Replace Every 8

Finally, it's important to look at how often you wash your bed sheets. Leaving dirty bedding on your mattress for a long time can result in more dirt and dust getting through to your mattress, which significantly reduces its lifespan. For this reason, it's best to wash your bedding once a week.

If you wake up in the morning with some stiffness or aches and pains, it could be that your mattress isn't providing the level of support and comfort it needs to. In this case, it might be time to replace your mattress regardless of how old it is. Also, if you're sneezing more than you're snoozing this may be because of the allergens collected in your mattress, meaning it’s time to consider changing it.

Another thing we're commonly asked is how often should you buy a new bed frame. This isn’t as pressing an issue as your mattress, as it doesn’t directly affect your comfort. Bed frames don't really have an expiration date. They can be used up until a slat breaks or you simply fancy a design change.

It’s a common question for us! Well, we recommend replacing a mattress once every 8 years to get the best and most hygienic night's sleep. However, the time to change can vary depending on the comfort and support offered by your mattress.

You spend about one third of your whole life in bed, so your mattress plays a big part in your general health and wellbeing, not to mention your day‐to‐day energy levels, alertness and mood. Both the mattress industry and the Sleep Council strongly recommend you replace a mattress every 8 years, because by this time it will have lost much of its original comfort and support.

Old and worn mattresses can also provide welcome accommodation for allergens, dead skin cells, dust mites, germs and even bedbugs (aargh!). This can happen even if you wash your sheets regularly. This means a mattress that’s 10 years’ old could be housing up to 10 million dust mites, so it might be high time to change your mattress before it gets to this point.

To learn more about the science behind your mattress, we've created this infographic: What Happens to Your Mattress Over Time.

Other tell‐tale signs your mattress needs replacing is if you can see a visible dip in the middle of it, or if you can feel the springs poking through it. This means it’s definitely time to get a new one. The same goes for a noisy mattress too. If it's creaking, groaning and pinging all night long, then it's obviously not in a sound condition.

If you're a couple of stone heavier or lighter than you were a few years ago, it's quite possible that your body’s changed to the extent where your existing mattress isn’t comfortable anymore. This also happens with children's mattresses, which aren’t able to adapt to the growing demands of kids.

An ageing mattress doesn't reduce motion transfer as well as it should. This can cause big problems in a shared bed by waking each other up each and every time the other person moves. A good mattress needs to support both sleepers in equal comfort with minimal motion transfer or ‘roll together’.