What is a good sleep efficiency?

What the number actually measures

Sleep efficiency is time asleep divided by time in bed, expressed as a percent. Lie down at 23:00, get up at 07:00, and that's eight hours in bed; if you were actually asleep for seven of them, your efficiency is roughly 88%. It says nothing about how much you slept — only how much of your time under the covers was sleep rather than lying awake.

What counts as good

Sleep researchers generally treat about 85% or higher as good for adults, and many healthy sleepers sit in the high 80s to low 90s. Below roughly 85% usually means a meaningful slice of the night was spent awake — and a run of low-efficiency nights is one of the patterns clinicians look at when assessing insomnia.

Why very high can be a warning sign

Higher isn't automatically better. A consistently very high figure — north of about 95% — can mean you're so sleep-deprived that you crash the moment your head hits the pillow and barely surface all night. Falling asleep almost instantly and showing near-perfect efficiency, paired with short total sleep, often points to an unpaid sleep debt rather than excellent sleep.

What drags it down — and the CBT-i fix

Two things lower efficiency: long sleep latency (the time it takes to fall asleep) and night-time awakenings. The counter-intuitive remedy from CBT-i is sleep restriction — deliberately matching time in bed to your actual sleep need rather than padding it with hours of lying awake. Spend less idle time in bed and the bed re-associates with sleep, latency shortens, and efficiency climbs back toward your healthy range. This is general information, not medical advice.

Vitra reads your sleep efficiency and awakenings from your Oura data and, when efficiency runs low, gives CBT-i-informed sleep-window guidance — a suggested time in bed matched to your learned sleep need — with the research cited, all computed locally on your machine.

Frequently asked questions