Team Placemattress

Why this site exists

In 2021 our founder spent $1,900 on a mattress recommended by the top three results for “best mattress for back pain”. All three sites had ranked the same bed first. None of them had slept on it, two of them had copied the manufacturer’s firmness rating verbatim, and the mattress was wrong in a way that thirty nights would have exposed immediately.

Placemattress started as a spreadsheet of measurements taken to answer one question: is there anything in this category that is actually measured rather than described? There largely was not, so we started measuring.

What makes this different

Three things, and they are all expensive, which is why the category does not do them.

We sleep on them. Every mattress gets at least thirty nights with a real sleeper in a real bedroom. A showroom lie-down tells you about the first ninety seconds of a relationship you are about to have for a decade.

We keep them. All forty-three of them, in storage, re-measured every twelve months for sag and wear. It is the only way to say anything honest about durability, and it is the reason our storage bill is larger than our hosting bill by two orders of magnitude.

We publish the method. The full protocol is on this site: the instruments, the room conditions, the weighting of every sub-score. If you disagree with how we weight motion transfer, you can see exactly what changing it would do.

How we pay for it

Affiliate commission, disclosed on every page. There is no display advertising and no sponsored content. Our top-rated mattress pays a lower commission than the mattress in third place, which is the shortest available answer to whether the rankings follow the money.

What we are not

We are not doctors. Marcus holds an MSc in Human Physiology and spent nine years in a hospital sleep laboratory, and he is the person who removes the health claims other people would leave in. A mattress cannot treat back pain, sleep apnoea or insomnia. It can stop making them worse, and that is the strongest claim you will find on this site.