When to drop to one nap: signs and the 2 to 1 nap transition

Your daughter is 14 months old. The day before yesterday she napped twice, as usual. Yesterday she lay awake in her crib for 40 minutes at the morning nap, then slept for two hours at midday. Today she dozed off in the stroller at 10, refused the afternoon nap, and by about six in the evening she was crying with exhaustion. You wonder whether it's time for one nap, how long this messy stretch lasts and whether you should put her to bed earlier. For the first question there is good data. For the other two, almost none.

The short answer on when to drop to one nap:

• When: most children move to a single nap between 12 and 18 months. In the largest dataset, the midpoint was 13 months, and at 12 months nearly 7 days out of 10 were still two-nap days. Most official guidelines say 15–18 months.
• The earlier transitions: from four naps to three at around 6 months, from three to two at around 8 and a half months, again as the midpoint of a wide band.
• How long it takes: we found no study that measures it. The figures in weeks that get passed around have no source.
• What changes: the remaining nap gets longer, but it doesn't make up all of the lost daytime sleep; a child keeps about 79% of their daytime sleep.
• The short late-afternoon nap usually goes away at the switch from three naps to two.
• The afternoon nap: under 2.5% drop it before age 2, a third by age 3, most between 3 and 5, with big differences between countries.
• What you do: look at what repeats several days in a row, not at a month on the calendar. No official source we read asks you to put them to bed earlier.

When to drop to one nap: a distribution, not a month

The largest dataset is also the newest. In September 2026, two researchers analyzed 10.7 million days logged by the parents of 175,593 babies aged 3–18 months in the Napper sleep app. They defined a transition as the week in which the usual number of naps drops compared with the week before. Among the children for whom the app caught the switch from two naps to one, the median was 57 weeks, or 13.2 months. It's the most gradual of the transitions: at 12 months, on average 69.3% of a child's days were still two-nap days.

Two caveats: the data come from parents who chose to log sleep in an app, not from a sample of the population, and one of the two authors, Kim de Bie, worked for Napper when the study was done. Most families were in Europe, a third in Germany alone. We make a sleep app too. That doesn't mean the numbers are wrong, but that they describe a particular group of families.

Older sources put the transition later. Marc Weissbluth, an American pediatrician and author of books on sleep, followed 172 children: a single nap, in the afternoon, at 15–24 months. In the Zurich studies, of 493 children, the number with two or more naps a day drops sharply between 12 and 18 months. Most official guidelines say 15–18 months; Brazilian pediatricians describe a single nap across the whole 1–3 year band (the table by country is below).

How the numbers fit together: the midpoint falls at around 13 months, and children who switch later only get to one nap at 18 months or later. Our month-by-month pages put the transition between 13 and 17 months: the midpoint falls at 13–15, and at 16 and 17 months the page still shows “1–2” naps. If at 16 or 17 months your child still naps twice and it's working, they're still within the band the studies found.

How many naps a 1-year-old takes

At 12 months, most still take two: in the app data, 69% of days had two naps, and Spanish pediatricians write that one nap in the morning and one in the afternoon is normal until 18 months. In total, the benchmark for ages 1–2 is 11–14 hours per 24 hours, naps included, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine and the WHO. How the hours split up, month by month, is in the guide to how many naps a day and on the 12-month page.

When to drop to 2 naps: every transition, from four to none

The table puts side by side what the four sources with age data measured. The band and the population of each row matter: these are different studies, from different countries and years, and nearly all of them rely on what parents logged or remembered.

The early transitions are gentler. At the early transitions, from four naps to three and from three to two, the remaining naps get longer, and a child keeps 88–89% of their previous daytime sleep, compared with 79% at the switch from two to one. Here too the band is wide: at 8 months, on average 65.7% of a baby's days were two-nap days. That number doesn't contradict the median of 8 and a half months: the percentage counts days, while the median is the age at the week in which the usual number of naps drops, and only among the children for whom the app caught the change. Our month-by-month pages put the switch from three to two at 6–8 months; three naps at 9 months are still within the data too.

The late-afternoon catnap: when it goes away and how late it can be

It's the last nap of the day, the short one that some babies still take at the end of the afternoon, before bedtime. We found no study that tracks it separately in babies (PubMed and Europe PMC, “late afternoon nap,” “evening nap,” “third nap” and “catnap,” with infants, Nov. 14, 2026). It usually goes away at the switch from three naps to two, at around 8 and a half months in the app data, but the study doesn't say which of the naps goes first. Karitane, an Australian nonprofit organization for parents, describes an “optional” third nap at 5–6 months, short, at the end of the afternoon, lasting 30–45 minutes “if needed.”

How late can it be? The only time limit we found doesn't come from an official guideline but from a 2024 article for primary care pediatricians in Spain: from around 6 months, avoid very long and late naps, “from 5 PM” (17:00), so the baby reaches bedtime with enough sleep pressure. A Japanese study of 50 children aged a year and a half found that those who napped later fell asleep later at night and slept less overnight, but that's a correlation. The 17:00 mark remains a rule of thumb from practice, not a measured threshold; what matters more is how many hours your child has between the last nap and bedtime.

The morning nap moves: signs they're ready for one nap

The Australian website for parents describes what usually happens: the first nap gets longer and moves later and later, toward the middle of the day, as the second one fades out. That's why parents say “the morning nap disappears”: in reality, it moves. None of the guidelines we read give measured thresholds for when the transition happens. The sources describe observations:

• The first nap comes later and later and lasts longer, and the second becomes short, hard to get or doesn't happen at all.
• They're not tired at the usual bedtime and stay awake much later; that's the sign Karitane gives.
• At one of the naps they don't fall asleep, or fall asleep much later, even though they have the chance, and on days without it they're no more tired or cranky. The list comes from the German Sleep Society and was written for the afternoon nap at preschool; we use it here by analogy, and no one has checked it for the switch to a single nap.

A bad day, a cold, teething, a trip or the first days at daycare don't count as signs. If you want a threshold, use this one, with its label: the pattern repeats several days in a row. It's a practical rule, with no study behind it. How to tell tiredness apart from other states is in the guide to tired signs.

How to transition to one nap

We found no study comparing ways of making the transition (in the same PubMed searches described below); what follows is what the guidelines describe and what has been measured around them.

1. Let the first nap move gradually later. By how much and how often, no source we read says; for the exact steps, in minutes and days, that circulate online, we found no source. Go at your child's pace. Where the single nap falls in the sample day, for each month, you can see in the strip below.

2. Two-nap days mixed in with one-nap days are normal. An American study notes the same thing about the last transition, the one to zero: children may nap on some days and not on others. It isn't a step backward.

3. The remaining nap gets longer, but it doesn't make up all of it. In the app data, at the switch from two naps to one, the average length of a nap rose from 67 to 103 minutes, and a child kept about 79% of their daytime sleep. The study doesn't analyze nighttime sleep around the transition. Overall, from 3 to 18 months, time spent in bed at night stayed almost the same, 650–664 minutes, while total sleep fell from 14.8 to 12.5 hours, almost entirely from daytime sleep. So we can't promise you that the night makes up for it.

4. Bedtime: watch your child, not a rule. No official source we read asks you to put them to bed earlier during the transition weeks, and the German public health institute says the opposite for a child who needs less sleep: move bedtime later or shorten the afternoon nap. What has been measured is in older children. In 25 children aged 30–36 months, put to bed at the usual time after a day without their afternoon nap, falling asleep took 12 minutes instead of 37. Night sleep rose from 9.6 to 10.1 hours, but over 24 hours they still slept less: 10.1 hours versus 11.2. In a small study, with no control group, of 19 Japanese 4-year-olds whose preschool stopped their afternoon nap, bedtime moved earlier on its own and night sleep rose by 31.6 minutes, but total sleep fell by 37.2 minutes. In practice: if on a day with a short nap they're falling asleep early, it isn't wrong to put them down then; if they're lively in the evening, don't force them into an earlier bedtime just because it's written somewhere.

The sample day, wake window and number of naps for your child's month, from 5 months to 2 years:

5 months · 6 months · 7 months · 8 months · 9 months · 10 months · 11 months · 12 months · 13 months · 14 months · 15 months · 16 months · 17 months · 18 months · 19 months · 20 months · 21 months · 22 months · 23 months · 24 months

How long the transition takes: we found no study

The old version of this page said that no one had measured the switch from two naps to one. That wasn't true: the app study and Weissbluth's study measure the age at which it happens. What no one has measured, as far as we found, is how long it takes. On November 14, 2026, in PubMed, “nap transition” or “nap transitions” in the title or abstract turn up two papers: the app study, which defines the transition from one week to the next and so gives an age, not a length, and a hypothesis paper with no data. A broader search (daytime sleep, infants or toddlers, “transition” and “week” or “duration”) turns up three papers, none with a length in weeks. Nor do the official guidelines we read, from ten countries and from the WHO, give a length. The figures in weeks that get passed around, including the one that sat on our own site for a while, therefore have no source. We don't know how long it lasts, and that doesn't mean it's quick.

Another piece of advice gets passed around: don't change naps during the “8–10 month regression” or the “18 month” one. On November 14, 2026, we searched for “sleep regression” and “sleep regressions,” together with infants, toddlers or babies. In the titles and abstracts in Europe PMC, only two papers come up, neither about a sleep regression in infants. PubMed can't search the exact phrase (it isn't in its phrase index), so there the search tells us nothing. In the full text in Europe PMC, the phrase appears in 24 papers, mostly about the word parents use (qualitative studies, social media, parents' mental health); judging by titles and abstracts, none measures a regression at 8–10 or at 18 months. What actually changes at different ages is in the guide to sleep regressions. It's a different matter when a child loses things they could already do, such as words or walking: that has nothing to do with sleep, and you tell the doctor.

What each country's guidelines say

The table puts ten sources side by side, most of them official. On the switch from two naps to one, they disagree only a little. On the afternoon nap, the differences are big: from “some drop it at 2” to the Romanian regulation, with sleep or relaxation during the day until 7–8 years.

Spanish pediatricians give two ages for dropping the afternoon nap, on different pages, and Brazilian ones treat daytime sleep after age 5 as a sign to check, even though the Romanian regulation provides for sleep or relaxation at preschool until 7–8 years. For Italy and Poland we found no official page with ages or transitions, and we couldn't open Hungary's official health website. The details for your country:

In the US, the American pediatricians' website for parents doesn't have, as far as we found, a page with the age of the switch to a single nap or with the number of naps by age. The page on how many hours of sleep a child needs only says that the hours are per 24 hours and include naps, so you add them up when you do the math. The American band that circulates most often, a single nap at 15–24 months, comes from Weissbluth's study of 172 children, not from an official recommendation. Also from the US is the study of 1,043 children aged 2–8 in the section on the afternoon nap below: at 8, Black children napped much more often than white children, but total weekly sleep was almost the same, just split differently between day and night.

When kids stop napping

The most complete review is a 2020 Australian meta-analysis, with 11 studies on the age at which naps are dropped. Under 2.5% of children drop daytime sleep before age 2, and by age 3 a third have dropped it. Most drop it in the preschool years: 57% of children aged 36–48 months no longer napped, 80% of those aged 48–60 months and 94% of those over 5. The authors note that differences in measurement between studies are large, and at age 3 the percentage of children who no longer nap ranges, from one study to another, from 4.8% to 65%.

The differences aren't just noise. In an online survey completed by the parents of 2,590 children aged 3–6 in 13 countries and regions, most children in predominantly Asian countries still napped, with the same total sleep over 24 hours as in the other countries. In the US, at age 8, 39.1% of Black children and 4.9% of white children napped, with nearly identical total weekly sleep at every age. Preschool matters too: in 113 rooms in Australia, only 31% of children slept during nap time, and where the mandatory nap lasted over an hour, four times as many fell asleep as where it lasted half an hour or less.

The signs that a child no longer needs the afternoon nap are the ones in the list above, from the German Sleep Society, this time at the age they were written for. Sleep can't be forced: a child who no longer naps can get a quiet break at the same time, and if they have trouble falling asleep at night, the afternoon nap can be shortened.

Is it worth keeping the afternoon nap as long as possible? The data don't say that for all children. A 2015 review of 26 studies, all observational and with low-quality evidence by GRADE criteria, found that after age 2, napping is associated with falling asleep later and with shorter, poorer night sleep; for behavior, health and development, the evidence is unclear. The study usually cited for memory, of 40 preschoolers (recruited at 36–67 months), found that they remembered a memory game better after a nap than after staying awake, but only those who napped habitually, at least 5 days a week; for the 10 who napped less than twice a week, the nap didn't help. Two large studies on the age of dropping naps point in opposite directions, with very small effects. In Australia, among 1,117 children, each extra year of napping was linked with slightly fewer behavior problems. In Canada, among 4,923 children, dropping naps before age 3 was linked with slightly better language and less anxiety. Both are observational and rely heavily on what parents reported. In short: in children who still nap habitually, a small study found a memory benefit, and in those who no longer need daytime sleep, napping is more likely to come with a shorter night. No source we read asks you either to keep it going by force or to cut it early.

When it isn't a transition: the signs that can't wait

A child who sleeps less during the day in the transition weeks is usually just in transition. A few situations have nothing to do with the schedule; the same rules as in the guide for when your baby won't sleep:

• Hard to wake or floppy, with no muscle tone, or falls right back asleep after you wake them: call 911 or go to the ER. It isn't a sign of sleep, it's a sign of illness.
• Labored breathing (grunting, the belly pulling in under the ribs, breathing very fast) or blue or gray lips or skin: call 911.
• Suddenly sleeps much more than usual, in total over day and night, or eats noticeably less, but wakes up when you wake them: call the doctor the same day; what to check instead of hours.
• Snores most nights or breathes with visible effort: tell the doctor, even if they don't ask.

The safe sleep rules stay the same when sleep moves to the stroller, the car or the grandparents' house, according to the American pediatricians' 2022 recommendations: until 1 year, for every sleep, on the back, on a flat, firm surface of their own, without pillows, soft blankets or toys, and without getting too warm. Also until 1 year, the car seat, the stroller in a sitting position and the baby carrier aren't places for regular sleep: if they fall asleep in them, move them to a flat surface as soon as you can (out of the car seat, right after you arrive).

How Lulla helps

The transition shows up in days, not in a month on the calendar. In Lulla you log every nap with the timer, and in History, for free, you see each nap by day, with the time it started and how long it lasted. That's how you spot the two-nap days and the one-nap days, and whether the first nap is slowly moving toward midday. On the Home screen you see how long it's been since the last nap and, under “Today's sleep,” how much they've slept so far.

Also for free, after each logged nap you get a notification when the estimated wake window has passed. At this age it helps to know how that works. For the first 7 days after the first nap logged on the phone, the window is fixed by age: between 1 and 2 years, 4 hours, whether your child takes one nap or two. After that, the notification uses the average of the wake windows from the last 14 days, only those between 30 minutes and 6 hours, leaving out the longest and shortest 10%; when there are too few, it goes back to 4 hours. In weeks with mixed days, the average blends the two-nap days, with shorter windows, and the one-nap days, with longer ones, so the notification may come somewhere in between, and it only lines up once the new pattern fills the 14 days. Take it as a reminder, not a verdict. The windows by age are explained in the guide to wake windows.

With Premium, Stats shows you total sleep per day over 7 or 30 days, so you can see whether the daily total has dropped or has only shifted from day to night. History and Stats don't compare the number of naps with age; for that, you have the month-by-month pages in the list above.

Keep in mind: this article is informational, not medical advice, and its recommendations come from the guidelines and studies in the list of sources, each with its own limits. For any concern about your child's sleep, your pediatrician remains the first place to go: they know your child's history.