A headache can last anywhere from 15 minutes to months or even years, depending on the type. Most common headaches resolve within a few hours to a few days, but some conditions produce headaches that never fully go away. Understanding the typical duration for each type helps you figure out what you’re dealing with and whether something unusual is going on.
Tension Headaches: 30 Minutes to 7 Days
Tension-type headaches are the most common kind, and they last anywhere from 30 minutes to 7 days per episode. Most people experience them as a dull, pressing band around both sides of the head. A single bad day at work might trigger one that fades in an hour or two, while a stressful week could keep one simmering for several days.
When tension headaches start showing up on 15 or more days per month, they’re classified as chronic. At that point, the pain can feel nearly constant, blending one episode into the next until it’s hard to tell where one headache ends and another begins. Chronic tension headaches often respond poorly to over-the-counter painkillers alone and typically need a different management approach, such as preventive strategies or lifestyle changes.
Migraines: 4 to 72 Hours
An untreated migraine attack typically lasts between 4 and 72 hours. That’s the headache phase itself, but the full experience stretches longer because migraines move through up to four distinct phases.
Before the pain even starts, many people enter a prodrome phase that can begin hours or days earlier. This shows up as mood changes, food cravings, neck stiffness, unusual thirst, fatigue, or a vague sense of feeling “off.” Some people learn to recognize these early signs as a warning that a migraine is coming. After the headache resolves, a recovery phase (sometimes called a “postdrome” or “migraine hangover”) can leave you feeling drained, foggy, or depressed for another day or two. Some people describe this aftermath as worse than the pain itself.
If a migraine attack pushes past the 72-hour mark without meaningful relief, it crosses into a category called status migrainosus. This is considered a complication of migraine rather than a normal attack. Brief breaks in pain from sleep or medication (up to 12 hours) don’t reset the clock. Status migrainosus often requires medical intervention beyond what you’d use at home.
Cluster Headaches: 15 Minutes to 3 Hours
Individual cluster headache attacks are shorter than most people expect, lasting 15 minutes to 3 hours each. But what makes them brutal is their frequency and intensity. The pain is severe, one-sided, and centered around the eye or temple, often accompanied by tearing, nasal congestion, or a drooping eyelid on the affected side.
These attacks come in “cluster periods” or bouts that last weeks to months, during which you might get one to several attacks per day, often at the same time each day. Between bouts, most people experience remission periods lasting months or years with no attacks at all. So while a single headache is relatively brief, the cluster period as a whole can dominate your life for weeks.
Headaches That Never Seem to Stop
Some headache disorders are defined by their persistence rather than their peaks. New daily persistent headache (NDPH) is one of the more frustrating types. It starts on a specific day that most people can pinpoint exactly, becomes continuous within 24 hours, and must be present for more than 3 months to meet the diagnostic criteria. Many people with NDPH remember the precise moment it began and describe it as a headache that simply never left.
Hemicrania continua is another continuous headache disorder. It produces a constant, one-sided headache lasting more than 3 months with no pain-free periods. The baseline pain is mild to moderate, but it flares periodically with more intense episodes. One distinguishing feature: it responds completely to a specific anti-inflammatory medication, and most people see relief within 24 hours of starting it, with many responding within 8 hours.
When Painkillers Make Headaches Last Longer
If you find yourself reaching for pain relievers most days of the week, the medication itself may be extending your headaches. Medication overuse headache develops when you use acute headache treatments too frequently: 15 or more days per month for simple painkillers like acetaminophen or ibuprofen, or 10 or more days per month for stronger options like combination painkillers or prescription migraine medications. This pattern has to persist for more than 3 months before it qualifies as medication overuse headache, but by that point, the cycle is well established.
Breaking the cycle means stopping the overused medication, which temporarily makes things worse. Withdrawal symptoms, including increased headache, nausea, restlessness, and anxiety, typically last up to 10 days for standard painkillers. For prescription migraine medications, withdrawal is usually shorter, around 4 to 7 days. Once you push through that window, the underlying headache pattern often improves significantly.
Post-Concussion Headaches
Headaches following a concussion or mild traumatic brain injury usually appear within 7 to 10 days of the injury. In many cases they resolve within a few weeks, but persistent post-concussive symptoms typically last longer than 3 months and can sometimes continue for a year or more. These headaches can resemble tension headaches or migraines and often come alongside other symptoms like difficulty concentrating, dizziness, and irritability.
Headaches That Need Immediate Attention
Duration alone isn’t always the most important factor. A thunderclap headache, one that reaches severe intensity (7 out of 10 or higher) within less than one minute, is a medical emergency regardless of how long it lasts. The defining feature is how fast the pain peaks, not how long it continues. This type of sudden, explosive headache can signal a brain bleed or other life-threatening condition.
Beyond thunderclap headaches, certain patterns warrant urgent evaluation: a headache that is dramatically different from any you’ve had before, one accompanied by fever and a stiff neck, a headache that worsens progressively over days with no relief, or any headache following a head injury that keeps getting worse rather than better. The general threshold that clinicians use to flag a concerning pattern is 15 or more headache days per month, which is the definition of chronic daily headache and a signal that something beyond occasional pain is driving the problem.