Average Sleep by Country

What the numbers show

• The biggest gap is between Asia and the rest. Japan (6h 06m), South Korea (6h 19m), India (6h 25m), Singapore (6h 27m), Hong Kong (6h 32m), Thailand (6h 36m) and the United Arab Emirates (6h 37m) are the only countries below 6 hours 40 minutes on weeknights.
• The other 28 countries are close together: from Italy (6h 46m) to New Zealand (7h 03m) is only 17 minutes. Within each country, individual users typically differ from the national average by about 40 minutes, so places in the middle of the table are not meaningful differences.
• On weeknights, only 4 of 35 countries average 7 hours or more: New Zealand, Finland, the Netherlands and Ireland. The recommendation for adults is 7 hours or more. A tracker measures time asleep, which is shorter than time in bed.
• People in every country sleep longer on weekend nights, but by very different amounts: 25 minutes more in Switzerland, only 4 minutes more in India.

What this data can and cannot tell you

These are Oura ring users, not national averages. People who buy a sleep-tracking ring are not typical: in every country the average user was between 37 and 46 years old, and most users were men (52% to 81%, depending on the country). Their sleep may differ from the rest of the population.

The study included only countries with at least 200 users per week, so some countries rest on a few hundred people and others on many thousands. The data cover one year, 2021, and the values are the raw averages that the authors published in their supplementary tables.

Sources

• Willoughby AR, Alikhani I, Karsikas M, Chua XY, Chee MWL. Country differences in nocturnal sleep variability: Observations from a large-scale, long-term sleep wearable study. Sleep Medicine 110:155–165 (2023), supplementary tables S1, S2c and S2d. Open access (CC BY). doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2023.08.010
• CDC, About Sleep: recommended hours of sleep by age. www.cdc.gov/sleep/about/index.html

Last reviewed: October 2026.