Shopping for the best mattress online is a waking nightmare, and picking the wrong one can literally cause bad dreams or kill your back. It doesn’t help that the online market is flooded with options, or that there are more dedicated mattress review sites than stars in the sky. It’s a mess.
WIRED is not a dedicated sleep site, but we did fill a room with 25 of the top mattress-in-a-box models and spent several days unboxing, examining, reclining, and even jumping on each of them last year. Since then we’ve tested half a dozen more mattresses. Below are my favorite (and least favorite) mattresses right now. All of the prices are for queen-size models.
Be sure to check out our many other buying guides, including Best Sound Machines and our roundup of the best gifts for people who like to sleep.
Updated for April 2020: We’ve added the Birch Mattress to this guide and fixed pricing elsewhere.
