Time Receipt
Where does an average day go?
How the average American day of 2025 divides up, from the government's American Time Use Survey.
Average out every American aged 15 and over across every day of 2025, weekends and holidays included, and the day comes to just over nine hours of sleep, about five hours of leisure and a little over three hours of work. Chores, meals and everything else fill the rest of the receipt.
See the numbers
| Activity | Hours per day |
|---|---|
| Sleep | 9.03h |
| Leisure | 5.16h |
| Work | 3.32h |
| Household chores | 1.99h |
| Eating & drinking | 1.21h |
| Everything else | 3.29h |
What it shows
Each line is an average number of hours per day, and the lines add up to exactly 24. Sleep, at 9.03 hours, includes naps and time spent lying awake. Leisure and sports took 5.16 hours, and more than half of that, 2.61 hours, was watching television. Socialising and communicating took 0.58 hours, and sport and exercise 0.34.
Work, at 3.32 hours, looks short because it is averaged over everyone, including students, retirees and people out of work, and over weekends. People who did any work on a given day spent 7.98 hours on work and work-related activities that day, on average.
What it leaves out
An average day is nobody's actual day. It blends weekdays with Sundays, parents of toddlers with retirees, and night-shift workers with students. The survey shows that women spent more time on household activities than men, 2.38 hours against 1.58, and men spent more time working and on leisure; the totals above combine both.
The survey also records one main activity at a time. Listening to a podcast while cooking counts as cooking. Time spent looking after children while doing something else is not counted as childcare here.
And hours are not the same as experience. An hour of television after a long shift and an hour of television on a quiet Sunday look identical on the receipt. The survey measures how time is spent, not how it feels.
Sources and method
Figures come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey, Table 1, 2025 annual averages, released in June 2026. The survey asks a representative sample of people aged 15 and over to account for every minute of one day. "Everything else" is 24 hours minus the five named lines: personal care other than sleep, shopping and services, caring for others, education, organisational and religious activities, phone calls and email, and activities not elsewhere classified.
And the answer is → Mostly to sleep: 9 of the 24 hours, then 5.2 to leisure and 3.3 to work.
