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Learning center / Acoustics by building type / Bedroom and nursery

Acoustic panels for bedrooms: the complete guide

What makes bedrooms noisy, which panels fix it, and how to plan treatment from start to finish.

2 minute read · Updated Nov 2026

A quieter, softer room for sleep and for kids. Acoustic panels do that by absorbing sound energy that would otherwise bounce between hard surfaces. In bedrooms the main sound sources are voices, the TV, and noise from outside the room, and the most common complaints are that sounds from the hallway feel sharp, a hard-floored nursery rings, and that a shared wall carries a neighbor's TV.

What is going wrong in the room

Every hard surface reflects sound. When a room has a lot of them, each sound keeps bouncing for a long time and overlaps the next one. That build-up is called reverberation, and it is measured as RT60: the time it takes a sound to fade by 60 decibels. A typical bedroom of 13 × 12 ft with a 8 ft ceiling has a volume of about 1,248 ft³. With soft surfaces (carpet, upholstered furniture and curtains), its echo time is about 0.54 seconds. The target for bedrooms is 0.50 seconds.

What panels can and cannot do

  • Panels can shorten reverberation, remove flutter echo, make speech clearer and lower the overall noise level that builds up in the room.
  • Panels cannot stop sound passing through walls, floors or doors. That is soundproofing, which needs mass, airtightness and isolation. See soundproofing and STC for bedrooms.

The recommended starting point

For a bedroom like the one above, we suggest about 2 24 × 48 in pill panel, 1 in thicks, which brings the echo time down to about 0.50 s. That is roughly 4% of the wall area if the panels went on the walls. A good split for bedrooms is about 100% on walls and 0% on the ceiling.

Open the designer with this setup loaded, or browse ready-made models on our bedroom and nursery solutions page.

Plan it in five steps

  1. Measure the room and note what the floor, walls and ceiling are made of.
  2. Work out how many panels you need with the room calculator or the worked example for bedrooms.
  3. Decide where they go, starting with the placement guide.
  4. Choose thickness, fabric and color to suit the room and its cleaning needs.
  5. Check the fire and code requirements before you order.

Guides for bedrooms