How to Wash a Dog Bed Without Wrecking It

There is a moment when you walk past your dog’s bed and realize the smell in that corner is coming from the bed, not the dog. Right behind it comes the thought that keeps a lot of beds unwashed for months: what if the wash is the thing that finally finishes it off?

Both instincts are reasonable. A dog bed is not one object, it is two or three sewn together, and each layer wants something different from laundry day. I read care tags for a living, and across the few hundred dog beds in our catalog the pattern holds: the tag tells you how to launder the cover and says almost nothing about the part people actually ruin, which is whatever is stuffed inside it.

So here is the whole job, sorted by how your bed is built: the prep step nearly everyone skips, the easy path for a zippered cover, what to do with a small bed sewn shut, the tub method for foam, and the drying rules that decide whether the bed comes back fresh or comes back worse.

Quick answer: Wash a dog bed by taking the cover off and running it cold on gentle with a mild detergent and an extra rinse, then air-dry it fully. Foam cores never go in a washing machine; they get a tub soak, a press, and a long air-dry. Vacuum the hair off before anything gets wet.

Key takeaways

• Wash the cover, not the whole bed, whenever there is a zipper. Cold water, gentle cycle, half the usual detergent, an extra rinse, and no fabric softener.
• Vacuum the hair off first. Hair that goes into a wash cycle mats into the fabric instead of rinsing away, and the rest of it ends up in your machine’s filter.
• A solid foam core never goes in a washing machine at any setting. It gets a tub soak, a press, and a long flat air-dry, and it is never wrung or twisted.
• Heat is what wrecks beds. Hot water and a hot dryer shrink covers past fitting and can degrade the waterproof backing many bed liners use.
• Bone dry before it goes back down. Mildew starts in fill that never finished drying, and a foam core commonly wants a full day or two.
• About monthly for most households, closer to weekly for allergy homes, heavy shedders, and dogs having accidents.

Can you wash a dog bed?

Almost always, yes, though rarely in one piece. Nearly every dog bed with a zippered cover is machine washable on cold and gentle. The part that decides everything is what sits inside: loose polyester fill usually tolerates a wash, and a solid foam core never belongs in a washing machine, no matter what the cover’s tag says.

Learn the anatomy once and every bed makes sense. Most beds are a cover, sometimes a water-resistant liner, and a fill. The cover is fabric and behaves like fabric. The liner is a coated or laminated layer that keeps accidents out of the fill, and it is the layer heat destroys. The fill is either loose polyester fiber, shredded foam in a bag, or one solid slab. Read the tag for the cover, then decide the fill on construction, not on the tag’s optimism.

Here is the map, and the rest of the post walks each row.

Bed construction	How to wash it	Dry time	Retire it instead when
Zippered cover, loose poly fill	Cover off, cold gentle, mild detergent, extra rinse; insert washes too if it fits the drum loosely	Cover a few hours in moving air, insert overnight	The fill has clumped hard and no longer fluffs back
Small bed sewn shut	Whole bed on cold gentle with an extra rinse and a second spin, if it fits with room to move	Overnight to a full day	Seams are open or the fill has gone flat and lumpy
Solid foam core (orthopedic or memory foam)	Never the machine. Tub soak, press, rinse-press, air-dry flat	Commonly a full day or two, longer in humid air	Foam crumbles, or stays compressed after a rest
Shredded foam fill in a liner bag	Cover washes normally; bag stays out of the machine and gets spot cleaning	Cover a few hours, bag a day or more	The bag has torn or the pieces have packed down solid
Bolster or donut with sewn-in bolster	Cover if it has one, otherwise hand wash the whole thing and support the bolster	A day or more for a thick bolster	The bolster has collapsed and will not hold a head
Elevated cot fabric	Fabric off the frame for cold gentle if the design allows, otherwise scrub in place with mild soap and a hose	A few hours in open air	The fabric has stretched, sagged, or torn near the rails
Crate pad or thin mat	Cold gentle in the machine, extra rinse	A few hours to overnight	Padding is flat, shredded, or chewed open

One habit that makes all of this easier: buy your dog’s next bed with a second cover, or keep an older bed in the closet. A foam core drying for two days is two nights your dog is not sleeping on that bed, and a dog will pick the couch over the floor every time.

Start by getting the hair off

Vacuum the bed thoroughly before it touches water. Dog hair that goes into a wash cycle does not rinse away, it mats into the fabric and works deeper into the weave, and whatever escapes collects in your machine’s filter and drain. Five minutes with a vacuum hose or a lint roller is the difference between a clean bed and a felted one.

Take the bed outside and shake it hard first, then vacuum both faces, the seams, and the piping where hair packs in tightest. A rubber glove dragged across damp fabric pulls up what suction misses, and so does a stiff rubber pet hair brush. This step matters more on a bed than on clothes because bed fabric is usually a heavier weave with a nap that grips hair.

While the bed is in your hands, do the inspection you will not get another cheap chance at. Check every seam, run the zipper the whole way and close it fully, and press the fill to feel for hard clumps. A seam that has been quietly splitting for a month does not survive a wash cycle, it just relocates the stuffing into your machine.

Then spot-treat before the wash rather than hoping the cycle handles it. For urine and other accidents, use an enzyme cleaner, which means a cleaner whose enzymes break down the proteins in the mess instead of covering the smell with fragrance. Saturate the spot the way the label directs, since these products work by contact time rather than scrubbing, and let it sit before the bed goes in. Skip ammonia-based cleaners on a dog bed entirely, because ammonia smells like urine to your dog and can invite a repeat.

Washing a removable cover

A zippered cover is the easy case. Turn it inside out, zip it closed, and run it on its own in cold water on the gentle cycle, with a small dose of mild detergent and an extra rinse. Skip fabric softener entirely. Cold water protects the waterproof backing many bed liners use, and the extra rinse gets the detergent out of a fabric your dog sleeps on for hours.

Inside out, zipper closed. Turning the cover protects the printed or brushed face from abrasion, and a closed zipper stops the pull from catching another item or the drum. A zipper left open is the single most common way a cover comes out with a snagged run down one panel.

Cold and gentle, on its own. Hot water shrinks a cover so it no longer stretches over its insert, and it is hard on any coated liner. Wash the cover with other pet bedding or by itself, never mixed into a load of clothes, and load the drum loosely so water actually moves through the fabric.

Use less detergent than feels right. A cover is not filthy in the way a work shirt is, it is oily and hairy, and excess detergent in heavy fabric is what leaves a stiff residue. Half the dose you would use for a comparable load of laundry, plus a second rinse, is the whole formula. If you want a boost, a cup of plain white vinegar in the rinse cuts residue and lingering odor for almost nothing.

Leave bleach and softener out of it. Fabric softener works by coating fibers, which is a fine feature on a bath towel and a poor one on a surface your dog lies on all night, and it can reduce a cover’s water resistance. Bleach fades colors and attacks the coating on a liner. Neither is doing anything a proper rinse is not doing better.

Expect a fight putting it back on. A dry cover always feels smaller than the insert. Work two corners of the insert into the far corners of the cover first, then push the rest in and zip from the middle out. If the cover genuinely will not close anymore, it shrank, and heat is almost always the reason.

Washing a whole bed that has no removable cover

Small beds with sewn-in fill can go in the machine whole if they fit with room to move, on cold and gentle with an extra rinse. The test is not weight, it is space: a bed jammed into the drum will not rinse, and a soaked one strains the machine. If it fills the drum, it belongs in the bathtub instead.

A front-loader or a top-loader without a center agitator is the better machine for this. The agitator post in an older top-loader is rough on seams and pushes loose fill to one end, which is how a bed comes out lumpy even when it comes out clean. If that post is what you have, run the gentlest cycle available and add a couple of towels to balance the load.

Then use the trick that saves you a day of drying: run a second spin cycle. Water is the whole problem with a stuffed bed, and an extra spin pulls out more of it than any amount of patience with a fan will. It costs a few minutes and can cut the drying time substantially.

While the bed is still damp, knead the fill back into shape with both hands, working the corners and the middle. Wet polyester fill migrates and then dries in the position it landed, so a bed that gets shaken out and reshaped before drying stays flat and even, and one that does not comes back with a hard lump at one end and a hollow at the other.

If the bed does not fit the drum, the bathtub does the same work. A few inches of cool water, a little mild detergent, then push the bed under with your hands and let it draw water back in, several times across its whole surface. Drain, refill with plain water, and repeat until the water stops sudsing. Press the bed against the tub floor to force water out, and never twist it.

Foam cores never go in the washing machine

A foam core, meaning the solid slab inside an orthopedic or memory foam bed, is the one part with no machine setting at all. Agitation tears the cell structure that gives foam its support, and wet foam soaks up many times its own weight, which is hard on the machine and worse for the foam. Clean it in the tub instead.

Soak it. Fill the tub with a few inches of cool or lukewarm water and a small amount of mild detergent. Lay the foam in flat and press it under with open palms, like a sponge, then release and let it pull clean water back in. Work across the whole slab rather than kneading one spot.

Rinse until the suds quit. Drain the tub, refill with plain water, and repeat the press-and-release until pressing the foam produces no more suds. Rinsing is most of this job. Detergent left in foam attracts dirt back and can leave a residue against your dog’s skin.

Squeeze, never twist. Wringing tears foam cells and a twisted slab never fully returns to shape. Press the foam down against the tub floor with your body weight, then roll it in a couple of dry towels and press again to pull out more water.

Dry it flat with air on both sides. Lay the foam over a drying rack, two chairs, or a couple of towels on a slatted surface so air reaches the underside. Turn it every few hours. Plan on a full day or two, and longer if the air is humid. Foam that feels dry on the surface is often still wet in the center, so squeeze the middle and check your palm before it goes back in the cover.

Shredded foam fill follows the same rule with less forgiveness. Those pieces live in an inner bag, they hold water in every gap, and they are miserable to dry evenly, so keep the bag out of the water and handle it with spot cleaning while the outer cover does the heavy lifting.

Now the honest part. A foam core that has absorbed repeated accidents all the way through is not a cleaning project, it is a replacement. No surface soak reaches the middle of a slab, and a core that smells after a real wash and a full dry is telling you where the smell lives. Most standard dog beds run in the twenty to eighty dollar range, so weigh a replacement cover or a new bed against another weekend of trying. Our dog bed collection is the place to start when the answer is a new one.

Drying is where dog beds get ruined

Bone dry before it goes back on the floor, and nothing else counts. Mildew starts in fill that never finished drying, and a bed that turns sour a week after washing almost always went down with a wet center. Skip high heat, give the bed air on both faces, and judge by the middle of the fill rather than the surface.

Air movement beats temperature every time. A box fan pointed at a bed on a drying rack does more than a warm room ever will, and it does it without the shrinkage and delamination that a hot dryer brings. If the care tag specifically allows a tumble dry, keep it on low or no heat, and pull the cover while it is barely damp so it finishes on a rack at full size.

Outdoor drying works well and sunlight is a mild natural deodorizer, with one caveat worth knowing: long stretches of strong sun fade colors and weaken fabric over time. A sunny afternoon is a good tool. A permanent spot on the patio is not.

Test the way you would test a thick towel. Press your palm hard into the center of the fill and hold for a few seconds, then check for cool dampness on your hand. Do the same on the underside, which dries last. Covers commonly want a few hours in moving air, a whole stuffed bed overnight to a full day, and a foam core a day or two.

If the schedule is inconvenient, that is the argument for a spare. A second cover means the bed is usable the same evening, which in practice is what makes a monthly routine survive contact with real life.

How often should you wash a dog bed?

About once a month for the average dog and the average household. Move to every week or two if anyone in the house has allergies, if your dog sheds heavily, if the bed lives outdoors or in the mud room, or if accidents are part of your current routine. Between washes, a quick vacuum does most of the work.

Those are starting points, not rules handed down from anywhere. The real signal is your nose and your hand: a bed that smells from standing height, or that leaves your palm feeling slightly greasy, has moved past its interval regardless of the calendar. Puppies, seniors with accidents, and dogs who come in wet from the yard all run shorter cycles.

Accidents do not wait for laundry day. Blot immediately with a towel rather than rubbing, which drives the mess deeper into fill, then treat with an enzyme cleaner and let it work before the bed goes in the wash. The gap between the accident and the treatment is what decides whether the smell ever really leaves.

Two related jobs worth doing on the same rhythm: vacuum the floor under the bed, since that is where the hair and dander you just removed will resettle, and run the toy basket through at the same time. The guide to cleaning dog toys sorts that out by material, because plush, rubber, and rope each want something different.

Here is the trade-off big-box copy never states plainly: washing extends a bed’s life, it does not restore its support. A bed whose fill has packed down flat is flat whether it is clean or filthy, and a senior dog on a collapsed bed is sleeping on your floor with extra steps. Wash to keep a good bed good. Replace when the structure is gone.

Washing after an illness or fleas

After a contagious illness or a flea problem, the standard changes from clean to hot. Wash whatever the care tag says can take hot water and a hot dryer cycle, since heat is what kills flea eggs and larvae in bedding, and replace what cannot take it. Treating the dog and the house is your vet’s call, not a laundry decision.

Fleas are the clearer case. Veterinary consensus is that most of a flea population lives in the environment rather than on the animal, as eggs and larvae that drop off into bedding, carpet, and the cracks around them, which is exactly why bedding gets named in every control plan. Vacuum the bed and the area around it first, empty the canister or bag into an outside bin right away, then hot-wash and hot-dry every layer the tag permits.

A foam core is the sticking point in a flea situation, because it cannot be hot-washed and cannot go in a dryer. Wash the cover and liner hot, treat the core to a thorough vacuum and a full dry, and understand that the honest answer for a heavily infested foam bed is often replacement. That is not a fun sentence to read, but a bed that keeps reseeding the problem costs more than a new one.

After a contagious illness, keep it simple: hot wash and full hot dry for what tolerates it, replacement for what does not, and ask your vet what the specific illness actually requires. Your vet knows your dog and the bug in question, and a laundry guide cannot.

Frequently asked questions

Can you put a dog bed in the washing machine? Most dog beds can go in a washing machine on cold and gentle, as long as the bed fits the drum with room to move. Wash the removable cover on its own whenever the bed has a zipper, using mild detergent and an extra rinse. The exception is a solid foam core, which never belongs in a machine at any setting.

How do you wash a dog bed with stuffing and no removable cover? Put it in the machine whole if it fits loosely in the drum, on cold water, a gentle cycle, mild detergent, and an extra rinse. Add a second spin cycle to pull out as much water as possible, then knead the fill back into shape while it is damp so it does not dry in clumps. If the bed fills the drum, wash it in the bathtub instead.

Can you wash a memory foam dog bed? Not in a washing machine. The cover comes off and washes normally on cold, and the foam core gets a tub soak: cool water, a little mild detergent, pressing the foam under with open palms, then pressing again in plain water until no suds come out. Squeeze the water out instead of wringing, and dry it flat with air on both sides for a day or two.

How often should you wash a dog bed? About once a month for most households, with a quick vacuum in between. Move to every week or two if someone in the house has allergies, if your dog sheds heavily, if the bed lives outside or in the mud room, or if accidents happen. Accidents get treated the same day with an enzyme cleaner rather than waiting for laundry day.

What detergent should you use on a dog bed? A small amount of mild, fragrance-free detergent, followed by an extra rinse. Your dog sleeps on this fabric for hours with skin against it, so getting the detergent back out matters more than which bottle you buy. Skip fabric softener and dryer sheets, since they coat the fibers and can reduce a cover’s water resistance.

How do you get the dog smell out of a dog bed? Most bed odor is skin oil and dried saliva held in the fabric, so a proper wash with a light detergent dose and an extra rinse removes it. If the smell comes back within a week, the bed was not dry in the middle. A cup of plain white vinegar in the rinse helps with lingering odor, but the drying is what actually settles it.

Washing a dog bed stops being risky the moment you stop treating the bed as one object. Take the cover off, vacuum the hair before anything gets wet, keep the water cold and the detergent light, keep foam out of the drum, and let everything dry longer than feels necessary. Run that on a loose monthly rhythm and a good bed lasts as long as its construction allows, which is all any bed can promise. When the fill has flattened past saving or the foam has taken one accident too many, our dog bed collection is where the replacement comes from.

About the author. Brandon Kelly is the Pet Care Editor at Pets Perfect, where he spends his days in the catalog and with the people who buy and use this stuff. He is not a veterinarian, and nothing here replaces your vet’s advice for your individual dog.