How to Set a Sleep Timer on Spotify (iPhone, Android, and Desktop)

By the LuxRise team · Last reviewed August 2026

Spotify has a built-in sleep timer. It's just tucked three taps deep, lives in a different spot for podcasts than for music, and doesn't exist at all on desktop, which is why so many people assume it was removed. It wasn't. Here's exactly where it is on every device, what to do when it vanishes, and how to get around its 60-minute cap.

The quick answer

Play a song, tap the three dots in the top-right of the Now Playing screen, scroll down, and tap Sleep timer. Pick a length, and Spotify fades out and pauses when time's up. That's it.

Every length below fades the audio out and pauses playback when it expires. End of track and End of episode are the two exceptions: they wait for the current item to finish instead of cutting at a fixed time.

The timer works on Spotify Free and Premium alike. Everything below covers the details, including the two cases the quick answer doesn't solve: desktop, and anything longer than an hour.

How to set a sleep timer on Spotify on iPhone or iPad

1. Start your music

   Open Spotify and start the song or playlist you want to fall asleep to.

2. Open the Now Playing screen

   Tap the mini-player at the bottom so the full Now Playing screen opens.

3. Open the menu

   Tap the three dots in the top-right corner.

4. Tap Sleep timer

   Scroll down the menu and tap Sleep timer.

5. Choose a length

   Choose 5, 10, 15, 30, or 45 minutes, 1 hour, or End of track.

You'll see a brief "Sleep timer set" confirmation, and a small moon appears near the playback controls while a timer is running. Some accounts also get a dedicated moon icon right on the Now Playing screen: same timer, one tap sooner. Spotify rolls interface changes out in waves, so don't worry if your app looks slightly different from a friend's.

Setting the sleep timer on Android

Same path, same menu. Open the Now Playing screen, tap the three dots in the top-right, scroll to Sleep timer, and pick your length. The options match iPhone exactly, from 5 minutes up to 1 hour plus End of track.

If your Android app shows the timer somewhere else, or not at all, you're almost certainly on an old version. Update from the Play Store and it comes back.

Podcasts have their own sleep timer (in a different place)

This trips up more people than anything else. When a podcast is playing, the sleep timer isn't buried in the three-dot menu. It gets its own button, a small stopwatch icon below the playback controls on some versions, a crescent moon on others. Tap it and you'll see the usual minute options plus End of episode, which is the one to use: the episode finishes naturally and playback stops, so you're not hunting for where you dozed off mid-sentence.

So if you were just listening to a podcast and now can't find the timer for music, or the reverse, nothing is broken. Spotify simply put the same feature in two different places.

Is there a Spotify sleep timer on desktop, Mac, or the web player?

No. The sleep timer exists only in the iPhone, iPad, and Android apps. The desktop app for Windows and Mac has never had one, and neither has the web player. Nothing was removed; the feature was never built. People have been asking Spotify for it in the community forums for years.

Two honest workarounds:

• Play from your phone instead. If bedtime listening is the goal, start the music on your phone (where the timer exists) rather than the laptop.
• Put the computer itself to sleep. Both Windows and macOS can be set to sleep after a fixed period of inactivity, which stops playback with it. Blunt, but it works.

The iPhone Clock trick that stops any audio

If your phone is the speaker, iOS has a built-in timer that outdoes Spotify's: open the Clock app, go to Timers, tap When Timer Ends, scroll to the bottom, and pick Stop Playing. Start the timer, and when it ends the iPhone halts whatever audio is playing (Spotify, Apple Music, podcasts, anything) and locks the screen.

It's also the answer to two questions Spotify's own timer can't handle: it works for any duration you type in, whether that's 90 minutes or 3 hours, and it works even when an app has no timer of its own.

Spotify sleep timer missing or grayed out? Five fixes

"Sleep timer is missing" threads fill Spotify's own community forums, and the fix is almost always one of these:

1. You're looking in the wrong menu for the content type. Music hides the timer in the three-dot menu; podcasts put it on a button below the playback controls. Check the other spot first; this solves most cases.
2. Update the app. The timer's location has moved across redesigns, and old versions can lose the menu entry entirely. Update via the App Store or Play Store.
3. Force-quit and reopen. The three-dot menu occasionally loads without its full option list mid-session. Swipe the app away, reopen, try again.
4. Log out and back in, or reinstall. The stubborn cases in Spotify's forums usually clear after a fresh login or a clean reinstall.
5. You're on desktop or the web player. The timer was never there. Move to your phone or use the workarounds above.

And no, Spotify didn't remove the sleep timer. Every redesign and staged rollout sparks a fresh "bring it back" thread, but the feature has stayed put in the mobile apps. It's a hide-and-seek problem, not a removal.

Want a timer longer than 60 minutes?

Spotify's fixed options top out at 1 hour. Three ways past it:

• The iPhone Clock trick above. Type in any length, 2 hours or 4 hours, and pick Stop Playing. The cleanest option on iOS.
• Let a playlist simply end. Build (or pick) a playlist that runs the length you want and turn off Autoplay so Spotify doesn't keep feeding similar songs afterward: Settings, Playback, Autoplay, toggle it off. The playlist becomes its own timer.
• Chain it. Set the 1-hour timer, and if you're somehow still awake when it ends, set another. Not elegant, but you'll rarely need the second one.

A calmer way to fall asleep to Spotify, and wake up to it

Spotify's timer does exactly one job: it stops the music. It won't help you pick what to fall asleep to, it forgets your setting every night, and it has nothing to say about the other end of the night, the alarm.

That's the gap LuxRise was built for: a free sleep timer app for iPhone that connects to your own Spotify or Apple Music account and handles the whole night.

• Curated sleep soundscapes. Eight playlists spanning rain, piano, lofi, healing frequencies, jazz, white noise and lullabies, streamed from your own account, with a built-in 15, 30 or 60-minute sleep timer. There's real evidence behind the habit: a 2022 Cochrane review found moderate-certainty evidence that listening to music can improve sleep quality in adults with insomnia symptoms. Plain white noise is the exception: a 2021 systematic review found the evidence for it mixed and of very low quality, so treat it as one option among the eight rather than the whole plan.
• A wake-up alarm that plays your music. The same app lets you wake up to Spotify, any song or playlist from your library, with a gradual volume fade-in instead of a jolt. And it's engineered to ring no matter what: if streaming or your network fails at 6 a.m., it falls back to a built-in sound.
• Actually free. No ads, no subscription, no in-app purchases. The timer, the soundscapes and the alarm all come with the app.

If you'd rather weigh it against everything else on the store first, we tested and compared every iPhone music alarm app, with the real price behind each free-trial screen. And if setup questions come up, the LuxRise support page covers Spotify and Apple Music connection, the sleep timer, and alarm reliability.

Spotify sleep timer FAQ