How much sleep does a person need? While the physiological bases of the need for sleep remain conjectural, rendering definitive answers to this question impossible despite contemporary knowledge, much evidence has been gathered on how much sleep people do in fact obtain. Perhaps the most important conclusion to be drawn from this evidence is that there is great variability between individuals in total sleep time.
Adults typically sleep between 6 and 9 hours per night, though an increasing number of people sleep less than 6 hours. According to sleep polls taken in the United States in 2009, the average number of persons sleeping less than 6 hours per night increased from 12 percent in 1998 to 20 percent in 2009. During that same period the average number of persons sleeping more than 8 hours decreased from 35 percent to 28 percent. Sleep time also differs between weekdays and weekends. In the United States and other industrialized countries, including the United Kingdom and Australia, adults average less than 7 hours of sleep per night during the workweek. For Americans this average increases only slightly, by an average of 30 minutes, on