How Long Should You Stay in a Sauna? Times by Type and Experience

Most people should stay in a traditional sauna for 10 to 20 minutes per round at 70°C to 90°C, then get out and cool down before deciding whether to go back in. Beginners should stop at 5 to 10 minutes. Infrared saunas work at far lower air temperatures, so sessions of 20 to 40 minutes are normal there, while steam rooms are best kept to 10 to 15 minutes. Two or three rounds is a full session for a regular; one round is plenty when you're starting.

Those numbers shift with the room's heat, your bench height and how your body handles it on the day, which is why the clock should only ever be a ceiling. If you want the temperature side in detail, our guide to sauna temperature covers it, so this page sticks to time.

How long to stay in each type of sauna

Type	Beginner	Regular user	Notes
Finnish (dry) sauna, 70°C to 90°C	5 to 10 min	10 to 20 min per round, 2 or 3 rounds	Hotter rooms and water on the stones mean shorter rounds
Infrared cabin or tent, 45°C to 65°C	15 to 20 min	20 to 40 min, one sitting	Slower to heat you, so longer sessions are fine
Steam room, 40°C to 45°C	5 to 10 min	10 to 15 min	Humidity makes it feel hotter than the number
Portable steam tent	10 to 15 min	20 to 30 min	Head usually outside, so it's gentler
Infrared sauna blanket	15 to 20 min	30 to 45 min	Lower settings for longer sessions

The Finnish sauna is the one where people overdo it. Dry air at 85°C feels manageable because your sweat evaporates quickly, so it's easy to sit there past the point where you should've left, and the dizziness tends to hit when you stand up rather than while you're sitting. Rounds rather than marathons are the fix.

Infrared is the opposite problem: it heats you slowly, and 10 minutes in a 50°C tent barely gets you sweating. That's why manufacturers suggest 30 minutes or so, and why the infrared vs traditional sauna comparison matters if you're deciding which to buy. For blankets, the controller setting is a liner temperature against your body, not an air reading; owners who go past 45 minutes rarely report getting anything extra for it.

Your first few sessions

Sit on the lower bench. Heat rises, so the top row in a stove-heated room can be noticeably hotter than the bottom one, and moving down a level is the single easiest way to make a strong sauna bearable.

A sensible first visit looks like this: 5 to 10 minutes in, out for a lukewarm or cool shower, then sit somewhere at room temperature for 5 to 10 minutes and drink some water. If you still feel normal, a second short round is fine. If you feel washed out, stop there; you'll learn far more about your tolerance from three short visits a week than one long one.

After that, add a couple of minutes per round each week until you reach 12 to 15 minutes. Plenty of regulars never go beyond that, and they aren't missing out.

Rounds and cool-downs

Finns don't sit in one long block. The classic pattern is a round in the heat, a cool-down (shower, plunge pool or just fresh air), a rest, and repeat:

1. Heat: 10 to 15 minutes, less if water's going on the stones.
2. Cool: 1 to 3 minutes under a cool shower, or a short cold plunge if you're used to it.
3. Rest: 5 to 10 minutes sitting down at room temperature, with water.
4. Repeat once or twice.

Total heat exposure across a session then lands around 30 to 45 minutes, spread out in a way your body copes with much better than 40 minutes in one go. If you want to add proper cold water between rounds, our guide on how long to stay in an ice bath has the time limits for that half.

After training

Wait until your heart rate and breathing have settled, which is usually 20 to 60 minutes after your last set, and get some fluid in before you go anywhere near the heat. Then shorten your normal round by a few minutes, because you're already down on fluid from the workout. Our sauna after a workout guide covers the timing, hydration and what the recovery research does and doesn't show, so there's no point repeating it here.

How often per week

Frequency matters more than how long any single session lasts. The study most people mean when they talk about sauna and heart health is a Finnish cohort of 2,315 men aged 42 to 60, followed for a median of 20.7 years (Laukkanen et al., JAMA Internal Medicine, 2015). Compared with men who used a sauna once a week, those going 4 to 7 times a week had a much lower adjusted risk of sudden cardiac death, fatal heart disease and death from all causes.

Duration showed up too, though less cleanly. Sessions lasting more than 19 minutes were linked with a lower risk of sudden cardiac death than sessions under 11 minutes, and the 11 to 19 minute group sat in between with no clear difference. That pattern held for fatal heart disease but not for death from all causes.

Two caveats before anyone books a daily slot. This was observational, so it shows an association, and men who sauna most days in Finland may differ from once-a-week users in plenty of other ways. And it was middle-aged Finnish men in hot, dry saunas, which tells you very little about a 50°C tent in a spare room. A later review by the same group gathered the wider evidence on blood pressure, cardiovascular outcomes and other conditions, and still described it as mostly observational (Laukkanen et al., Mayo Clinic Proceedings, 2018).

The practical takeaway: two to four sessions a week of 10 to 20 minutes is realistic for most people, and more often is fine if you enjoy it and feel well.

Warning signs to get out

Leave the sauna at the first sign of any of these, however long you've been in:

• Dizziness or feeling light-headed
• Headache, nausea or cramps
• A racing or pounding heart that doesn't settle
• Feeling confused, or unusually irritable
• Intense thirst, or skin that feels hot but has stopped sweating

Most of those overlap with the NHS list of heat exhaustion symptoms. The NHS advice is to move somewhere cooler, drink water or a rehydration drink, and cool the skin; if you aren't feeling better within 30 minutes, it can become heatstroke, which needs a 999 call (NHS: heat exhaustion and heatstroke). Stand up slowly at the end of every round, too, because heat lowers your blood pressure and the faint usually comes on the way to the door.

Who should limit time or avoid saunas

• Pregnancy: talk to your midwife or GP before using a sauna, steam room or hot tub, and keep any sessions short and cooler if they give you the go-ahead.
• Heart conditions: anyone with unstable heart disease, uncontrolled blood pressure, or a recent heart attack, chest pain or stroke should get medical advice first. The same goes if you take medication that affects blood pressure or sweating.
• Alcohol: don't mix it with a sauna. It dehydrates you, blunts your sense of overheating and makes the drop in blood pressure when you stand up far more likely to end badly.
• Illness: skip it if you've got a fever, a stomach bug or you're already dehydrated.

Doing it at home

A home unit makes frequency easy, which is the part that seems to matter. Our best home sauna UK guide compares cabins, tents and blankets, and the session times above apply whichever you pick: shorter in anything hot and dry, longer in infrared, and always with water nearby.

Recommended reads

1. Sauna temperature: how hot should it be?
2. Sauna after a workout: timing and session length
3. Infrared sauna vs traditional sauna
4. The best home sauna in the UK
5. All our recovery guides and reviews