Hunting 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 a few years ago, we did fill a room with 25 of the top mattress-in-a-box models and spent several days examining, reclining, and even jumping on each of them. Since then we’ve tested dozens more. Below are our favorite (and least favorite) mattresses right now. All of the prices shown are for queen-size models.
Be sure to check out our other sleep guides, including Best Organic Mattresses, Best Sleep Gadgets, Best Sound Machines, and our roundup of Gifts for People Who Like to Sleep.
Updated November 2022: We’ve added the Winkbed, added more long-term testing thoughts on the Helix Sleep, and mentioned the Molecule Hybrid.
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Julian Chokkattu, Matt Jancer, Louryn Strampe, and Scott Gilbertson contributed to this guide.