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Ferber Method Chart Printable

The progressive waiting chart, printed on one page with a night log beside it — and the intervals editable, because the widely reproduced ones are from a trade book rather than from any medical publisher this site is allowed to cite. One method among several; this is the chart if you have chosen it.

No account, no email, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Where these numbers come from, before you print them. The familiar table — three minutes, then five, then ten, lengthening across the week — was published in Richard Ferber’s book Solve Your Child’s Sleep Problems, and every version of it online is a reproduction of that. No publisher this site is allowed to cite reprints it: not the NHS, not the American Academy of Pediatrics, not the NIH, and not a paper on PubMed. They are loaded here as editable defaults, not as medical guidance, and every cell is yours to change.

This site takes no position on whether to use it. Progressive waiting is one approach among several and this page does not sell it, sell against it or sell a course in it. What it can do is print you a good chart if you have already decided, and keep the record of what actually happens honest.

Set your own intervals

The widely reproduced table from the book, minute for minute. Change any cell and the sheet follows.

7

Nights on the chart. The book’s table stops at seven; beyond that most people hold the last row rather than keep extending, and there is no published rule either way.

Night First check Second Third Then every

Minutes to wait before going in. Leave a cell empty and the sheet prints an empty box to fill in by hand.

The night log
7

This chart estimates nothing and predicts nothing. It prints the waiting times you set and a grid for what actually happened. How long any of it takes varies enormously between children, and no source on this page attaches a number of nights to anything — the book’s own table simply stops at seven. If a week produces nothing at all, that is information rather than a verdict: stopping, and trying again in a month or not at all, is a legitimate decision.

What the trials actually measured, in both directions. A randomised trial of graduated extinction, bedtime fading and a control in infants aged 6 to 16 months found real sleep improvements over the control, a modest decline in salivary cortisol in both active groups, and no differences in parent-child attachment or in emotional and behavioural problems twelve months later. A separate randomised trial followed children to the age of six and found no evidence of differences from usual care on mental health, sleep, stress regulation, the parent-child relationship or maternal mental health — no marked long-lasting effects in either direction. Neither trial tested this particular table of minutes. Anybody telling you the strong version of either story is going beyond what was measured.

Safe sleep does not change because a method is in progress. Every check, every settle and every sleep: on their back, on a firm flat surface, in a cot clear of blankets, pillows, bumpers and soft toys, in your room for at least the first six months, with nothing weighted on or over her. If your baby is unwell, feeding poorly, or something simply feels wrong, that is a call to your pediatrician or health visitor rather than a night to push through. Nothing on this page is medical advice and no printable can see your baby.

How this is worked out

  1. The chart is a table of waiting times: how long you leave it before the first check of the night, the second, the third and every one after that, with the waits getting longer as the nights go on. That is the whole mechanism, and the sheet prints it as a grid you can read at arm's length in a dark hallway.
  2. Where the numbers come from, said plainly, because it is the thing every other page in this search result skips. The familiar table — three minutes, then five, then ten on the first night, growing across the week — was published in Richard Ferber's book Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems, and every version of it online is a reproduction of that. No publisher this site is allowed to cite prints it: not the NHS, not the American Academy of Pediatrics, not the NIH, and not a paper on PubMed. It is loaded here as an editable default with that attribution on the paper itself, and it is not medical guidance.
  3. Because they are defaults rather than instructions, every cell is yours to change. Families routinely start gentler than the book — one, two and four minutes is a common first night — or hold the same numbers for two nights instead of moving up daily, and the chart takes whatever you put in it. There is also a preset that starts short, and a plain empty table if you would rather write your own in pencil.
  4. What is actually measured, as opposed to what is published as a schedule: two randomised trials on graduated extinction as a category. The first randomised infants aged 6 to 16 months to graduated extinction, bedtime fading or a control, found sleep benefits over the control, saw salivary cortisol decline modestly in both active groups, and found no differences in attachment or in emotional and behavioural problems at twelve months. The second followed children up at the age of six and found no evidence of differences from usual care on mental health, sleep, stress regulation, the parent-child relationship or maternal mental health — no marked long-lasting effects in either direction. Neither trial tested Ferber's particular numbers.
  5. The night log is the half that will be worth more to you in a fortnight. Date, time down, the time of each check, when she settled, how many times she woke after that, and a line of notes — because whether this is working is a question about the trend across a week, and nobody remembers a week of nights accurately. It prints on the same page, at true page size, A4 or US Letter.
Questions

The short answers

The widely reproduced table starts at three minutes before the first check on the first night, then five, then ten, and lengthens over the following nights — five, ten and twelve on night two; ten, twelve and fifteen on night three, and so on up to around thirty minutes by the end of the first week. That table is from Richard Ferber's book, and this is the part worth knowing: no medical publisher this site is allowed to cite reprints it, so nobody can hand you a version of it stamped by a health body. The chart here loads those numbers because they are what people mean by the query, and it lets you change every one of them.
Neither absolute survives contact with what was actually measured, and this page will not pretend otherwise in either direction. A randomised trial of graduated extinction, bedtime fading and a control in infants aged 6 to 16 months found real sleep improvements over the control, a modest decline in salivary cortisol in both active groups, and no differences in parent-child attachment or in emotional and behavioural problems twelve months later. A separate randomised trial followed children to the age of six and found no evidence of differences from usual care on any outcome it looked at — mental health, sleep, stress regulation, the parent-child relationship, maternal mental health. The reasonable reading is that these techniques help sleep in the short to medium term and that the strong claims made about them, in both directions, are not what the trials found.
The trials on this page recruited infants from six months, and that is the honest floor for what has been measured — younger than that, you are outside the evidence rather than inside it. The AAP's own gentler suggestion, putting a baby down drowsy rather than asleep, starts from around four months, when sleep cycles become more regular. Below four months there is no consensus figure published for anything about sleep, because the normal variation is too wide, and night feeds are still part of the picture for most babies. If your baby is unwell, teething badly or in the middle of a fortnight of disrupted nights, the answer is usually to wait rather than to start.
The book's own table stops around the seventh night, and what people usually do is hold the last row rather than keep extending the waits forever. This chart lets you set as many nights as you want and to put the same numbers on several rows, which is what "holding" looks like on paper. Worth saying plainly: there is no published rule for what happens after the first week, so any confident answer you read is somebody's practice rather than a finding. If a week has produced nothing at all, that is information — stopping and trying something else, or nothing, in a month is a legitimate result and not a failure.
No, and no. Progressive waiting is one approach among several — bedtime fading, which moves bedtime later to meet the sleep the child actually has, was the other arm of the trial cited above and performed comparably; there are also gradual-retreat and pick-up-put-down approaches, and there is doing nothing in particular, which is also a decision. This site takes no position on which of them a household should use, and it does not sell a course in any of them. What it can do is print you a good chart if you have already chosen, and keep the record honest about what is known.
The intervals you set and the sheet options are saved in this browser under one key so the chart opens as you left it. Nothing is sent anywhere, there is no account and no server sees any of it, and the button under the controls deletes it. A private window forgets it on its own.

Where this comes from

  1. Pediatrics (PubMed) (2016). Behavioral Interventions for Infant Sleep Problems: A Randomized Controlled Trial. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27221288/
  2. Pediatrics (PubMed) (2012). Five-year follow-up of harms and benefits of behavioral infant sleep intervention: randomized trial. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22966034/
  3. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2024). Getting Your Baby to Sleep. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/sleep/Pages/getting-your-baby-to-sleep.aspx
  4. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2013). Sleeping Through the Night. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/sleep/Pages/Sleeping-Through-the-Night.aspx
  5. American Academy of Pediatrics (HealthyChildren.org) (2022). How to Keep Your Sleeping Baby Safe: AAP Policy Explained. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/ages-stages/baby/sleep/Pages/A-Parents-Guide-to-Safe-Sleep.aspx
  6. NHS (2025). Reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). https://www.nhs.uk/baby/caring-for-a-newborn/reduce-the-risk-of-sudden-infant-death-syndrome/

Every link above was opened and read when this page was last updated. Snuggle is not affiliated with any of these organisations and none of them has reviewed this page. Nothing here is medical advice.

Go deeper

The reading behind this page

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The Ferber Method, Explained

Graduated extinction, under the name everybody uses. What the trials found, what the interval chart actually is, and the questions the method pages skip.

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Cry It Out: What the Evidence Says

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When to Start Sleep Training

Every trial in this subject enrolled babies of six months or older. What that does and does not tell you about your four-month-old, and the honest answer for the months underneath.

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The app this site is for

Snuggle does this with your baby’s own pattern.

This page works from an age band, because an age band is all a web page knows about you. Snuggle starts from the same bands and then blends them with what your baby actually did today — how long she lasted, when she went down, how the last nap ran — and shows on the face of the ring how sure it is. Early estimates say they are early.

It logs sleep, feeds, nappies and growth in one tap on a dim red screen, and every caregiver in the household is on the same timeline in their own account. The arithmetic runs on the phone, on your baby’s own history. There are no AI features in it.

In development for iPhone and Android. Not released yet — when it is, it will be on this site.

What Snuggle is