How to Get Stains Out of a Mattress: Our Team’s In-Depth Guides

Updated January 17, 2025

Table of Contents

How to Clean Blood From Your Mattress
How to Clean Yellow Stains From Your Mattress
How to Clean Urine Stains From Your Mattress
How to Clean Vomit Stains From Your Mattress
Our Other Cleaning Guides: Pillows, Bedding, and Beyond

We spend a significant chunk of our waking and sleeping lives in bed, making our mattresses both one of the most important places in our home and a hotspot for messes. From spills and accidents to our natural body oils and sweat, our mattresses are exposed to a lot over the years. Keeping your mattress clean can help it last longer and keep you sleeping soundly, but that’s easier said than done. Different types of stains require special care to clean, and that’s especially true with a mattress stain, since you can’t just throw your mattress in a washing machine and call it a day.

As product experts and as people, we’ve seen more than our fair share of mattress messes. We have years of combined experience dealing with different stains, whether they’re part of testing in our product Test Lab or due to an accident at home. We’ve tried a number of different methods to clean all sorts of stains, from store bought solutions to easy DIY cleaners made using household ingredients. We’ve also done the research into how different stains form and react to cleaning to find the best methods to remove them. Below, we’ve collected our in-depth guides to help you clean all sorts of stains from your bed, from blood stains to vomit.

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How to Clean Blood From Your Mattress

Blood stains are one of the trickier stains to remove. Blood binds to fibers over time as it dries, so it’s best to deal with blood stains while they’re still fresh. The longer a blood stain has been able to sit, the harder it tends to be to remove. Blood stains also set in deeper when you try to wash or dry them with heat, so make sure to use cold water while treating them.

Here’s our in-depth guide to removing blood stains:

How to Get Blood Out of a Mattress: Step-by-Step

How to Clean Yellow Stains From Your Mattress

Not to be confused with urine stains, yellow stains on a mattress develop over time due to exposure to sweat and the body’s natural oils. They tend to have a duller, yellow-orange color, While it’s more common to find yellow stains on older pillows, they can still show up on a mattress, given enough time.

Here’s our in-depth guide to getting rid of yellow stains:

How to Get Yellow Stains Out of a Mattress: Step-by-Step

How to Clean Urine Stains From Your Mattress

Urine is arguably one of the easier types of stains to clean up. You’ll still want to move quickly, since urine stains will get harder to remove with time, but common household ingredients like vinegar or hydrogen peroxide make the process pretty easy. Note that when it comes to urine, pet messes are different from human messes, so you’re better off using an enzyme cleaner if your pet has had an accident.

Here’s our in-depth guide to getting urine stains out of your bed:

How to Get Urine Smell and Stains Out of a Mattress: Step-by-Step

How to Clean Vomit Stains From Your Mattress

Vomit stains can be intimidating, but they’re just another mess. You’ll want to be cautious when handling and cleaning vomit, wearing as much personal protective equipment as you can. You’ll also want to act quickly, both to keep stains from setting in and to decontaminate the affected area.

Here’s our in-depth guide for getting vomit out of your sheets and bedding:

How to Clean Vomit From a Mattress: Step-by-Step

Our Other Cleaning Guides: Pillows, Bedding, and Beyond

While our guides above also cover how to get the different types of stains out of other types of bedding, you may be wondering how to generally care for your pillows, sheets, and mattress toppers. We’ve put together different cleaning and care guides for other types of bedding below.

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Written By

Logan Foley, Editorial Director

Logan is a Certified Sleep Science Coach with a deep understanding of what it means to struggle with sleep. Her years of experience researching and testing sleep products – including mattresses, natural sleep aids, and bedding – are critical to her role helping lead the editorial team. As a chronic insomniac, she aims to bring her findings to anyone struggling with getting adequate rest. Her expertise is in creating informative, trustworthy, and useful health content. When she’s not testing mattresses or researching CBT-I, she enjoys spending time in the sunshine with her husband and her dogs Pepper and Winston.

Learn more about our Editorial Team