What time should a 1 year old go to bed?

Last reviewed: 14 September 2026

At one, bedtime is mostly a function of naps. Get the afternoon right and the evening usually follows.

Bedtime chart for a 1-year-old

Find the time your child has to be up, and read across. These bedtimes are lights out, not the start of the evening — they already include about 15 minutes to fall asleep, which is a typical figure at this age.

If your 1-year-old wakes on their own at roughly the right time and is cheerful for the first twenty minutes of the day, the bedtime you are using is working. If they need waking every morning, it is too late — whatever the chart says.

How much sleep does a 1-year-old need?

A 1-year-old needs 11 to 14 hours of sleep a night. The major guidelines agree closely, and all of them give a range rather than a number because healthy children genuinely vary by an hour or more either side.

Naps are what set bedtime at one

A 1-year-old's bedtime is downstream of the last nap, not of the clock. The useful number is the wake window — how long they can comfortably stay awake between sleeps. At twelve months that is around three and a half to four hours on a two-nap schedule, stretching towards five hours once they move to one nap.

If bedtime has become a 45-minute struggle, the nap is nearly always the place to look first. A nap that ends at 4:00 PM makes a 7:00 PM bedtime physically unlikely, however good the routine is.

Two naps to one

Most children make this move between 14 and 18 months, so at twelve months two naps is still entirely normal — despite what other parents at playgroup or nursery may be doing. The signs it is coming are consistent over a few weeks rather than on one bad day: refusing the afternoon nap repeatedly, naps getting shorter, early-morning waking, or fighting bedtime when the routine has not changed.

The transition itself is rarely clean. Most families spend several weeks alternating — one nap on some days, two on others — and the reliable move on a one-nap day is an earlier bedtime, often as early as 6:15 PM, rather than pushing through. An overtired toddler is harder to settle, not easier.

The twelve-month regression

A lot of families hit a patch of broken nights right around the first birthday. It usually coincides with walking, a burst of new words, and the peak of separation anxiety — all of which are developmental rather than signs that anything has gone wrong. It generally settles within a few weeks if the routine stays consistent through it.

Signs a 1-year-old is not getting enough sleep

Tiredness in children rarely looks like tiredness. It is far more likely to arrive as behaviour, and the timing is the giveaway — it clusters in the late afternoon and gets worse as the school week goes on.

• fighting a bedtime that used to be easy, with no other change
• waking before 5:30 AM — more often a sign of overtiredness than of too much sleep
• falling asleep in the pushchair, stroller or car on short journeys
• rubbing eyes, ear-pulling or sudden clinginess in the late afternoon
• naps getting shorter and more fractured rather than longer

Snoring every night, long pauses in breathing, or persistent mouth-breathing during sleep are different — those are worth raising with your GP rather than treating as a bedtime problem.

A bedtime routine that works at one

Twenty minutes is plenty at one, and the sequence matters far more than the length: bath, milk, pyjamas, one or two books in a dim room, into the cot or crib awake. That last part is the one that pays off — a child who goes into the cot already asleep has to be resettled the same way at every natural waking during the night.

Keep the room properly dark and slightly cool. And expect the routine to be tested in a new way once they can stand up in the cot, which most children manage around this age — a calm, near-silent lie-down without conversation works better than anything more engaged.

How to move bedtime earlier without a fight

1. Fix the wake-up time first. Same time every day, weekends included, for a week. A stable morning anchors the body clock far more effectively than a stable bedtime does.
2. Move in 15-minute steps. Shift lights out 15 minutes earlier every three or four nights. The body clock will follow that; it will fight an hour.
3. Get daylight into the morning. Curtains open on waking, and ten to fifteen minutes outside before school if you can manage it.
4. End screens before the wind-down starts, not as part of it — stopping something engaging is itself stimulating.
5. Give it a fortnight. Two or three nights tells you nothing. Judge it by how the mornings look after two weeks.