In 2020 a Monash University team put light sensors on 62 people across 59 Australian homes and recorded 163 nights of ordinary evenings. They were not measuring anything exotic. They were measuring what people actually have switched on between dinner and bed.
In 48 per cent of those homes, the light in the three hours before bed was bright enough to suppress melatonin by half or more. In 73 per cent it was bright enough to suppress it by at least a fifth. Homes lit with energy efficient lamps had roughly 90 per cent more melanopic light than homes still running incandescent globes.
That is the case for taking bedroom lighting seriously, and it is Australian, measured and peer reviewed rather than borrowed from a northern hemisphere blog. This guide sets out how to light a bedroom around that finding.
Why the bedroom is a harder room than the living room
A bedroom has to do two opposite jobs. In the morning and while you are getting dressed it needs enough light to see colours properly. In the hour before sleep it needs almost none. Most bedrooms are wired for exactly one of those and the switch by the door decides which.
Winter makes it worse. Sydney's sunset falls at 4.54 pm in late June, Melbourne at 5.08 pm. That means four to five hours of artificial light before a normal bedtime, every evening, for months.
The three things worth changing
1. Get the brightness off the ceiling switch
The single ceiling fitting is the reason bedrooms are too bright at night. It is not that the fitting is wrong, it is that it is the only option. Adding one low light beside the bed gives you a second setting, and the second setting is the one you will use most.
A bedside wall light does this better than a table lamp in a small room, because it gives the surface back to you and it puts the light above the book rather than beside your ear.
58cm Bedroom Wall Light – Bedside LampAUD $104.95Shop now
2. Make the evening light dimmable
The Monash group also found that sensitivity to evening light varies by more than fifty times between individuals. There is no single brightness that is right for everyone, which is precisely why a fixed setting fails and a dimmer does not. Their own recommendation is warm LEDs rather than cool ones, or a dimmer.
An international consensus paper published in 2022 put numbers on it: no more than about 10 melanopic lux at the eye in the evening, closer to 1 lux in the bedroom itself, and at least 250 lux during the day. You cannot measure melanopic lux at home, but the direction is unambiguous. Less light, later, and warmer.
31cm Dimmable Bedside Wall Lights – Rechargeable with Touch DimmingAUD $104.95Shop now
3. Choose the Kelvin number, not the label
The federal energy rating site recommends 2700 K for bedrooms and living rooms, and notes that blue light should be avoided in bedrooms because it suppresses melatonin. It reserves 4000 K for kitchens, studies and workshops.
The trouble is the words on the packaging. One major hardware chain calls 3500 to 4100 K bright white, a specialist lighting chain calls 3300 to 5300 K cool white, and those ranges overlap. Two globes sold as warm white in different shops can be several hundred Kelvin apart. Ignore the adjective and read the number.
How much light does a bedroom need in the first place
There is no mandatory lux level for a bedroom in Australia. AS/NZS 1680 is a workplace standard and its scope excludes decorative lighting, so anyone quoting a lux figure for your bedroom is quoting a retailer, not a regulation.
What is regulated is power. The National Construction Code caps lighting power density in a home at 5 watts per square metre. For a 12 square metre bedroom that is a budget of 60 watts, which in LED terms is around six 800 lumen sources. The cap is not the constraint it once was, and that is the point: with LEDs you can afford four or five separate light sources in a bedroom where halogen would have allowed two.
The same three layer approach runs through how to light a living room, and it transfers to a bedroom almost unchanged. Which is the whole argument for layers. The question is no longer how much light the room can have, it is how many separate settings you can give it.
Layer by layer, in a real bedroom
The ceiling layer
Keep it, and use it for the morning. Under a 2.4 metre ceiling, which is the National Construction Code minimum for a habitable room, an oyster or flush mount takes no headroom. At 2.7 metres a pendant has room to be seen.
If you have a choice, put the ceiling fitting on a dimmer or choose one with selectable colour temperature, so the same fitting can be 4000 K at seven in the morning and 2700 K at nine at night.
Modern Glass Bedroom Pendant LightsAUD $99.95Shop now
The bedside layer
This is the layer that decides whether the room works. Three practical requirements, in order of how often they are ignored.
- The switch has to be reachable without sitting up. A lamp you have to lean out of bed to turn off will be left on.
- The bottom of the shade wants to sit near shoulder height when you are propped up reading, roughly 55 to 65 cm above the mattress.
- It has to dim, or at least have a low setting. One brightness is not enough for a room used for reading and for winding down.
Touch dimming solves the first and the third at once, which is why cordless touch lamps have become the default bedside light rather than a novelty, a category we look at in detail in cordless rechargeable lamps. A cordless lamp also removes the cable that runs down the back of the bedside table, which in a small bedroom is the difference between a table you can move and one you cannot.
The charging trade off
The trade off is charging. A cordless bedside lamp used at low brightness for an hour or two a night will typically go a week or more between charges, but it does need a routine. If nobody in the house will ever plug it in, a corded lamp with a proper inline switch is the better answer.
28.2cm Dimmable Night Lamp – Rechargeable LED Touch Bedside LightAUD $59.95Shop now
The night layer
The light you need at two in the morning is not a reading light. It is enough to find the door and not enough to wake anyone. A motion sensing light low to the floor does this without a switch and without waking the person beside you.
This is also the layer that matters most in a hallway between a bedroom and a bathroom, where the alternative is switching on a full ceiling light in the middle of the night.
Two details decide whether a sensor light is tolerable. The first is the trigger delay, because a light that takes two seconds to notice you is a light you have already walked past. The second is whether it has a light level sensor as well as a motion sensor, so it stays off during the day instead of flickering every time someone crosses the room. Rechargeable units are the practical choice here because there is rarely a socket at floor level where you want the light.
LED Indoor Sensor Night LightAUD $39.95Shop now
Children's rooms
The advice that circulates about night lights, that they should be red or amber and under fifty lumens, is repeated everywhere and has no Australian health source behind it. We are not going to pretend otherwise.
What does hold up is the general finding: less light in the evening, warmer light, and light that can be turned down rather than only off. A dimmable lamp a child can operate themselves does more for bedtime than a lamp with a specific colour, because it removes the argument about the ceiling light entirely.
Floating LED Moon Lamp with Touch ControlAUD $119.95Shop now
If you rent
At the 2021 census, 30.6 per cent of occupied Australian homes were rented. That rules out changing the ceiling fitting, and it rules out adding a wall switch.
Everything above except the ceiling layer works without touching a wire. Rechargeable wall lights mount with adhesive or two screws and lift off to charge. Plugging an appliance into a socket by its flexible cord is explicitly not electrical work under Queensland's Electrical Safety Act, so nothing here needs a licence or a landlord.
Dimmable Wall Lamps for Bedroom – Wireless and Rechargeable with Remote ControlAUD $74.95Shop now
What to do first
- Add one light beside the bed that dims, so the ceiling switch stops being the only option.
- Move every globe in the room to 2700 K, read from the box rather than the label.
- Add a low motion sensing light for the middle of the night.
- Leave the ceiling fitting alone. It is the morning light, and it is doing its job.
Browse the range in bedroom lights, wall lights, table lamps and night lights.
Sources
Colour temperature labels compared across two Australian retailers, one hardware chain and one lighting specialist, August 2026.
Cain SW, McGlashan EM, Vidafar P et al., Evening home lighting
adversely impacts the circadian system and sleep, Scientific Reports, published
5 November 2020,
PMC7644684.
62 participants, 59 homes, 163 nights.
Brown TM et al., Recommendations for daytime, evening and night-time indoor light
exposure, PLOS Biology, 17 March 2022.
Colour temperature guidance, energyrating.gov.au, Australian Government.
National Construction Code 2022, minimum ceiling height, Australian Building
Codes Board.
Census of Population and Housing 2021, tenure type, Australian Bureau of
Statistics.
Electrical Safety Act 2002 (Qld), section 18(2).
Sunset times, United States Naval Observatory, 2026.