How often you need to pump is different for every mama and can change throughout your EP journey. Read on to learn the tools to help you determine how many pumps per day are right for you.
A Deeper Look:
General Information
How often you need to pump is initially determined based on where you are in your EP journey. This is because during the first few weeks immediately following your baby’s birth, your milk supply is largely driven by hormones. But eventually—on average somewhere between 2 weeks and 12 weeks but often between 6-8 weeks—the source of your milk supply changes and is instead driven by supply and demand. When this switch occurs, you are considered to have an established milk supply. How much milk you produce when this switch occurs is dependent on your actions during your first few weeks postpartum.
So let’s begin here: If you’ve recently given birth or are not sure whether your milk supply is established, start by reading the next section. If you know your milk supply is established, jump down to the next section titled “EP Journey: Established Milk Supply.”
EP Journey: Birth-12 weeks Postpartum
Until your milk supply is established, you should aim to pump between 8-12 times in a 24-hour period to ensure that you establish your milk supply to its fullest. You should not go more than 5 hours without pumping, and at least one of your pump sessions should occur during the night because that is when your prolactin levels (the hormone that encourages milk production) are highest and you are likely to pump the most volume of milk.
In The Breastfeeding Mother’s Guide to Making More Milk, this period of time is described as your body’s “market research phase” for calibrating your milk production because your body is determining “whether it needs more or fewer assembly lines to meet baby’s milk needs.” There is evidence to support the theory that the more often you pump in the first weeks after birth, the more your prolactin receptors multiply, and the easier it will be to sustain long-term milk production. These prolactin receptors are important because prolactin is the hormone that encourages your body to produce breast milk. Essentially, the more milk you remove during these early weeks while your hormones are still in charge, the higher your milk supply will be once your supply is established.
So how do you know if your milk supply is established (or regulated as this occurrence is commonly called)? Your milk supply may be established if your breasts have lost the constant feeling of fullness, you notice you have stopped leaking (or you notice you are leaking less frequently), you have stopped feeling let-downs as intensely or altogether, or you are not pumping as much milk as you did previously. If you notice a decrease in milk supply, that may be a result of your body “calibrating” to the amount of milk you’ve removed from your body over the first postpartum weeks.
Many mamas believe they have an “oversupply” (the term for when you make more than your baby is eating) those first weeks postpartum and are tempted to pump less often than recommended. But if your milk supply is not yet established and you cut back on the recommend amount of pumps, this perceived oversupply can significantly drop once your supply is established. Essentially, your supply drops because you “told” your body that your baby did not need that much milk. Even if you do not have an oversupply, if you cut back on the number of times you pump in a day before your milk supply is established, you may end up with a lot less milk once your body has finished calibrating the amount of milk your baby needs. While these first weeks are the easiest time to increase your milk supply, it is possible to increase your supply once your supply is established, it’s just not as easy.
For more information on increasing your milk production, click here.
EP Journey: Established Milk Supply
Once your milk supply is established, how often you need to pump to maintain your milk supply is different for every mama but is largely dependent on breast storage capacity.
What is Breast Storage Capacity?
Breast storage capacity is the volume of milk available in your breasts at their fullest. So why does your breast storage capacity matter? Well, breast milk production slows for two reasons. First, the closer your breasts are to reaching your storage capacity, the slower milk is produced. Second, there is a protein in your milk known as feedback inhibitor of lactation (FIL), and when it accumulates, it sends a signal to your breasts to slow production. Basically, the fuller your breasts are, the more FIL has accumulated, and the slower milk is produced. Therefore, knowing your breast storage capacity can help you determine how frequently you need to pump to prevent your breasts from becoming too full such that milk production slows.
Your storage capacity is not related to the size or your breasts—which is based on the amount of fatty tissue—but by how much room is in your milk-making glands. If you have a very large storage capacity, your breasts may contain a total of 20 ounces at their fullest. If you have a smaller storage capacity, your breasts may contain a total of 3 ounces at their fullest. (These are example storage capacity amounts, not actual minimums and maximums). This does not mean that a mama with a smaller storage capacity will produce less breast milk than a mama with a larger storage capacity. Rather, it means that the mama with a smaller storage capacity will need to remove milk more frequently to make sure her breasts do not slow milk production. Logically, if your breasts have a capacity of 3 ounces, and your body has made 3 ounces of milk, your breasts need to be emptied to make room for more milk!
How to Determine Your Breast Storage Capacity
So how do you know what your breast storage capacity is? The best indication of your storage capacity is to look at the highest number of ounces you pumped in one pump session. Most mamas are likely to have pumped their largest quantity of milk during their first morning session because prolactin levels are higher and generally there is more time between the last night session and the first morning session than between daytime pump sessions.
Once you know your storage capacity, it can be used as a guideline to determine how often you need to pump until your body gives you its own feedback by either maintaining your milk supply or decreasing it. For example, if, after 6 hours (start the clock from the start of your last pump session) you produced 5 ounces of milk, this may be close to the maximum amount of milk you can hold. Now, you won’t know for sure that this is the maximum amount of milk you can hold unless you try going 7 or 8 hours between your pump sessions. If you end up pumping about 5 ounces after waiting a longer period of time, you’ve likely determined your storage capacity. However, if you consistently allow 5 ounces of milk to accumulate in your breasts, and your capacity is 5 ounces, you will eventually signal your body to decrease milk production, so, instead you would want to pump more frequently than every 5 hours—perhaps try every three hours. If you pump 3 ounces every three hours, that may be your sweet spot!
The Middle of the Night Pump
Lastly, prolactin levels are higher during the middle of the night and generally decrease throughout the day; thus, your middle of the night pump may contribute to a good amount of your total amount of pumped ounces for the day. So although you can set how often you need to pump based on your storage capacity, you may still be constrained to pumping at particular times—middle of the night and/or early morning—to get the most out of your prolactin levels.
How long you need to pump also plays a role in maintaining your milk supply. For more information on how long your pump sessions should be, click here.
The EP&Me Take
There are a lot of words up there. All of them boil down to this: you should pump frequently until your supply is established, and then pump frequently enough to avoid your breasts getting too full that your milk production slows.
I know pumping 8-12 times seems daunting, especially when you are already caring for a newborn. Logically, this means pumping every 2-4 hours—fortunately, you do not have to pump logically. What matters in those early postpartum weeks is frequent milk removal, which will encourage a full milk supply. If you think about it, a baby does not indicate they need food every 2 or 4 hours on the dot; rather, a baby may want food thirty minutes after the last feeding and then not for another hour and a half. This is why you may have been told to “pump every time your baby has a bottle” because doing so ensures you are removing milk as often as your baby is eating, which will help ensure your supply meets your baby’s demand.
So if you take the same approach to pumping that your baby does with eating at this stage; your pumping schedule might look like this: 4:00 a.m., 7:30 a.m., 10:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 2:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 6:30 p.m., 9:00 p.m., and 11:00 p.m. In this example, there were times when there was an hour between pumping start times, and other times there was as much as five hours. Think about what will work best for you. Is your baby already sleeping 4 or 5 hours a night? You should sleep during that time too! So push some of your pump sessions a little closer during the day to give you that time to sleep. During the day, perhaps you’ll find it easiest to pump when your baby takes a nap, or maybe you prefer to feed your baby while you pump (for tips on managing your baby and pumping, click here!).
Some mamas find it easier during the first few weeks postpartum to focus on the number of sessions they need to complete in a day, rather than that they need to pump “every two hours.” Inevitably, something will call your attention away ten minutes before many of your scheduled pump sessions, and you’ll start them fifteen and twenty minutes “late” and if you think you need to evenly space out your pump sessions, you’ll eventually run out of time in the day.
Once your supply is established, finding your “magic number” (this is a commonly used phrase that refers to the number of daily milk removals needed to maintain your supply) is more of a guess and check situation. For me, I had a large storage capacity—I was able to pump a little over 20 ounces after not pumping for 13 hours. Unfortunately, I did not know just how large my storage capacity was until about 8 months into EPing because I was afraid to go too long between pumps. In retrospect, I would have allowed myself to sleep a little bit longer one day earlier on to test out my storage capacity. The worst thing that could have happened was I lost a little supply that one day. As long as you are not consistently missing a pump session, missing a session or pushing a session back a few hours on just one day should not change your milk supply thereafter. If I had done this little experiment, I would likely have dropped to 3 pumps per day around 5 months. One less pump may not sound like a big deal to those who have never pumped, but for us mamas, we know what a difference that can make.
Of course, even once I knew my storage capacity was 20 ounces, I rarely let that amount of milk accumulate in my breasts because I did not want to signal my body to decrease milk production. I recommend you do the same! Until I dropped to two pumps a day, I generally only let myself go 10 hours at the most between pumps, which meant I pumped somewhere between 12-15 ounces during my morning pump. My later pumps were never as big even when I was down to two pumps, because breast milk production generally decreases as the day goes on (prolactin levels are highest during sleep and shortly thereafter, so a longer nap may boost your levels!).
I have included a sample pump schedule below for those, who like myself, thrive on schedules. But if you don’t like the times I’ve suggested, you can very easily make your own. Once you know how many times you need to pump a day, you can pick the times that are most convenient.
(Picture detailing four sample pumping schedules)
If you don’t pump as many times as you should pump in a day, acknowledge it, try to understand how it happened and whether there is something you can do to avoid that happening the next day, then let it go and try again tomorrow. If you miss a pump session here and there, it should not effect your milk supply. Only consistently missed pumps sessions should affect your pump supply. If you notice your supply has decreased, or that it decreased when your milk supply established, click here, for information on increasing your milk production.
Regardless of my storage capacity, I never liked suddenly dropping pumps. I always preferred to ease into them because I pumped on a regimented schedule and I could really feel when I went off-schedule. For more information on dropping pumps, click here.
How often you need to pump is a popular topic amongst EPers. There is a lot of different advice out there, and a lot of mamas basing their decision to pump less frequently on someone else’s situation. In the end though, how often you need to pump is deeply personal to you. Everyone is different—we all have different storage capacities, pumping habits, stressors, breast gland development, and hormones. No one else can accurately tell you how many pumps a day you need to maintain your supply based on their experience. However, if you’ve read this post, you have the tools to determine the answer for yourself. Believe in yourself mama, you’ve got this.
The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 8th ed., La Leche League International (2010).
Working and Breastfeeding Made Simple, Nancy Morbacher, IBCLC, FILCA (2014).
Making More Milk: The Breastfeeding Guide to Increasing Your Milk Production, Second Edition, Diana West, IBCLC, and Lise Marasco, M.A., IBCLC (2019).
The Nursing Mother’s companion, Kathleen Huggins, R.N., M.S. (2015).
Daly et al., Frequency and Degree of Milk Removal and the Short-Term Control of Human Milk Synthesis. Experimental Physiology, vol. 81, no. 5, Sept. 1996, pp. 861-875, https://doi.org/10.1113/expphysiol.1996.sp003982
