Insufficient sleep affects adolescents both immediately—through daily fatigue and reduced functioning—and over the long term. Lack of sleep increases risks for poor mental health, academic difficulties, and chronic disease in later life. Despite its importance, most teens are not getting the rest they need. Busy schedules, social lives, social media and screen time all compete with adolescents’ time for sleep.

Unfortunately, a new study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health (SPH) shows that this problem is only getting worse. Adolescents are getting less sleep today than they were even a decade ago. Further, the study found that Black, Hispanic, and those who had less educated parents are reporting the shortest durations of sleep, and this “sleep gap” relative to other socioeconomic groups has been growing.

To conduct the study, researchers drew on data from Monitoring the Future, an ongoing, nationally representative survey of U.S. students in grades 8, 10, and 12. The study authors analyzed responses from more than 400,000 adolescents collected between 1991 and 2023. In the survey, teens answered two key questions: how often they got at least seven hours of sleep per night, and how often they felt they were getting enough sleep. Researchers then used advanced statistical models to examine trends over time, across age groups, and among different demographic groups.

The study, published in Pediatrics, found:

• Sleep has steadily declined across all age groups. Adolescents today are less likely to get adequate sleep than teens in previous decades. The most recent data (2021–2023) showed the lowest sleep levels at every age, with as few as 22% of older teens reporting at least seven hours of sleep per night.
• Sleep disparities are widening. Gaps between demographic groups have grown over time. Black and Latino adolescents and those with less-educated parents are increasingly less likely to get sufficient sleep compared with their peers.
• Older teens are hit hardest. Sleep duration consistently decreases with age, as both sleep duration and perceived sleep sufficiency drop sharply from early to late adolescence.

“What’s striking is not just that teens aren’t getting enough sleep — it’s how steadily sleep has declined over more than three decades, with today’s adolescents getting less rest than any generation before them,” said Rachel Widome, a lead author and professor in the School of Public Health. “The widening gaps we’re seeing by race and socioeconomic status also suggest that sleep is becoming another area where inequities take hold early in life. Teen sleep is increasingly becoming a public health crisis, and without broader structural changes, we risk setting up a generation of young people for long-term challenges in health, learning and overall well-being.”

The researchers point to structural solutions to address the challenge that can reach large numbers of teens. One of the most effective is delaying secondary school start times—a policy change shown to increase sleep duration by better aligning with adolescents’ biological rhythms.

Funding for the study was provided by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, with additional support from the Minnesota Population Center and the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.