Michelle Bailey | Lifestyle
My inbox has received four emails this week announcing the “biggest mattress sale of the year,” and Memorial Day is still eleven days away. One of them came from a brand whose mattress I priced in February at exactly the same number it’s now calling 50% off. If you’ve been sleeping on a sagging bed and waiting for Memorial Day mattress sales to finally replace it, I want to save you some stress: for a lot of online mattresses, the sale price is just the price. Buy when your mattress is done, and judge it by what it costs per night.
Most Memorial Day mattress sales never really end
Here’s the part the deal roundups mention only in passing. A lot of bed-in-a-box brands run the same discount nearly all year. When Tom’s Guide looked at this during the 2024 Memorial Day sales, its editors wrote that DreamCloud’s 50% off sale “has been around since last year”, and that a 35% discount on the Cocoon by Sealy Chill “never ends.” The DreamCloud Hybrid queen was $665 at the time. That’s a real, decent price. It just wasn’t a holiday price.
None of that makes these mattresses bad. It means the countdown clock on the website isn’t telling you much. If you need a bed this week, you’re not losing money by skipping the Memorial Day weekend crush, and if you don’t need one yet, a banner shouldn’t be the reason you buy.
The “was” price is a federal question, and it’s worth asking
There’s a reason I squint at strikethrough prices now. The Federal Trade Commission’s Guides Against Deceptive Pricing say a former price used in a “compare at” claim should be “the actual, bona fide price at which the article was offered to the public on a regular basis” for “a reasonably substantial period of time.” In plain English, if a store says a mattress was $1,330 and now it’s $665, the $1,330 should be a price people were actually charged, not a number that existed only to be crossed out.
You don’t need to file a complaint to use this. Just check the price history before you buy. Search the model name with “price” and look at a few dates, or screenshot the price whenever you’re casually shopping. If the “sale” price matches what you saw in March, you know the discount is part of the furniture.
How long your mattress lasts matters more than the discount
The number I care about now is lifespan. The Sleep Foundation’s guide to mattress lifespan puts the average innerspring at about 5.5 to 6.5 years, foam at 6 to 7, hybrids at 6.5 to 7.5, and latex at 7.5 to 8.5. Those ranges vary with how you sleep and how much the bed is used, but they give you something better than a percentage off to compare.
People are also spending real money around sleep. In a June 2025 survey commissioned by the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, about half of U.S. adults said they’d spent more than $100 on sleep products in the past year, and that figure didn’t even count mattresses. Pillows, cooling sheets, and toppers add up, and a lot of us buy them to patch a mattress that’s already past its life.
Do the cost-per-night math before you check out
This is the calculation that changed how I shop. Take the price and divide it by the number of nights you’ll realistically sleep on it.
Start with that DreamCloud Hybrid queen at $665. If it lasts seven years, the middle of the hybrid range, that’s 7 times 365, or 2,555 nights. $665 divided by 2,555 is about 26 cents a night.
Now say you’re tempted by a latex mattress for $865, which is $200 more. Latex tends to last longer, so give it eight years: 8 times 365 is 2,920 nights. $865 divided by 2,920 is about 30 cents a night. The pricier bed costs you roughly 4 cents more per night, a little under $15 a year.
Next, look at it from the other side. If you snag a cheap $300 foam mattress that sags in three years, that’s 1,095 nights at about 27 cents a night, the same as the hybrid, and you get to go mattress shopping again in 2029. The sticker price hid that, and the per-night number made it obvious.
Once you think this way, a Memorial Day mattress sale that knocks off an extra $50 means less than 2 cents a night over seven years. That’s nice, but it isn’t worth losing sleep over.
The return policy is the real sale
If there’s one place to spend your attention, it’s the fine print on returns. According to the Sleep Foundation, trials usually run 90 to 120 nights, and many brands require a break-in period of two weeks to a month before they’ll take a return. Some charge shipping, handling, or restocking fees, and old mattress removal is usually non-refundable.
So before you buy, find three answers: how long the trial is, how many nights you have to wait before you can return it, and what a return costs you. A generous trial with no fees is worth more to me than an extra 10% off, because the most expensive mattress is the one you hate and can’t send back.
When a Memorial Day mattress sale is worth waiting for
There are times the holiday helps. If a brand you’ve been watching has held a steady price all spring and then drops it for the weekend, that’s a real discount. Bundles can be useful too, like free pillows or a protector you were going to buy anyway. And if your bed is fine for a few more months, there’s no harm in watching prices through the weekend.
What I’d skip is buying a mattress you weren’t planning to buy because a timer told you to. If you’ve already been thinking about refreshing your bedroom on a budget, I’ve got ideas for doing it without breaking the bank, and if you’re in a smaller place, these small space organization ideas are a good reminder to measure before a queen shows up at your door.
So here’s my rule for this year’s Memorial Day mattress sales: check the price history, read the return policy, and divide by nights. If it comes out around a quarter a night for a bed you’ll love, buy it whenever you’re ready.