Puppy Sleep Schedule by Age: How Much Puppies Sleep

A young puppy sleeps 18 to 20 hours a day, according to the American Kennel Club, in naps of 30 minutes to two hours. The Royal Kennel Club's age guide has that falling to about 14 to 16 hours between three and six months and 12 to 14 hours after six months, and most puppies are not sleeping through the night until somewhere around 16 to 20 weeks. The schedule that works is a short cycle repeated all day, not a timetable.

The first week is not usually hard because of the training. It is hard because nobody warns you how much of the day a healthy puppy spends unconscious, and how badly things go in the hour when he should be asleep and is not.

How much puppies sleep, by age

Every figure is a typical range, not a target. VCA puts a two-month-old's awake time at only four to six hours a day, in pieces. Everything you want to do with him, toilet trips, meals, handling, socialization, training, has to fit inside those pieces without filling them.

The shape of a puppy's day

The AKC says a puppy may nap every hour or so and recommends following active time with quiet time. That gives you a cycle rather than a schedule, which is more useful, because a cycle survives contact with real life:

1. Wake. Straight outside, no detour, no talking. The highest-percentage toilet moment of the cycle.
2. A short something. A meal, a few minutes of handling, one tiny piece of training.
3. Play, watched. Ten to twenty minutes is a lot for a young puppy.
4. Out again. Excitement moves things along.
5. Back to the quiet place. Before the crash, not after it.

Then repeat. Six or seven turns of that is a day.

Rule of thumb: Count cycles, not hours. If you are counting hours you will keep getting caught out by a puppy who was fine ten minutes ago.

The overtired puppy looks exactly like a badly behaved one

An overtired puppy does not slow down. He speeds up. He bites harder, grabs trouser legs, sprints in circles, and stops hearing his name. It reads as defiance, and it is hard not to respond to it as defiance.

Test the nap before you test the training

Put him somewhere small, dark and boring, and see what he is like twenty minutes later. Most families discover that the puppy they thought was aggressive at seven in the evening is a different animal after a nap.

It matters because of what you teach in that window. AAHA's life stage guidelines note that puppies generally do not outgrow their problems. A frantic, exhausted puppy is not learning what you think he is learning. He is practising being frantic.

A covered crate in the room the family uses: small, dim and boring is what gives a puppy permission to stop.

What is not normal

Sleeping a great deal is normal. These are worth a call rather than a wait:

• Difficult to rouse, or floppy and unresponsive when awake
• Not eating, or vomiting, alongside the sleepiness, especially in a very small puppy
• Sleeping through meals and toilet trips for a whole day
• Crying that sounds like pain rather than protest

The sleep is doing real work: the AKC describes it as contributing to development of the central nervous system, brain, immune system and muscles. The visitor can meet him at the start of the next awake cycle.

Where the sleep should happen

A puppy who will not settle usually has too much space, not too little. An open room gives him a horizon to patrol. A defined, covered, boring space gives him permission to stop.

In practice that means a crate sized so he can stand, turn and lie flat but not much more, or a playpen with the bed in one corner. Most families here end up with the MidWest iCrate with its divider panel, because the divider keeps one crate the right size in October and next summer. The MidWest 30-inch exercise pen clips onto a wire crate if he needs floor as well as a bed.

Both need to be introduced as good places first; crate training a puppy, stage by stage covers it. A crate he has been fed in for three days is a bedroom.

• Put it where the family is, at least at first, and cover three sides.
• Something legal to chew in there. A teething chew such as a frozen, stuffed KONG Goodie Bone keeps him off the bars.
• A washable bed rather than a nice one. A crate pad with a waterproof bottom, or a zippered waterproof crate liner that outlasts anything with a stuffed core.

When do puppies sleep through the night?

Later than most owners hope. Zoetis Petcare's veterinary guidance says it is normal for a puppy not to sleep continuously through the night until around 16 to 20 weeks, and that a puppy may manage four to six hours at a stretch overnight before then. The AKC's point is the same: young puppies often still need a toilet break in the night.

So at eight to twelve weeks, expect one or two wakings, most of them a real toilet need. Make the trip uneventful: no lights, no conversation, out, wait, back to bed. Keep the night clean-up kit by the door, with an enzyme cleaner such as Nature's Miracle, which breaks down the smell that invites a repeat.

If the nearest grass is a lift ride away, a small puppy may not make it in time. A Fresh Patch real-grass patch on a balcony keeps the trip short without teaching him that indoors is where it happens. It is sized for small dogs and thrown out whole rather than washed.

Keeping the crate beside your bed for the first weeks tends to shorten this phase: you catch the stirring before it becomes a shriek. Move it away in stages once the nights have settled.

Is there a 4-month sleep regression?

Not as a documented stage. We found no veterinary source that describes a puppy sleep regression at four months, and the phrase appears to be borrowed from human baby-sleep writing. What is documented is narrower: Zoetis notes it is not abnormal for a puppy who slept longer at night to start waking more often, or earlier, as he grows. Four months is also when the Merck Veterinary Manual has adult teeth starting to appear, and a sore mouth is a plausible reason for a broken night; our teething timeline covers that side.

What to do is unglamorous: keep the night trip boring, check the day was not over-stimulating, and do not reward the 4 a.m. wake with play. A sudden change with pain, diarrhoea or straining is a vet call, not a regression.

Remember: A puppy who cannot settle usually needs a smaller space, not a bigger one. Divide the crate down and cover more of it before you try anything else.

The overnight pattern and the daytime toilet pattern are the same problem, so read this alongside our potty training schedule. Everything else about this stage sits on our new puppy stage page, and before the first nap, spend an hour on puppy proofing your home.