast.

What this means practically: do not schedule. Feed on demand, watch for the 45-to-60-minute wake window, and put her down before she is visibly overtired. The AAP's newborn guidance is that most newborns need to eat every two to three hours, and sleep organizes itself around that. Anything you impose on top will be overwritten by the feeding cycle within a day.

The things worth doing in month one are not schedule things. Get her into bright natural light in the morning and keep evenings dim — this is the input the circadian system will eventually use, even though it produces no visible result yet. Keep a short, identical wind-down before night sleep. Both are deposits toward months three and four.

Month 2: the first long stretch shows up

Somewhere in month two, most babies produce their first genuinely long night stretch — four, sometimes five hours. It usually happens once, then does not happen again for two weeks, which is its own particular cruelty. This is not a schedule forming. It is the night stretch beginning to consolidate ahead of the circadian system coming online.

Wake windows stretch to roughly 60 to 90 minutes. Total sleep is still in the 14-to-17-hour band. The visible change is that daytime alertness lengthens: she is awake and actually looking at things rather than awake and eating.

The useful move in month two is starting a consistent bedtime anchor even though bedtime itself is still late and unstable — often 9:00 or 10:00pm. Pick the point in the evening where she settles into her longest stretch and treat that as bedtime, running the same short routine before it. Over the following six to eight weeks that anchor drifts earlier on its own, and by month three or four it lands somewhere around 7:30pm without you having to force it.

Month 3: day and night finally mean something

This is the month the chart starts to be worth printing. Melatonin production and circadian entrainment come online across roughly months three to four, and the practical result is that the same routine at the same time begins producing the same outcome — which was simply not true in month one.

Naps consolidate to four, occasionally three. Wake windows land at 90 minutes to two hours. Bedtime pulls meaningfully earlier, commonly into the 7:30 to 8:30pm window, and the last catnap of the day starts to disappear.

Month three is also when a morning wake-up time becomes worth defending. Pick a 30-minute window — say 6:45 to 7:15am — and wake her if she is past the top of it. A fixed morning is the anchor the whole rest of the day hangs from, and it is much easier to install now than at month six.

Month 4: everything you built comes apart, on schedule

Month four is the one people warn you about, and the warning is accurate but the framing is wrong. Nothing regresses. Around three to four months, infant sleep architecture reorganizes from the immature two-state pattern into a more adult-like staged structure, with light arousals between cycles. A baby who previously slept straight through a cycle boundary now surfaces at it, every 45 to 60 minutes, and if she cannot get back down without help she will call for you at each one.

The schedule implication is that naps often shorten to a single cycle — the notorious 45-minute nap — and night wakings multiply. Total sleep drops toward the bottom of the 12-to-16-hour range for a few weeks.

What actually helps is boring: keep wake windows slightly shorter than you think while sleep is fragmented, protect the first nap, and consider an earlier bedtime to offset the lost daytime sleep. What does not help is chasing the schedule around, which is what I did for far too long. This is a developmental passage of two to six weeks, not a problem with your day.

Months 5 and 6: three naps and a day you can plan around

This is the calmest stretch of the first year for most families. The architecture reorganization is done, circadian rhythm is established, and naps settle into a three-nap structure that holds for two or three months. Wake windows sit at two to two and a half hours, graded shortest-to-longest across the day.

The third nap in this window is short and functional — 30 to 45 minutes, purely a bridge to bedtime. It will be the first thing to go, usually somewhere between six and eight months, and its departure is what triggers the two-nap transition.

Bedtime settles into 6:30 to 7:30pm and stops moving much. Night sleep is commonly 10 to 12 hours with zero to two feeds, depending on the baby and on your feeding approach. Solids typically begin around six months per AAP guidance, which changes the feeding schedule considerably but usually changes the sleep schedule less than people expect.

Months 7 to 9: down to two naps

The three-to-two nap transition is the most disruptive schedule change of the first year, and it takes two to six weeks. It does not happen cleanly. You will get days where she clearly still needs the third nap and days where the third nap refuses to happen and bedtime becomes a demolition site.

The standard handling is to bridge. On days that end up with only two naps, move bedtime 30 to 45 minutes earlier — sometimes as early as 6:00pm — to cover the shortfall. On days that still take three, cap the third nap at 30 minutes and hold the usual bedtime. Do this for several weeks and the wake windows stretch to fill the gap on their own.

By month nine, most babies have landed on two naps with wake windows around 2.75 to 3.25 hours, a total of 2.5 to 3.5 hours of daytime sleep, and 11 to 12 hours overnight. This is also peak separation-anxiety territory, which produces its own crop of night wakings that have nothing to do with timing.

Months 10 to 12: two naps, longer legs, and a false alarm

The ten-to-twelve-month schedule looks a lot like the nine-month one with everything stretched. Wake windows reach three to three and a half hours, and often three and a half to four by the first birthday. Total sleep drifts toward the 11-to-14-hour band that the AASM specifies for toddlers.

The thing to know about this window is the false one-nap alarm. Somewhere between ten and twelve months, a large share of babies start refusing the morning nap for a week or two, and parents reasonably conclude it is time to drop to one. It usually is not. The genuine one-nap transition typically happens between fourteen and eighteen months. What is happening at eleven months is more often a burst of gross motor development — pulling to stand, cruising, first steps — that temporarily makes lying still intolerable.

The test is duration. If the morning nap refusal persists past two weeks and the baby is genuinely content through a long morning, it may be real. If it resolves within two weeks, it was motor development and the two-nap schedule reasserts itself.

Every month, side by side

This is a baby sleep schedule by month for the whole first year compressed into one reference. Sleep totals are from the AASM consensus ranges; nap counts and wake windows are practical norms rather than clinical recommendations, and no professional body publishes wake window figures.

One column deserves a note. The longest night stretch column is the number that parents actually care about and the one that varies most between babies. A six-month-old sleeping a six-hour stretch and a six-month-old sleeping eleven are both extremely common. Night feeding needs are individual and are a pediatrician question, particularly for babies with any growth or weight-gain concerns.

Read this table across a row for a snapshot, and down a column to see the trajectory. The trajectory is the more useful view — it shows you that everything trends the same direction, slowly, with two visible discontinuities at month four and around month seven or eight.

What changes every month, and what never changes

Reading twelve tables in a row can obscure the pattern, so here is the pattern.

Four things change continuously across the year: total sleep decreases by roughly three hours, nap count falls from five to two, wake windows roughly quadruple, and the longest night stretch grows from about three hours to about eleven. Every one of those moves in one direction and does not come back.

Three things do not change at all. The grading of wake windows — shortest in the morning, longest before bed — holds from week six to the second birthday. The value of a consistent morning wake-up holds throughout. And the fact that a bad week does not mean the schedule is wrong holds throughout too. Illness, teething, travel, developmental leaps and separation anxiety all produce sleep disruption that looks exactly like a broken schedule, and the correct response to most of them is to hold the structure loosely for a week and let it come back.

That last point is the one I would most want to hand to someone in month four. The disruptions have a shape. They arrive, they last one to six weeks, they resolve. The schedule you built is still there underneath.

• Decreasing all year: total sleep, nap count
• Increasing all year: wake window length, longest night stretch
• Constant all year: graded wake windows, fixed morning anchor, the fact that disruptions end

Where a month-by-month chart will mislead you

Three ways a baby sleep schedule by month goes wrong in practice, because I fell into all three.

The first is treating a month boundary as a deadline. There is no developmental event at week 26 that distinguishes a six-month-old from a five-month-and-three-week-old. If your baby is on the month-five schedule at six and a half months and everyone is sleeping, she is not behind. Nap-count transitions in particular are driven by the individual baby and spread across a two-to-three month window in the population.

The second is over-fitting to clock times. Every table above is 7:00am-anchored. If you read the 9:00am nap as a fixed fact rather than as morning-plus-two-hours, you will spend your life fighting a baby who woke at 5:40am and was ready to sleep at 7:40.

The third is diagnosing off a single day. Sleep is noisy. One bad night tells you almost nothing; three consecutive bad nights with the same shape tell you something. Before you change anything, wait for a pattern, then change exactly one variable and give it 72 hours. This is the least satisfying advice on the page and the most reliably useful.

If what you need is the underlying method rather than a set of pre-built days, the how-to-create guide walks through building a schedule from your own baby's data instead of from a table. If it is the four-month wreckage you are in the middle of, go to the regression guide.