How Long Should Maths Homework Actually Take?

28 August 2026 · by Larry

It is a quarter past nine. There are four questions left. Somebody has cried, and it might not be the child.

The question every parent asks at that moment is the same one: is this normal? Should a worksheet take this long, or is something wrong — with the homework, with my child, or with how we are doing this?

I will not give you a number of minutes, because I do not have one to give. There is no figure I can point you to and say that is what it should take, and anyone who hands you one confidently has made it up. Children differ, worksheets differ, and a good evening and a bad evening can contain the same amount of maths.

What I can offer is a better question, and it turns out to be much more useful.

Not how long. Where the time went.

Two hours is not one thing. It is at least three completely different evenings, and they look identical from the kitchen.

Two hours of actual working. The child sat down, worked steadily, and it genuinely took two hours. Nothing is wrong with the child. Either there is a lot of homework, or it is pitched harder than the class can do independently.

Two hours containing twenty minutes of maths. Sharpening. Water. Toilet. A discussion about the pencil case. Twenty minutes of work spread thinly across two hours of avoidance. This is usually not laziness — it is what avoidance looks like when something in the work is frightening.

Two hours on one question. The child got stuck at question four and never got past it, and everything after it is untouched. From outside this looks like two hours of homework. It is actually four minutes of homework and one hundred and sixteen minutes of being stuck alone.

Notice that shorten the homework only helps the first one. The other two get worse if you shorten it, because the underlying problem stays and now there is less time.

How to find out which one you have

You do not have to sit there watching, which nobody enjoys and which changes the behaviour anyway.

Do this instead. When your child starts, note the time. Thirty minutes later, walk past and put a small pencil dot in the margin next to wherever they have got to. Then leave. At the end of the session, look at the page.

• Steady progress before and after the dot: it is genuinely long homework. That is real information and it is not about your child at all.
• Very little done by the dot, then a rush at the end: the first hour was avoidance. The question to ask is what they were avoiding.
• Nothing after the dot, and one question with three crossed-out attempts: they were stuck, and they did not tell you. This is the most common one and the easiest to fix.

That single dot tells you more than an hour of hovering, and your child barely notices you did it.

Decide when you are stopping, before you start

This is the change that helps most households, and it feels wrong the first time.

Before the worksheet comes out, agree a stopping time out loud. "We stop at half past eight, finished or not." Then honour it — the whole thing depends on honouring it, including on the night when they are nearly done.

Two things happen. The child stops stretching the work to fill the evening, because there is nothing to be gained by it. And more importantly, the evening starts producing information: what was still unfinished at half past eight is a fact about the homework, not a verdict on your child.

A word of care here. A stopping time is not the same as timing each question, and the difference matters — a clock on individual questions punishes rereading, which is exactly the thing a child should do on a hard problem. I have written about that separately in timing your child on maths. Stop the session. Do not time the thinking.

Telling the teacher, in a way that gets a response

Most parents either say nothing for a year or send a message that reads as a complaint. There is a middle option that teachers can actually act on, and it is simply facts.

Not: "The homework is too much."
But: "She worked from 7 to 8.15 and got through three of the ten questions. She was stuck on question four for most of it."

The second version is useful to a teacher in a way the first is not. It tells them where the work broke down, and it tells them it happened at home rather than in class where they would have seen it. Teachers generally do not know how long homework takes at your kitchen table — they only see what comes back.

The stopping time makes this message possible, because it gives you an honest end point to report.

The one thing that genuinely shortens homework

Not tricks, and not doing it for them. It is the facts that should be automatic.

If a child works out 7 × 8 every single time it appears, then every question containing it costs extra — extra time, and extra concentration that was needed for the actual problem. Across a worksheet, that adds up to a great deal of the evening. A child who recalls it instantly is not smarter; they are just not paying that toll twenty times a night.

This is the part that is worth practising on a calm day, away from homework, in small amounts. Times tables — memorising, understanding, and the order that works covers how, and counting on fingers covers when it is a problem and when it honestly is not.

If the stall is on word problems rather than on calculation, that is a different repair — the sums are fine and the story is not, and that has its own note.

Three things not to do at nine o'clock

• Do not finish it for them. It removes the only signal the teacher would have received.
• Do not add extra practice on a night that already went badly. Nothing is learned after the point where everyone is upset, and it teaches the child that finishing is punished with more.
• Do not push through to eleven. A tired child at eleven is not doing maths. Tomorrow's school day pays for it, and so does the next homework session.

The short version

There is no correct number of minutes, and chasing one will not help you. Find out where the time actually went, agree a stopping time before you begin, and report what happened as facts rather than as a complaint.

And on the evenings when it goes badly anyway — and there will be some — stopping is allowed. An unfinished worksheet and a child who is still willing to try tomorrow is a better outcome than a finished one and a child who is not. If checking the work is its own battle in your house, that one has a note too.