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Can snoozing make you late for work?

Last updated: October 15, 2026

It can. In a large objective study of snoozing (over 3 million nights), mornings that ended with a snooze included about 11 minutes of snoozing, and heavy snoozers averaged about 20 minutes. Add the grogginess of sleep inertia and a tight morning gets tighter.

The 11-to-20-minute leak

Robbins et al. (2025) analyzed more than 3 million nights logged by 21,000+ Sleep Cycle users. On nights that ended with a snooze, people pressed it 2.4 times and spent 10.8 minutes snoozing on average. Heavy snoozers (snooze on more than 80% of mornings) averaged 20.2 minutes. For a heavy snoozer, five snooze mornings add up to about 1 hour 40 minutes a week.

Inertia compounds the delay

Even after you get out of bed, sleep inertia slows every task — choosing clothes, making coffee, getting ready — for roughly 15 to 30 minutes, sometimes an hour or more. Hilditch and McHill (2019) review the evidence.

Reclaim the morning

Getting up at the first alarm gives you back the 10 to 20 minutes that snoozing takes. That is the ByeBed pitch: no snooze button, and a mission that gets you moving instead.

Sources

1. Hilditch & McHill, Nature and Science of Sleep, 2019. Sleep inertia: current insights
2. Robbins et al., Scientific Reports, 2025. Snooze alarm use in a global population of smartphone users (21,222 Sleep Cycle users, 3 million+ nights)