How often should you actually restart your router?

This gets asked often enough that it's worth a straight answer: routers do benefit from occasional restarts, but not for the reasons or frequency most people assume, and both extremes people default to (never, or religiously every day) miss the actual sensible middle ground.

Why restarting occasionally helps

Routers accumulate memory usage and minor glitches over long uptime, similar to any always-on device, and clear these with a restart. It also lets the router reapply the latest firmware if an update was downloaded but not yet installed, many routers download updates in the background but wait for a restart to actually apply them.

Why daily restarts aren't necessary

A well-functioning router with decent hardware and updated firmware can comfortably run for weeks without issue. Restarting daily is unnecessary and, if the network briefly drops during the reboot, more disruptive than helpful, especially inconvenient if it happens to interrupt something in progress like a video call or download.

When frequent restarts are actually masking a real problem

If you find yourself needing to restart the router every few days just to keep things working, that's not normal router behavior, it's a sign of an underlying issue, aging hardware, a specific device causing repeated conflicts, or outdated firmware, that a restart is only temporarily papering over rather than actually fixing.

Our practical recommendation

A restart every few weeks, or whenever performance genuinely feels off, is a reasonable middle ground. If you're restarting more often than that just to keep things working, that's usually a sign of an underlying issue worth diagnosing properly instead of treating a frequent restart as the actual solution.