How to Clean Mattress Stains (Sweat, Blood & More)

Mattress stains are usually one of a few things: sweat, the odd bit of blood, or a drink that went over in bed. Dried to a yellow-brown, they all look alike. They don't all come out the same way, though, and the wrong move on the wrong one sets it for good.

One rule covers every stain here: never soak a mattress. You can't wring it out, and water trapped in the core grows mould you'll never fully clear.

How do you clean stains off a mattress?

Work damp, not wet, and match the method to the stain. Blot, treat, then draw the moisture back out with a dry towel rather than leaving it to sink in.

1. Strip the bed and vacuum the whole mattress, seams included.
2. For sweat and general yellowing, mix a little washing-up liquid into cool water, dab it on with a cloth and blot straight back.
3. For blood, use cold water only. Heat cooks the protein and locks it in.
4. For a smell as well as a mark, work in an enzyme cleaner and give it ten minutes before blotting.
5. Press a dry towel down hard to lift the moisture, then let the mattress air with a window open before you make the bed.

Notice what's missing: scrubbing, and hot water on blood. Both are the classic ways to turn a small mark into a set-in one. Restraint wins.

If a mark has already beaten the cupboard methods, or the smell tells you the problem has soaked deeper than anything you can reach with a cloth, it books through a professional mattress deep clean, priced by mattress size.

Can you get old yellow stains out of a mattress?

Sometimes, but rarely all the way back to white. Those yellow marks are old sweat and body oils, oxidised into the fabric a bit like the ring on a shirt collar, and after months of that they sit deep in the ticking.

A home clean will lift and lighten them. Getting them fully out, if it can be done at all, takes an enzyme treatment to break down the proteins and oils, then extraction to flush the residue away without soaking the mattress.

That's the whole trick.

Here are two of our own mattress cleans. Even a mattress that photographs as generally clean holds more in the surface than people expect.

Is it worth getting a mattress professionally cleaned?

If a stain won't shift, or you're troubled by allergies, yes. We spend a third of our lives on a mattress, shedding skin and sweat into it the whole time, and no home method reaches deep enough to clear that out.

A proper clean flushes the sweat, dust and stains from inside the ticking and sanitises it, using little enough water that you can sleep on it the same night.

Mattresses are always priced by size, because a super king holds a lot more than a single and it wouldn't be fair to charge them the same.

Two stains have their own guides, because they need more than the general approach above. Getting urine out of the mattress itself is a source problem, not a surface one. And if it's allergies driving this rather than a mark, the dust mites living in it are the thing to tackle.