When America Goes to Bed: Bedtimes and Wake Times From the CDC's Survey
Updated: 1 day ago
If you have ever lain awake at midnight wondering whether everyone else is asleep, here is the answer: most of them are, but more than a quarter are not. We took the CDC's national sleep questionnaire and worked out when American adults actually fall asleep and wake up.
The data
The CDC's NHANES survey asks each participant what time they usually fall asleep and what time they usually wake up, once for weekdays or workdays and once for weekends. The answers are recorded to the half hour. We downloaded the 2017 to March 2020 sleep file (P_SLQ), matched it to the demographics file for age, and kept adults 18 and over. That left 9,557 people with a weekday answer and 9,560 with a weekend answer. We did not apply the survey weights, so these are the respondents in the sample, not a population estimate, but with nearly ten thousand people the picture is clear.
One note on wording: the question asks when you usually fall asleep, not when you get into bed. So these are sleep times, and the scrolling before them is not counted.
The weekday schedule
The median adult falls asleep at 11:00pm on a weekday and wakes at 6:30am. Around that middle:
19.5% are asleep before 10pm.
28.5% fall asleep at midnight or later.
48.0% are up by 6am.
9.4% wake after 9am.
Nearly half the country is awake by six. The late-night quarter is real but smaller than the midnight feeling suggests.
The weekend schedule
On weekends the median sleep time stays at 11:00pm, but the average slides to 11:27pm because the late tail gets longer: 42.7% fall asleep at midnight or later, up from 28.5% on weekdays, and only 12.4% are asleep before 10pm. Wake times move more than bedtimes. The median weekend wake time is 8:00am, ninety minutes later than the weekday median. Only 24.3% are up by 6am and 18.8% sleep past 9am.
We also matched each person's own weekday and weekend answers. The median person falls asleep at the same time on weekends and wakes 30 minutes later. The averages are larger, 25 minutes later to sleep and 62 minutes later to wake, because a minority shifts a lot: 31.2% of adults wake two hours or more later on weekends than on weekdays. That is the group sleep researchers describe as living in two time zones, one for work and one for the weekend.
By age
Median weekday and weekend schedules, by age group:
Ages 18 to 29: asleep at 11pm and up at 7am on weekdays; asleep at midnight and up at 9am on weekends.
Ages 30 to 39: 11pm to 6:15am on weekdays; 11:30pm to 8am on weekends.
Ages 40 to 49: 11pm to 6am on weekdays; 11pm to 7:30am on weekends.
Ages 50 to 64: 11pm to 6am on weekdays; 11pm to 7am on weekends.
Ages 65 and over: 10:30pm to 6:30am on weekdays; 11pm to 7am on weekends.
The weekday bedtime hardly moves across adulthood. What changes is the wake time, which gets earlier through the working years and then relaxes again, and the size of the weekend swing, which is two hours at 18 to 29 and half an hour after 65.
Why the numbers are useful
Most sleep advice starts with a fixed bedtime. The data suggests the lever people actually move is the wake time, especially on weekends, and the swing is largest in the years when weekday sleep is shortest. A consistent wake time is also the single thing most sleep clinicians ask patients to fix first, because it anchors everything else.
You cannot know your own swing from memory. People remember the good nights and the terrible ones and nothing in between. Two weeks of a morning note, roughly when you fell asleep and when you woke, is enough to see your weekday schedule, your weekend schedule and the gap between them.
Try it by text
Text Hi to (831) 999-2553 to start Sleep Textapp. Each morning it asks how you slept; you reply with a number from 1 to 10 and roughly how many hours, and you can mention when you turned in. Ask for your patterns any time to see your weekday and weekend averages side by side. It works on any phone that can text, with nothing to install.
Your first 20 messages are free. After that, one $9.99 a month subscription covers every Textapp. Text STOP at any time to end it.
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