Our team of sleep experts has spent years researching, testing and deconstructing over 300 mattresses. Most of our testing happens in our 6,000-square-foot mattress warehouse in Reno, Nevada. In addition to the office space where our team tirelessly compiles mattress data, there are also two mock bedrooms we use to test and film reviews in. A back room also serves as an overflow for the hundreds of mattresses the team has tested.
Testing mattresses is a very hands-on process that involves analyzing the construction, feeling and rolling around on the beds from multiple points of view. Our team has a variety of genders, body types and sleeper positions, which allows us to give each bed a well-rounded view that we can compile into recommendations for the average person.
The Mattress Smasher 9000 testing the Helix Midnight Core model.
Firmness and feel: Firmness and feel are some of the most subjective factors when testing mattresses. How firm a mattress feels will depend on how much pressure you put on the bed — aka your body weight — and this varies from person to person. We often find that our opinion on a bed’s firmness does not always match a brand’s claim. Our sleep team has recently developed a method to measure a mattress’ true firmness: a machine dubbed the Mattress Smasher 9000. This proprietary device and corresponding software were developed in-house by our lab technicians. It presses into the middle of the mattress and measures its firmness to score each bed on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the firmest and 1 being the softest. While we also test each bed personally for perceived firmness and feel, we use data from the MS9K to complement our conclusions.
Here’s the data we learned testing the best mattresses with our Mattress Smasher 9000. Sorted from the softest beds to the firmest, here’s how the mattresses scored on our firmness scale.
Durability and construction: We can’t sleep on every mattress we test for years to test the durability (though we have done it for some). While we note the construction of a bed, we use it to inform how durable and supportive a bed will be over time. Saatva, for example, received a 10 support score during testing because of the hefty construction and dual-coil system.
Motion isolation: When I say motion isolation, I’m referring to how well a bed can dampen movement across the surface. We test this by having multiple teammates move around and measure how much motion they can feel. Memory foam tends to perform best in this area. For example, the Nectar Premier mattress scored higher in motion isolation because the memory foam layers are superior at dampening movement compared with innerspring mattresses.
CNET video producer Jon Gomez captures mattress expert Dillon Payne testing the edge support of a mattress.
Edge support: This one might not seem like a big deal, but edge support is important if you sleep on the edge of the bed. Think about it like how strong the bed’s perimeter is. If it caves in when we sit or lay on it, it doesn’t have good edge support and receives a score corresponding to where it falls in the data.
Temperature: Many brands claim their mattresses are cooling, although very few are. While adding cooling technology or gel-infused foams can help regulate temperature, it doesn’t mean they are physically cool to the touch. We carefully assess each of the cooling features but differentiate between being temperature-neutral and cooling. For instance, Purple is a naturally breathable bed because of the grid construction, but we don’t consider it an actively cooling bed.
Read more on how we test mattresses.
