7-10 is the honest range
Advanced options
You spend a third of your life on it: the cost-per-use maths that justifies good shoes and coats (see our cost per wear page) applies triple to the thing you use 8 hours a night. The buying truths: firmness is preference not virtue (side sleepers usually want softer than they buy), the 100-night trials made showroom guessing obsolete: use them: and the GBP 2,000+ tier buys diminishing returns over the GBP 600-1,000 sweet spot for most bodies.
What The Mattress Cost Per Night Calculator Works Out
- Cost per night: the mattress price divided by its expected life in nights (years x 365). An GBP 800 mid-market mattress over an honest eight years is 2,920 nights at about 27p each.
- Per sleeping hour: the nightly figure divided by eight hours, around 3.5p an hour for the furniture hosting a third of your life, cheaper than the bedside lamp's electricity.
- Perspective: halving the price of a bad-fit mattress saves roughly 14p a night and costs every one of those nights in sleep quality, which makes it the wrong place in the house to economise. The 7-10 year replacement guidance is real: support and hygiene both degrade on that schedule.
- Make it last the full term: monthly head-to-toe rotation (plus a flip for two-sided mattresses), a washable protector from day one, and the right slatted base, since wide gaps kill foam mattresses and quietly void warranties.
- People sleeping on it (advanced): a double shared by two halves the per-person cost; the per-sleeper card shows each person's share per night and per hour.
- Hours in bed (advanced): replaces the eight-hour assumption for long sleepers, readers in bed or children's 10-11 hour nights.
- Delivery and disposal (advanced): delivery and old-mattress take-back run GBP 20-60 unless included; council bulky-waste collection is GBP 15-40 and keeps the old one off the lay-by.
- Protector, pillows and topper (advanced): the yearly spend on the ecosystem around the mattress. Pillows on their 1-2 year cycle are the cheap lever people ignore while blaming the mattress.
- All-in per night and total cost of ownership (advanced): mattress, delivery and all the years of upkeep together, per night and in total.
- Alternative mattress (advanced): enter another mattress's price and expected life to compare per night. A GBP 300 mattress lasting four years costs more per night than an GBP 800 one lasting ten; the GBP 600-1,000 band holds the engineering most bodies can tell apart.