In recent years, the effect of sleep on memory consolidation has received considerable attention. In humans, these studies concentrated mainly on procedural types of memory, which are considered to be hippocampus-independent. Here, we show that sleep also has a persisting effect on hippocampus-dependent declarative memory. In two experiments, we examined high school students’ ability to remember vocabulary. We show that declarative memory is enhanced when sleep follows within a few hours of learning, independent of time of day, and with equal amounts of interference during retention intervals. Sleep deprivation has a detrimental effect on memory, which was significant after a night of recovery sleep. Thus, fatigue accumulating during wake intervals could be ruled out as a confound.