What time should a 5 year old go to bed?

Last reviewed: 14 September 2026

Five is the first full school year, and the first time most children are running a genuine sleep deficit across the week without anyone noticing.

Bedtime chart for a 5-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 5-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 5-year-old need?

A 5-year-old needs 10 to 13 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.

How much sleep do kindergarteners need?

Children in Reception in the UK, or kindergarten in the US, need 10 to 13 hours of sleep a night. That is the same band as preschoolers, and it catches a lot of parents out — starting school does not reduce how much sleep a child needs, it just makes the morning non-negotiable.

The arithmetic is worth doing plainly. School gates at 8:50 AM means up at 7:00 AM for most families. Eleven hours back from 7:00 AM is 8:00 PM asleep, so lights out at 7:45 PM. Almost every 5-year-old whose parents describe them as "fine on 9 hours" is in fact running a debt that shows up as Thursday-afternoon behaviour rather than as obvious tiredness.

The weekend catch-up trap

A 5-year-old who sleeps until 9:00 AM on Saturday is telling you something about Monday to Friday. Weekend lie-ins do repay part of a sleep debt, but they also push the body clock later, which makes Sunday night harder and Monday worse — the cycle that produces a difficult start to every school week. Capping the weekend lie-in at about an hour past the school wake-up keeps the clock steady and forces the real fix, which is an earlier weekday bedtime.

Signs a 5-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.

• needs waking every school morning, and sleeps 90 minutes or more later at weekends
• tearful or explosive between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM on school days
• the teacher mentions concentration or fidgeting, particularly later in the week
• falls asleep instantly — under five minutes — which usually indicates real deprivation rather than good sleep habits

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 five

Thirty minutes, ending in the bedroom, with the last ten minutes screen-free and dim. At five, reading together is worth protecting even once they can read a little themselves — being read to is calming in a way that decoding words is not.

If bedtime has drifted late, move it in 15-minute steps every three or four nights rather than all at once. A body clock will follow a 15-minute shift without much protest; it will fight a one-hour shift for a fortnight.

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.