What time should a 6 year old go to bed?

Last reviewed: 14 September 2026

Six is where the official guidance changes band — and where a lot of families quietly let bedtime slip by half an hour without adjusting anything else.

Bedtime chart for a 6-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 6-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 6-year-old need?

A 6-year-old needs 9 to 12 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.

Why the first year of formal school is harder than the year before

In England, Reception (roughly US kindergarten) is play-based; Year 1 (first grade) is where formal learning starts, with longer periods of sitting, focused phonics and maths, and much less free movement. Children often come home from Year 1 (first grade) noticeably more tired than they did from Reception, and the tiredness shows as behaviour rather than yawning — a sharp, brittle mood between four and six in the afternoon that vanishes after food and an early night.

Six is also the age where after-school clubs start multiplying. Two evening activities a week is usually fine; four is how a 10½-hour bedtime becomes a 9-hour one without anyone deciding to change it. It is worth writing down, for one week, what time your child is actually asleep each night — the gap between the intended bedtime and the real one is almost always 20 to 40 minutes.

Losing teeth, and waking up

The first adult molars and the loss of baby teeth cluster around six and seven, and toothache is a common and easily-missed cause of a suddenly unsettled sleeper at this age. So is a blocked nose from the first proper winter of school germs — if your 6-year-old has started snoring every night, mouth-breathing, or pausing in their breathing, that is worth raising with your GP rather than treating as a bedtime problem.

Signs a 6-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
• a hard crash or short fuse between 4:00 PM and 6:00 PM
• complains of headaches or tummy aches in the late afternoon with no other cause
• concentration or handwriting noticeably worse on Thursdays and Fridays

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 six

Twenty-five to thirty minutes is enough at six. Keep the last half hour screen-free: at this age the bigger problem with a tablet before bed is usually not the light but the fact that the content is engaging and stopping it causes a fight, which is a poor way to start the wind-down.

Six is a good age to hand over parts of the routine — they choose the books, they set the order, you hold the time. Ownership of the details buys you compliance on the thing that actually matters, which is lights out.

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.