UK Mattress Guarantees: The Cover, the Exclusions, and the Company Behind Them

The guarantee and the company behind it

A guarantee is a contractual promise from a specific company. It is not insurance, nobody underwrites it, and there is no industry fund standing behind it. If the company stops existing, the promise stops with it. That makes the age and status of the company a plain part of what you are buying, and it is the one part no brand puts next to the number of years.

Both halves of the table below are public. The guarantee comes from each brand's own terms page. The company comes from the Companies House register, read on 19 October 2026. Every company name links to its own register entry so you can check the current position yourself, which matters, because a status can change in a week.

The spread is the point. Vispring is trading through VI - SPRING LIMITED, incorporated in 1901. Several brands offering the same ten years are trading through companies younger than the guarantee they are selling. That is not an accusation of bad faith. It is an observation that the two numbers are usually presented apart, and that they mean something different together.

A young company is not a bad company, and a long guarantee from one is not a trick. Plenty of the newer names here make better mattresses than the older ones. The point is narrower: when the entire difference between two mattresses is that one offers ten years and the other five, the promise is doing the work, and the promise is only as durable as the company.

What a mattress guarantee actually covers

Narrower than most people assume. A mattress guarantee covers manufacturing defects and sagging past a stated depth. The depth is the number that decides every claim, and it is measured with the mattress unloaded, so a dip you can see while lying in it does not count. If a brand publishes that threshold, it is on this site in its review. If it does not publish one, that is worth knowing before you buy rather than at the point of claiming.

What it does not cover is comfort. A mattress that turns out to be too firm is not defective, and no guarantee in this market treats it as such. That is what the sleep trial is for, and the trial is measured in nights while the guarantee is measured in years, which is why the two are not alternatives. Normal softening is also excluded almost everywhere. Foam and fillings are expected to settle, and settling is not sagging.

What voids it

Guarantees are voided more often by how the mattress was supported and handled than by anything that went wrong inside it. Four conditions recur across the market: using a base the manufacturer does not accept, usually expressed as a maximum gap between slats; removing the law label sewn into the side; staining, which many brands treat as evidence of misuse and which is the reason a protector is worth more than it looks; and turning a single-sided mattress over.

The base condition is the one most people breach without knowing, because a bed frame bought years before the mattress has whatever slat spacing it came with. The published limits are not the same from brand to brand, and the measurement is the clear gap between two slats rather than the distance from one to the next, which is the mistake that makes a compliant base look non-compliant and the reverse.

The last one catches people who are doing what they were taught. Turning a mattress was correct advice when mattresses were built the same on both sides. Most are not any more, and on a single-sided mattress the underside is a base rather than a sleeping surface. Rotating it head to foot achieves what turning used to: it moves the wear. Check the care instructions rather than assuming, because the two words are used loosely and the wrong one costs you the claim.

Pro-rata cover, and why the years are not equal

A guarantee can be full term or pro-rata. Under a full term guarantee the remedy in year nine is the same as the remedy in year one. Under a pro-rata guarantee the amount you can recover falls as the guarantee runs, often from quite early on, so that by the later years you are being offered a fraction of what you paid against the price of a replacement. Both are legitimate and both get advertised as the same round number of years.

Three real examples, all read from the brands’ own guarantee pages. Emma publishes ten years with no declining-value clause, so a successful claim in year nine is treated the same as one in year one. Mammoth advertises ten years, but the standard cover is one year and the ten only exists if you register the product online; after year five you contribute 20 per cent of the purchase price, rising to 80 per cent by year nine. Bensons sells a Lifetime Guarantee that pays a credit rather than a replacement, at 75 per cent of the price in the first year beyond the manufacturer’s guarantee, then 50, then 25, then 10 per cent, and the credit cannot be exchanged for cash.

None of that is hidden. All three publish it. It is simply never the number on the product page, which is why two guarantees described with the same word can differ by most of the value of the mattress.

Two further patterns worth knowing. Some long guarantees carry a charge that arrives at the point of claim rather than a reduction in cover: Nectar and DreamCloud both attach a transport fee each way once past year ten. And several require you to register the product within a set window or the long term never starts, which is the quietest way a guarantee is lost. Vispring gives you 14 days, Ergoflex 30.

It is the single most useful question to ask before you compare two guarantees, and it is usually answered several clicks into the terms rather than on the product page.

What happens if the company fails

You become an unsecured creditor of a company with no money, which in practice means the guarantee is gone. This is not hypothetical in this market. Brook and Wilde sold mattresses with long guarantees through Brook and Wilde Limited, company number 11513891. Liquidators were appointed on 14 November 2023, the company was wound up by court order in February 2024, and it was dissolved on 26 November 2025. Eve Sleep went into administration in October 2022.

The part that surprises people is what happens next. A brand name is an asset, and it can be bought out of an insolvency by a new company. The new company owns the name. It does not inherit the old company’s guarantee obligations unless it decides to take them on, because those obligations sat with the company you bought from, and that company no longer exists. So a brand can continue trading under the same name while the guarantee you were sold has no one left to honour it.

Four brands on this site have already been through it. In each case the name survived and the company did not, which is the distinction that decides whether an old guarantee is worth anything.

• Dreams: NIGHT REALISATIONS PLC (02189427), dissolved, appointment of an administrator (form 2.12B) 2013. The brand now trades through DREAMS LIMITED.
• Bensons for Beds: BLUE GROUP UK BEDS LIMITED (08431253), dissolved, appointment of an administrator (AM01) 2020. The brand now trades through BENSONSFORBEDSRETAIL LTD.
• Eve Sleep: ESR 2022 PLC (09261636), liquidation, appointment of an administrator (AM01) 2022. The brand now trades through BENSONSFORBEDSRETAIL LTD.
• Brook + Wilde: BROOK AND WILDE LIMITED (11513891), dissolved, liquidators appointed 2023. The brand now trades through BROOK & WILDE SLEEP LIMITED.

More immediately, these are companies currently selling, or recently selling, into the UK whose own register entry is not showing an active company. Read each entry yourself before relying on a guarantee from them, and note that a product can still be on sale at a retailer after the company behind the brand has stopped being able to honour anything.

• Dormeo: DORMEO UK LIMITED (07440398) is shown as liquidation on the register.
• Noa: NOA HOME UK LIMITED (12931330) is shown as dissolved on the register.
• Leesa: LEESA SLEEP LIMITED (09443560) is shown as liquidation on the register.
• Inofia: KENTESH LTD (12948235) is shown as dissolved on the register.

Your legal rights are not the guarantee

This is the part worth knowing even if you never read a guarantee. A manufacturer’s guarantee is voluntary and additional. Your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 are neither, and they run against the retailer that sold you the mattress rather than the company that made it. If the manufacturer disappears, those rights are unaffected, because the shop is the one that owes them.

Three points do most of the work. Goods must be of satisfactory quality, which for a mattress includes lasting a reasonable time. You have a short term right to reject faulty goods for a full refund within 30 days of delivery, and that clock pauses while a repair or replacement is being sorted out. And you generally have six years in England and Wales, or five in Scotland, to bring a claim. That last figure is a deadline for starting a claim and not six years of cover, which is a distinction a good deal of writing on this subject gets wrong.

There is one further wrinkle in your favour. If a fault appears within the first six months, the law presumes it was there when the mattress was delivered, and it is for the retailer to show otherwise. After six months that reverses, and it falls to you to show the fault was present from the start. This is general information about how the legislation is framed and not legal advice.

What to check before you buy

• The sagging threshold in centimetres, and whether it is measured loaded or unloaded.
• Whether the cover is full term or pro-rata, and from which year it starts reducing.
• What base the guarantee requires, including the maximum slat gap, since this is the condition most people breach without knowing.
• Whether the mattress is single sided, and whether the instruction is to rotate rather than turn, which decides how long it lasts.
• Who you claim from, the brand or the shop, and what proof of purchase you will need in year seven.
• How long the company behind it has been trading, which the table above answers.