Being drunk typically lasts anywhere from one to six hours, depending on how much you drank. Your body eliminates roughly one standard drink per hour, so the math is fairly straightforward: three drinks means about three hours of elevated blood alcohol, plus additional time as levels taper down. But several factors can stretch or shorten that window significantly.
How Alcohol Moves Through Your Body
After you take a drink, alcohol absorbs quickly through your stomach and small intestine into your bloodstream. How fast it peaks depends on what you’re drinking. Spirits mixed with a mixer hit peak blood alcohol in about 36 minutes on an empty stomach. Wine takes closer to 54 minutes, and beer is the slowest at roughly 62 minutes. All three peak within about an hour when you haven’t eaten.
Once alcohol is circulating, your liver does the heavy lifting. It breaks alcohol down into a toxic intermediate compound, then quickly converts that into harmless acetate, which your body flushes as water and carbon dioxide. The average person’s liver processes about 7 grams of alcohol per hour. That works out to roughly one standard drink per hour: 12 ounces of regular beer, 5 ounces of wine, or a 1.5-ounce shot of liquor. Each of these contains about 14 grams of pure alcohol.
This rate is mostly fixed. Your liver can’t be rushed, which is why “sobering up” strategies don’t work (more on that below). If you have four drinks in an hour, your body needs approximately four hours just to process the alcohol, not counting the time it took to absorb.
What Changes How Long You Stay Drunk
The one-drink-per-hour rule is an average, and real-world results vary quite a bit based on your body and circumstances.
Food in your stomach: This is the single biggest variable you can control. Eating before or while drinking, especially carbohydrates, dramatically slows absorption. Blood alcohol levels in someone who ate a full meal may reach only a quarter of what they’d hit on an empty stomach from the same amount of alcohol. That means a slower, lower peak and a shorter period of noticeable intoxication.
Body size and composition: A larger person has more blood volume to dilute alcohol, so the same number of drinks produces a lower concentration. Body fat matters too, because fat doesn’t absorb alcohol the way water-rich tissue does. Two people who weigh the same but carry different amounts of body fat will reach different blood alcohol levels from identical drinks.
Biological sex: Women generally reach higher blood alcohol levels than men from the same amount of alcohol, even after adjusting for body weight. This happens for two reasons: women tend to have a higher proportion of body fat and a smaller blood volume, so alcohol is more concentrated. Women also produce less of the stomach enzyme that begins breaking down alcohol before it ever reaches the bloodstream.
Drinking speed: Sipping three drinks over three hours keeps your blood alcohol relatively low because your liver processes alcohol nearly as fast as you consume it. Downing those same three drinks in 30 minutes overwhelms your liver and sends blood alcohol climbing steeply.
What Different Levels of Intoxication Feel Like
Blood alcohol concentration (BAC) is measured as a percentage, and each range comes with a distinct set of effects. At 0.02%, you might notice a slightly altered mood, some relaxation, and a subtle shift in judgment. By 0.05%, you feel noticeably uninhibited, your alertness drops, and your judgment is impaired enough that you may not realize it.
At 0.08%, the legal driving limit in most U.S. states (0.05% in Utah), muscle coordination declines and your ability to detect danger weakens. Reach 0.10% and your reaction time slows visibly, speech starts to slur, and thinking feels sluggish. At 0.15%, expect mood swings, nausea, vomiting, and real difficulty with balance. Between 0.15% and 0.30%, confusion and drowsiness set in heavily. Above 0.30%, you’re in the territory of alcohol poisoning, loss of consciousness, and genuine medical emergency. A BAC over 0.40% can be fatal.
These levels drop at the same roughly one-drink-per-hour pace. So if you’ve reached a BAC of 0.16% after a night of heavy drinking, it could take eight hours or more before you’re back to zero.
Why Coffee and Cold Showers Don’t Help
Caffeine does not lower your blood alcohol level at all. Studies combining energy drinks with alcohol found that breath alcohol readings were identical whether caffeine was present or not. What caffeine does is make you feel less drunk. People who mix alcohol and caffeine report lower subjective intoxication, but their actual motor coordination and reaction times remain just as impaired. This is arguably worse than doing nothing, because it creates a false sense of sobriety while your brain and body are still compromised.
Cold showers, fresh air, and exercise don’t speed up metabolism either. Your liver works at its own pace regardless of what you do to the outside of your body. The only thing that reliably lowers blood alcohol is time.
How Long Alcohol Shows Up on Tests
Feeling sober again doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll pass every test. Standard breath, blood, and saliva tests can detect alcohol for up to 12 hours after your last drink. Urine tests have a slightly longer window because urine sits in your bladder. Specialized urine tests that look for alcohol byproducts rather than alcohol itself can detect drinking for considerably longer, though these are typically used in clinical or legal settings, not routine screenings.
For practical purposes, if you drank heavily the night before, you could still blow a positive breathalyzer the next morning. A person who stops drinking at midnight with a BAC of 0.16% might not reach 0.00% until 8 a.m. or later.
The Hangover Phase
Even after your blood alcohol returns to zero, you’re not necessarily in the clear. Hangover symptoms typically begin as your BAC is falling, peak right around the time it hits zero, and can persist for up to 24 hours after that.
Several things drive a hangover simultaneously. Alcohol is a diuretic: four drinks can cause your body to flush 600 to 1,000 milliliters of extra water over the following hours, leaving you dehydrated. Alcohol also disrupts sleep architecture. You may fall asleep faster, but as your blood alcohol drops, your nervous system rebounds into a state of excitation that fragments sleep and shortens it. This rebound also explains the anxiety, racing heart, and restlessness many people feel the morning after, as your brain’s calming and stimulating systems are temporarily out of balance.
The toxic intermediate your liver produces while breaking down alcohol also contributes. At higher concentrations, it triggers rapid pulse, sweating, flushing, and nausea. Darker-colored drinks like bourbon, red wine, and brandy contain higher levels of other biologically active compounds called congeners, which can intensify these effects. And disrupted circadian rhythms from late-night drinking create something resembling jet lag, adding fatigue and mental fog on top of everything else.
Rough Timelines by Number of Drinks
These estimates assume an average-sized adult drinking on a moderately full stomach:
- 1 to 2 drinks: Mild effects lasting 1 to 2 hours. BAC likely stays below 0.05% and returns to zero within 2 to 3 hours.
- 3 to 4 drinks: Noticeable intoxication lasting 2 to 4 hours. BAC may reach 0.08% to 0.12%, taking 4 to 6 hours to fully clear.
- 5 to 7 drinks: Significant impairment lasting 4 to 6 hours. BAC could reach 0.15% or higher, requiring 7 to 10 hours to return to zero.
- 8+ drinks: Heavy intoxication that can take 10 hours or longer to fully metabolize. Hangover symptoms may extend well into the following day.
These are rough guides. A smaller person drinking on an empty stomach will hit higher levels faster and stay impaired longer. A larger person who ate a big meal will track shorter. The one constant is that your liver clears about one drink per hour, and nothing you do can meaningfully change that rate.