Best Mattresses for Back Sleepers

Back sleeping is the position spinal specialists tend to prefer — but only when the mattress holds the natural S-curve of the spine. The failure mode is a soft bed that lets the hips sink below the shoulders, flattening the lumbar curve and straining the lower back over the course of the night.

Medium to medium-firm models perform best here: firm enough to keep the hips level, with just enough surface contouring to fill in the lumbar gap. Zoned-support designs, which are firmer under the hips than the shoulders, are built for this position specifically.

The table below lists every mattress in our database tagged for back sleepers, ranked by Value Score. Most are hybrids or firmer foams — sort by firmness in the details or by price to compare.