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Who Sleeps Now

How the numbers are made

Every figure on this site is a model: who lives in each time zone, times the share of them asleep at that zone's local time.

Who lives where

  • 243 countries and territories, 8.22 billion people in all.
  • Population is the World Bank's latest figure for each country. The World Bank's own world total for 2025 is8.22 billion.
  • A country with several time zones is split by where its towns of 15,000 or more are, from GeoNames.
  • Local time comes from the time zone database, so daylight saving and half-hour zones are exact.

When people sleep

Bed and wake times are measured for 63 countries, home to 70% of the world's people.

  • Adults fall asleep 15 minutes after the measured bedtime and wake at the measured wake time, spread around both.
  • Children under 15, 25% of people, go to bed 140 minutes earlier and wake 20 minutes earlier.
  • At least 2% of people are asleep at any hour, and at most 92%.

Where the times are estimated

The other countries borrow times from their region.

Africa south of the Sahara

50 countries, 1.21 billion people.

Actigraphy in Ghana: METS 2025 onset 21:50 to 21:54, wake 05:28 to 05:36 (n=125), and GRAPHS 2022 rural mothers in bed 21:40, up 05:46. No app or wearable data exists for the region.

South Asia

7 countries, 527 million people.

Sleep Cycle 2022 India (n=854), the only South Asian country measured.

Middle East and North Africa

16 countries, 364 million people.

Unweighted mean of Sleep Cycle 2022 for AE, SA and EG.

Latin America

42 countries, 146 million people.

Mean of the 8 measured countries in the region: AR, BR, CL, CO, CR, EC, MX, PE.

East and Southeast Asia

8 countries, 113 million people.

Mean of the 11 measured countries in the region: CN, HK, ID, JP, KR, MY, PH, SG, TH, TW, VN.

World

35 countries, 94.6 million people.

Unweighted mean of 61 countries in the 2025 re-fetch of Sleep Cycle data.

Europe

22 countries, 30.8 million people.

Mean of the 31 measured countries in the region: AT, BE, BG, CH, CY, CZ, DE, DK, EE, ES, FI, FR, GB, GR, HR, HU, IE, IS, IT, LT, LU, LV, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, RU, SE, SK, UA.

What it cannot tell you

  • Sleep Cycle users own iPhones and mostly live in cities, so measured bedtimes likely run later than for a whole country.
  • Ireland uses the 2025 figures, because its 2022 bedtime sits 67 minutes from its neighbours.
  • Egypt rests on 509 app users, and its bedtime moved 54 minutes between the 2022 and 2025 figures.
  • Weekdays and weekends are averaged together.
  • City populations are GeoNames figures for the city as recorded, which for some Chinese cities is the whole municipality.

Sources