Sleep · September 2026
The clocks go back on 25 October. Here’s what it means for your baby’s sleep.
Sunday 25 October, 2am. The clocks go back an hour and everyone gets a lie-in, which is possibly the funniest sentence in the English language if you currently have a baby.
Most of what you’ll read about this weekend is about the hour. Shift bedtime by ten minutes a night, blackout blinds, hold your nerve. Some of that helps. But there’s a second thing happening on the same weekend that nobody seems to mention, and in our experience it wrecks more nights than the hour does.
If you only read one bit, read this
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The hour usually sorts itself out in under a week. Don’t overthink it.
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The bigger change is temperature. Late October is when UK houses stop coasting and start getting properly cold overnight.
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Your baby’s room should be 16–20°C (NHS guidance).
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Cold hands are not a sign your baby is cold. Feel their chest or the back of their neck instead.
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Whatever worked in September will be too thin by early November.
The hour: less of a problem than you’d think
Two schools of thought.
The first is to shift things gradually. From about the Wednesday before, push bedtime, naps and meals ten or fifteen minutes later each day, so by Sunday you’ve absorbed the hour without anyone noticing.
The second is to do nothing at all and let them adjust over a few days.
Both work. If you’ve got a baby who falls apart when routine moves, do the gradual version. If you’ve got one who’s fairly easy-going, or if you simply haven’t got the bandwidth to run a phased sleep migration this month, the do-nothing approach is completely fine. Most babies land within three or four days.
What helps either way: get proper daylight into the morning, and get the room dark in the evening. Light is what resets the body clock, not willpower.
That’s the hour dealt with. Now the bit that actually catches people out.
The real change is the cold
Through September and early October, most UK houses sit in a comfortable middle. Heating’s off, but it’s not cold. Nurseries hover somewhere around 19 or 20 degrees overnight without anyone doing anything.
Then late October arrives. The evenings go dark at half four. The heating goes on for a few hours in the evening, then clicks off around ten or eleven. And the room your baby sleeps in drops steadily through the small hours, hitting its lowest point somewhere between four and six in the morning.
Which is, funnily enough, exactly when everyone suddenly starts waking at five.
That 4am dip is the thing. Your baby went to bed in a room at 20 degrees wearing what they wore all autumn. By dawn that room might be 15. Nothing about their clothing changed, but the situation did.
What to check
Get a thermometer in the room. Not a guess, not the hallway, not your phone’s weather app. The actual room, at the actual height the cot is. Cheap ones are a few quid and most sleeping bags come with a free strip thermometer anyway.
Check it late, not at bedtime. The bedtime reading tells you almost nothing. If you’re up at 2am anyway, and let’s be realistic, look then.
Aim for 16 to 20°C. That’s what the NHS recommends. It will feel cold to you. That’s fine. Babies sleep better slightly cool than slightly warm, and overheating is the risk the Lullaby Trust flags, not being a bit chilly.
How to tell if they’re actually cold
Feel their chest, or the back of their neck. That’s the reliable check.
Not their hands. Not their feet. Babies have cooler extremities almost all the time, and the number of parents who’ve piled on an extra layer at 3am because of cold little fingers is enormous. We’ve done it. It’s the single most common mistake in this whole area.
If their chest feels warm and dry, they’re fine. If it’s hot or clammy, take a layer off.
Dressing them for the colder nights
Thin layers, not one thick one. Trapped air between layers is what keeps them warm, and it means you can peel one off at 3am without a full reassembly job.
A few things the Lullaby Trust is clear on, and they matter more in winter because the instinct to bundle up is so strong:
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No hats indoors for sleep. Babies release heat through their heads. A hat inside is an overheating risk, and it can slip.
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No loose blankets, duvets, quilts or pillows under 12 months. A well-fitting sleeping bag does the job without the risk.
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No weighted sleeping bags, sleep pods or nests. The Lullaby Trust advises against these specifically.
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On their back, in a clear flat cot, and in your room for the first six months, naps included.
Tog is just a measure of warmth. Higher number, warmer bag. The right one depends on how cold that room actually gets, which is why the thermometer matters more than the season.
Where this gets annoying
A tog chart gives you a rule. The trouble with a rule is that it doesn’t know what tonight is like.
A 2.5 tog bag in a 19-degree room is a different situation to a 2.5 tog bag in a 15-degree room, and both of those things happen in the same week in late October. The chart on the back of the packet can’t tell you which one you’re in.
This is why we built Little Layers. We had a baby, it got cold, and we went looking for something that would just tell us what to put him in tonight rather than making us do sums at eleven o’clock at night. There wasn’t anything, so we made it.
You put in your child’s age and where you live. It pulls tonight’s actual forecast, asks how warm the room is, and tells you what to put them in. No chart to interpret at midnight.
It’s free. It follows NHS and Lullaby Trust guidance, and there’s an overnight mode built for exactly this problem.
What to actually do between now and then
Now
Put a thermometer in the room. Get a baseline before the heating starts going on.
Week before (from 18 Oct)
Take a reading at 4 or 5am one night. That’s your real number.
Wednesday 21 Oct
If you’re doing the gradual shift, start nudging bedtime later by 10 minutes a night.
Saturday 24 Oct
Have the warmer sleeping bag out and ready. Don’t be looking for it in the dark.
Sunday 25 Oct
Clocks have gone back. Get everyone outside in the morning light. Expect two or three wobbly nights and then normality.
And if it all goes sideways
It might. Some babies handle the clocks change without blinking and some are up at 4.30 for a fortnight. Neither means you’ve done anything wrong.
Get the room temperature right. Dress for 4am rather than for bedtime. And stop checking their hands. That covers most of it.
Little Layers is a free UK app that tells you what to dress your child in, based on tonight’s actual weather and their age. It follows NHS and Lullaby Trust safer-sleep guidance. Built by two parents who were fed up guessing.