I don’t trust my Apple Watch’s Sleep Score, and neither should you

Macworld

At its iPhone 17 launch event, Apple announced a new watchOS 26 feature called Sleep Score. As its name suggests, the tool evaluates the quality of your sleep based on multiple factors, distilling the outcome into a simple number.

I was initially looking forward to trying Sleep Score, since the company made such a big deal out of it—making it, in fact, a keynote segment headliner. But after a month of active use, it’s become clear to me that Sleep Score is essentially just the same old Apple Watch sleep tracking with a new coat of paint. It does not collect any new sleep data, nor does it deeply analyze other relevant health metrics.

But Sleep Score can be saved. Here’s what Apple needs to do to truly elevate it.

How Sleep Score works

Before pointing out Sleep Score’s shortcomings, let’s take a closer, objective look at how it works. For starters, you’ll need an Apple Watch with sleep monitoring enabled or a similar third-party tracker that collects the same types of data. Once you update your iPhone to iOS 26, you’ll be able to check your Sleep Score in the built-in Apple Health app.

Sleep Score is a 100-point system that takes three main elements into consideration. Your sleep duration, bedtime consistency, and sleep interruptions account for 50, 30, and 20 points, respectively.

To earn the duration factor’s full 50 marks, it appears you need to sleep for at least 8 hours during a given night. Meanwhile, the grade for bedtime consistency depends on whether you sleep around the same time every night. Lastly, you can earn the 20 points for sleep interruptions if you don’t wake up for prolonged periods at night. While you probably won’t score a full mark nightly, claiming the 100 points is achievable, as I’ve done it a few times.

Given that Sleep Score does not gather any new metrics, you can actually check previous months’ ratings—assuming you’ve had the sleep tracking feature enabled. This only proves that Sleep Score is merely a new way to display existing data and doesn’t do much else.




Outliers can be clues to sleep problems, but don’t stop you scoring a perfect 100.Mahmoud Itani / Foundry

The missing ingredients

I was hoping for a meaningful upgrade to the classic sleep tracking feature but Sleep Score is, at best, a UI overhaul with a rating attached. We’ve long been able to check the nightly sleep duration, schedule, and interruptions. While assigning a score can reflect how consistent one’s sleeping habits are, the number itself can be a bit misleading.

Earning 100 points doesn’t necessarily equate to a perfect or even good night’s sleep. For example, if you’re sick and on painkillers, you could realistically score the full mark, despite waking up worn out and having outliers in the Health app’s Vitals section. Sleep Score doesn’t take into account your resting heart rate and heart rate variability, which can be strong indicators of one’s sleep quality and overall health.

Similarly, it completely disregards the previous days’ recorded workouts and burned calories, even though they could impact how well a user sleeps and feels the following morning. The same could be said about the Vitals feature’s recorded respiratory rate, wrist temperature, and blood oxygen levels, which Sleep Score excludes altogether.

Given its name, Sleep Score delivers on its promise; it rates your primary sleeping conditions. The problem, however, is that it fails to innovate or meaningfully enhance sleep tracking on watchOS. If Apple is unable to significantly upgrade the feature, the company should have rolled it out silently as the mostly cosmetic update it is.




A ‘body battery’ approach offers a more useful picture of your sleep health.Mahmoud Itani / Foundry

A simple patch

A more helpful approach would have been estimating users’ overall energy levels throughout the day. I use a HealthKit-enabled third-party app that accesses relevant metrics to display an all-encompassing ‘body battery’ score. These include my workouts, active energy, heart rate readings, wrist temperature, mindfulness minutes, sleep data, and more.

The app analyzes my sleep duration, heart rate, Vitals, and so on to figure out how recharged I am when I wake up. The refilled energy is similarly reflected through a 100-point scoring system. As the day goes by, my score drops depending on recorded workouts, heart rate, physical activity, and so on.

Beyond the overall body battery rating, the app estimates fatigue and stress levels. The readings tend to be accurate, as they account for recent weeks’ health data and aren’t limited to a single day’s measurements. The body battery route helps me get a realistic representation of my state in real time, instead of restricting me to a static score formed from incomplete sleep metrics.

Given that Apple reportedly plans to launch a Health+ service next year with AI coaching, I’m still hopeful. The company could potentially bundle a tool that reads a user’s entire Health app log and presents a meaningful report that dynamically changes every day. Until then, I’m hitting snooze on the Sleep Score feature.