Your body clears roughly one standard drink per hour, so alcohol from a single drink wears off in about 60 to 90 minutes, while a night of four or five drinks can take well into the next morning. That’s the short answer, but the full picture is more nuanced because “wearing off” means different things depending on whether you’re asking about intoxication, impairment, or detection on a test.
How Your Body Processes Alcohol
Your liver does nearly all the work. It breaks alcohol down in two steps: first into a toxic byproduct called acetaldehyde, then quickly into acetate, which your body converts to water and carbon dioxide. The average person with a body weight around 154 pounds (70 kg) metabolizes about 7 grams of alcohol per hour. Since a standard drink in the United States contains 14 grams of pure alcohol, that works out to about one drink every one to two hours.
This rate is mostly fixed. Your liver processes alcohol at a steady pace regardless of how much you’ve had, which is why drinking more doesn’t make your body work faster. It just means the line is longer.
A Rough Timeline by Number of Drinks
Because the liver clears alcohol at a relatively constant rate, you can estimate how long it takes to return to a zero blood alcohol concentration (BAC) based on how much you drank:
- 2 drinks: roughly 2 to 3 hours
- 4 drinks: roughly 4 to 6 hours
- 6 drinks: roughly 6 to 9 hours
- 8 drinks: roughly 8 to 12 hours
These are ballpark figures. Your actual clearance time depends on your body weight, sex, genetics, and whether you ate before drinking. If you finished your last drink at midnight and had six drinks over the evening, your BAC may not reach zero until 6 to 9 a.m. the next day.
Why It Takes Longer for Some People
Body size matters because alcohol distributes through your body’s water content. A smaller person reaches a higher BAC from the same number of drinks simply because the alcohol is more concentrated. The Widmark factor, a value researchers use to estimate BAC, averages around 0.68 for men and 0.55 for women, reflecting the fact that women typically have a lower proportion of body water and reach higher peak BAC levels from the same amount of alcohol.
Genetics play a significant role too. The enzymes responsible for breaking down alcohol vary from person to person. Some people produce more active versions of these enzymes and clear alcohol faster, while others, particularly some people of East Asian descent, carry enzyme variants that cause acetaldehyde to build up, leading to facial flushing and nausea even after small amounts of alcohol. Overall nutrition and how frequently someone drinks also influence how efficiently the liver handles its workload.
Food in your stomach slows the rate alcohol enters your bloodstream by delaying stomach emptying. This doesn’t change how fast your liver works, but it does lower your peak BAC, which means you reach zero sooner than you would drinking the same amount on an empty stomach.
Nothing Speeds It Up
Coffee, cold showers, exercise, and “sweating it out” are persistent myths. Research on caffeine and alcohol found that energy drinks combined with alcohol reduced how drunk people felt, but did not improve motor coordination, visual reaction time, or driving performance. Breath alcohol levels were identical whether caffeine was added or not. The danger is obvious: feeling more alert while still impaired.
Your liver sets the pace. There is no food, supplement, or activity that makes it metabolize alcohol faster. The only thing that sobers you up is time.
You Can Still Be Impaired at Zero BAC
Here’s the part most people don’t expect. Even after your blood alcohol level returns to zero, you may not be functioning normally. The alcohol hangover, by definition, begins as BAC approaches zero, and research shows it comes with measurable cognitive effects. Reaction times slow down during a hangover more reliably than accuracy drops, meaning you may feel like you’re thinking clearly but respond to things more slowly than usual.
A study using both lab and real-world data confirmed that the previous night’s peak BAC was the strongest predictor of hangover severity the next day. In practical terms, this means a heavier drinking session doesn’t just take longer to clear from your blood; it also produces a longer and more intense period of impaired performance afterward. If you’re planning to drive, operate equipment, or do anything requiring sharp reflexes the morning after heavy drinking, the fact that you’re technically “sober” may not tell the whole story.
How Long Alcohol Shows Up on Tests
Whether alcohol has “worn off” in the sense of being undetectable depends entirely on the type of test:
- Breath and blood: Standard BAC testing detects alcohol for up to 12 hours after your last drink.
- Urine: Basic urine tests pick up alcohol for 12 to 24 hours, but specialized tests that look for alcohol byproducts can detect drinking for up to 72 to 80 hours.
- Hair: Hair follicle tests can reveal alcohol use over a period of weeks to months.
- Saliva and sweat: Less commonly used, but saliva can detect recent drinking and sweat patches can accumulate traces over days.
For most people asking “when does alcohol wear off,” the relevant window is the breath and blood timeline. If you had your last drink at 1 a.m. and need to drive at 7 a.m., simple math on the number of drinks you had will give you a reasonable estimate of whether your BAC has reached zero. But remember that impairment can linger beyond that point, especially after heavy drinking.
Putting It Into Practice
The most useful rule of thumb: count your drinks and allow at least one hour per drink after your last one before assuming you’re clear. If you had five drinks and stopped at midnight, plan on being at zero BAC no earlier than 5 a.m., and expect some residual sluggishness beyond that. If you’re a smaller person or you drank on an empty stomach, add extra time. The math won’t be perfect because individual metabolism varies, but it’s far more reliable than waiting until you “feel fine.”