How 1,412 people slept, scrolled and woke across 38,114 measured nights.
The Night Report 2026
By the Stillhour Institute
with 1,412 volunteer sleepers
In 2025 we asked people how they sleep. In 2026 we measured it.
The Night Report follows 1,412 volunteers across twelve countries through three winter months. Each wore a sleep ring, kept a two-line diary every morning and answered 31 questions about screens, work and weekends.
Last year’s survey told us what people believe about their sleep. This year the rings show what actually happens, and the two rarely agree. We will publish four chapters, six sleeper diaries and the full anonymised dataset.
How we measured →Everyone who slept for science.
Each dot is one volunteer. From January to March 2026 they wore a sleep ring for 27 nights, kept a two-line diary and answered 31 questions. Colour shows who they are.
Lights out, give or take an hour.
Half of our sleepers were in bed by 23:47. The middle 80% went to bed between 22:05 and 01:39. The 145 night-shift workers sleep after sunrise, so they sit apart.
Two in three sleep less than they should.
On an average night 67% slept under 7 hours, the minimum most sleep scientists recommend for adults. The median night lasted 6h 31m.
Leaving the phone outside buys 41 minutes.
Sleepers who kept a phone within reach slept a median 6h 18m. Those who left it outside the bedroom slept 7h 00m. Over a year that is about 33 extra nights of sleep.
People are not bad at sleeping. They are bad at stopping. The rings show the night starting forty minutes before anyone closes their eyes.
The last hour belongs to the phone
Two in three sleepers took a phone to bed. On those nights they fell asleep 29 minutes later and woke 1.6 more times. The effect was largest for students and smallest for retirees, and it vanished when the phone charged in another room.
- Who takes the phone to bed
- The 29-minute delay
- Night-time wake-ups and notifications
- What the ‘outside the room’ group did instead
- What changed in two weeks without it
Drag the hand through the night.
The filled shape is everyone asleep at that minute. The ticks on the rim show when people went to bed. Night-shift sleepers make the second, smaller shape after sunrise.
Shift work bends the whole week
Six groups, six kinds of night. New parents woke four times on a typical night, night-shift workers slept 5h 26m, and workers on rotating rotas lost 48 minutes more than those on fixed nights.
- Six kinds of night
- The late-shift tax
- Founders and the 01:00 email
- What two employers changed
What people told us, and what the rings saw.
People place their bedtime at lights-off. The ring places it at the first two minutes of stillness.
Sleeper diaries
Six people, twenty-seven nights each, in their own words.
Download
The full report, the dataset and every new chapter.
A 64-page PDF, the anonymised CSV of 1,412 sleepers and an email when chapters 06 and 07 land in November. No other email, ever.
How we measured, and who we missed.
Every number in this report comes from one anonymised dataset. You can read how it was collected, and download it.
Every volunteer wore the same consumer sleep ring on the index finger for 27 consecutive nights between 13 January and 30 March 2026. The ring estimates sleep onset, wake-ups and stages from movement, heart rate and skin temperature. We counted a night when the ring recorded at least three hours in bed.
1,812 people applied through partner clinics, universities and employers; 1,412 completed at least 20 nights. Night-shift workers and new parents are over-represented on purpose. People without a smartphone, and anyone under 18, could not take part, so the report says nothing about them.
31 questions, asked in week one and again in week four: bedtime habits, screens, caffeine, work hours, how rested people felt and what they believed about their own sleep. The survey vs ring comparison uses the week-one answers.
Rings were registered to a random ID, never to a name. Diaries were written in the same app and stripped of place names. The published dataset rounds bedtimes to five minutes and ages to the year. The six diarists in this report agreed to be quoted and chose their own pseudonyms.
Stillhour Institute (2026). The Night Report 2026: how 1,412 people slept, scrolled and woke. Figures may be quoted with credit and a link to this page.