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Restful sleep is paramount. Get a good night’s sleep, and you feel sharp, strong, and able to be truly present to enjoy the things that bring you happiness. But suffer through a fitful night, and you spend the next day haggard, drained, and borderline delirious.
A great mattress that’s right for you can really help. It cushions, cradles, and supports your every position as you drift into REM sleep. Of course, a good mattress doesn’t usually come cheap—it’s an investment. Luckily, the majority of high-quality mattresses are all discounted to their best prices during three yearly sales, allowing you to take your pick of discounts and mattress types without any retail regrets.
Presidents’ Day sales in mid-February are a great time to buy a mattress at a discounted price. Wirecutter mattress picks from Saatva and Leesa will almost certainly see sales, and we’ve also seen past price drops for Wirecutter’s bed frame picks. Keep an eye out for Wirecutter’s own Sleep Week event, too. In the past, we’ve been able to help our readers score exclusive deals on our foam, hybrid, and spring mattress picks and other sleep essentials like bedding and pillows.
The summer’s informal bookends—Memorial Day and Labor Day—also provide excellent prices on mattresses, with discounts on multiple mattress brands. Labor Day, which is nearly upon us, should offer excellent mattress and bedding discounts based on the historical prices we've noted. Fourth of July also offers some discounts, but they usually aren’t quite as good as the aforementioned sales. So if you can wait for a major sale holiday (Presidents’ Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day), be sure to do so.
Finally, Prime Day, Black Friday, and Cyber Monday offer sales on plenty of memory foam and hybrid mattresses-in-a-box. The prices often either compete with or beat the best discounts we see all year, but beware—stock is limited, and the deals are often quite fleeting, so we can’t seriously recommend either day as the best time to buy for most people. But the good news is that if you miss out on Black Friday sales, it’s just a few months before the Presidents’ Day sales happen, and the entire cycle repeats.
Because mattresses are so costly, it’s important to make sure you do your research on what kind is best suited to your needs. Wirecutter’s expert sleep team has a handy guide on how to choose the best mattress that will help you narrow down the very crowded field. You can trust us: We’ve been testing mattresses since 2016. We’ve visited mattress factories, stores, showrooms, and trade shows. We’ve grilled experts and devoured customer reviews. We’ve scoured warranties and return policies, and we’ve had dozens of people test dozens of mattresses for a combined total of thousands of hours over the last six years.
We recommend going to a store and trying mattresses yourself before you buy. Even mattress-in-a-box retailers like Casper now offer storefronts where you can test out mattresses. If you choose to forgo testing, we recommend you at least know what firmness level you want and whether you want a traditional spring mattress, a hybrid mattress, or a foam mattress (the pros and cons of each are all included in our extensive mattress coverage).
After you narrow your choices a bit, set alerts for mentions of mattress brands you like on Twitter—it can help identify those one-off mattress sales when they crop up. Even then, we still recommend that you don’t settle for less than 15% off the list price. That’s usually the baseline for a decent mattress sale. You can also set up price alerts for any mattress carried by Amazon via a third-party price tracker like Camelcamelcamel or Keepa. And of course, you can save your favorite Wirecutter pick mattress to keep an eye on price fluctuations throughout the year. Simply click the bookmark icon in the top right corner of a Wirecutter pick within the mattress guide. You can then click the bookmark button in the top right corner of the site to find your list of saved items, where you can see which of them have deals running right now.
This article was edited by Nathan Burrow.
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Ignacia Fulcher is a supervising editor for the Deals team. She has a BA in Mass Media Studies from Hofstra University and has written both product reviews and culture essays for BuzzFeed, Teen Vogue, and other publications. Ignacia is passionate about Whitney Houston and listens only to singers. She very rarely listens to anyone who cannot.
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