How Much Sleep Does Your Dog Really Need? What the Latest Research Reveals
Dog owners know that their four-legged friends sleep a surprisingly large part of their lives. But how many hours of rest are normal? And what does good sleep have to do with learning and training?
A dog that curls up in its bed after a long walk and then, moments later, seems to be running through its dream world with twitching paws, appears outwardly above all else: completely content. In reality, far more happens during this rest phase than it seems. Sleep, even in dogs, doesn't just compensate for physical exhaustion. It's connected to learning and memory processes and changes considerably throughout its life.
How much sleep a dog needs cannot be answered with a single, definitive number. Age and activity level play a role, as do health and daily routine. Even the question of what constitutes "sleep" is more complex than it seems: dogs distribute their rest across numerous periods throughout the day and night – and spend a significant amount of time dozing.
How many hours do dogs sleep per day?
It is often stated that an adult dog needs twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen hours of sleep a day. Only then, it is claimed, will it be permanently healthy and balanced. However, such general statements should be treated with caution. Reliable data on how many hours a healthy family dog actually needs to sleep is still scarce. Furthermore, there is a methodological problem: If you see your dog lying on the sofa, you cannot easily tell whether the animal is actually sleeping or merely resting.
So how can we approach a reliable answer? A good starting point is the British long-term study "Generation Pup," which follows dogs over an extended period and examines their health and behavioral development. The research project is supported by organizations including Dogs Trust, a large British animal welfare organization with its own research activities. Scientists from the University of Bristol are also involved.
Based on data collected in the long-term study, information on 2,332 dogs at 16 weeks of age and 1,091 dogs at 12 months of age was analyzed for a study published in 2020. For the animals with comparable data at both time points, the researchers found an average of 11.2 hours of sleep within 24 hours for the 16-week-old puppies and 10.8 hours for the one-year-old dogs. However, the data were based on owners' assessments and not on objective sleep measurements – an important limitation.
The study also makes it clear why a single number is not very meaningful. Sixteen-week-old puppies slept longer during the day than one-year-old dogs, while the older animals slept longer at night. Thus, the distribution of sleep changes even within the first year of life.
Instead of adhering to a supposedly ideal number of hours, it makes more sense to consider the individual dog: Does he regularly settle down? Does he sleep peacefully? Does he seem alert after waking up? And does his sleep pattern suddenly change significantly?
Sleep patterns in dogs change with age.
Just like with humans, a dog's sleep needs change throughout its life. Young dogs need a lot of sleep – and that makes sense: their nervous system is still developing, and at the same time, they have to process an enormous amount of new information every day. People, other dogs, smells, sounds, rules, and training tasks are all new to a puppy. The fact that young dogs sleep differently than adult dogs can now also be measured.
Even towards the end of their lives, dogs' sleep patterns change. A study published in 2023 by North Carolina State University is particularly interesting: The team led by neurologist Alejandra Mondino examined 28 older dogs during a two-hour afternoon nap using polysomnography. This technique records not only brain waves but also other physiological signals during sleep. The dogs also completed various cognitive tests.
The result: Dogs with more pronounced signs of cognitive impairment spent less time in non-REM sleep, which includes particularly deep sleep, and REM sleep, in which the brain is comparatively active. Furthermore, changes in brain activity in more severely affected animals indicated lighter sleep. The researchers see this as evidence of a link between sleep and cognitive aging.
If an older dog suddenly wakes up frequently at night, wanders around, or seems disoriented, while sleeping more during the day, such changes shouldn't be dismissed too quickly as normal signs of aging. Pain, other illnesses, or cognitive dysfunction could also be the underlying cause.
Dogs sleep differently than humans.
Humans typically concentrate their sleep into one long nightly period. Dogs follow a different pattern: they sleep polyphasically, meaning their rest is spread across several episodes over the course of 24 hours.
Despite this difference, the sleep patterns of dogs and humans share surprising similarities: Electroencephalography, or EEG for short, can identify different stages in dogs as well: wakefulness, dozing, non-REM sleep, and REM sleep. REM sleep – the abbreviation stands for "Rapid Eye Movement" – is named for the rapid eye movements that can occur during this phase. Many dog owners are also familiar with the twitching of the paws, movements of the muzzle, or soft sounds their sleeping pet makes.
Whether a dog is actually dreaming of running across a meadow at that moment cannot, of course, be scientifically determined. Nevertheless, the similarities between human and canine sleep are so great that dogs now even serve as model organisms for certain questions in comparative sleep research.
What happens in a dog's head while it sleeps
The research becomes particularly exciting when it connects the sleeping and learning canine brains. A research team at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest studied family dogs that were learning new commands. The scientists then recorded the dogs' sleep using EEG. This revealed that brain activity changed during sleep after a learning session. Certain EEG patterns correlated with how well the dogs could later recall what they had learned. The results suggest that sleep is also involved in memory consolidation in dogs – that is, in anchoring newly acquired information in memory for the long term.
Another study by the Budapest research group examined sleep spindles, brief bursts of brain activity during non-REM sleep. In humans, such spindles have long been associated with learning and memory processes.
The researchers found similar patterns in dogs: After a learning task, certain EEG activities occurred more frequently. Furthermore, the density of this sleep spindle-like activity correlated with how much the dogs' performance had improved in subsequent recall tests. A later study supported the fundamental connection between sleep spindles and learning performance, but also showed that repeated measurements are more informative than single sleep recordings. This is remarkable for everyday life: While a dog may appear idly in its bed after training, its brain may still be engaged with what it has just learned.
For owners, a rigid set of hours is therefore less important than whether the dog has sufficient opportunity to satisfy its individual sleep needs. A quiet retreat, a reasonably reliable daily routine, and rest after physically or mentally demanding activities create good conditions for this.
And perhaps this is the most important finding of the still-young field of canine sleep research: sleep is not simply the time when a dog does nothing. While the body rests, the activity of its brain changes, depending on age, experiences, and prior learning. Sleep is therefore an active part of a dog's life – and presumably also an important prerequisite for experiences to become lasting lessons and for training to result in lasting learning.