The Best Futons for Side Sleepers

Why depth beats softness for a side sleeper

Lie on your side on a hard floor and your hip bone takes the load through perhaps two square inches of flesh. Your shoulder takes another concentrated load. Your waist, meanwhile, is bridging a gap — unsupported, so the lumbar spine bends sideways to reach the floor.

A mattress fixes that in one way only: by letting the hip and shoulder descend far enough that the waist comes into contact. That descent is limited by the total depth of material available. A soft four-inch mattress bottoms out and you are on the floor again with a cushion in the way; a firmer eight-inch mattress lets the hip travel two or three inches and still has material left underneath it.

Which is why “soft” is a misleading word to shop on, and depth is not. A three-inch soft topper over a four-inch pad is still seven inches of material and will beat a five-inch mattress described as plush.

Two rows on that table clear eight inches. Everything else is a component rather than an answer — useful stacked on something, insufficient alone.

Pocket coils versus foam, at the same depth

At eight inches we cover one of each: the DHP coil futon mattress and the Zinus Green Tea foam mattress. For a side sleeper they are not equivalent, and the difference is local compression.

Independently encased coils mean each spring is in its own fabric pocket and compresses largely on its own. Put a hip on it and a small cluster of coils goes down while the ones under your waist stay up. That is the behavior a side sleeper wants: a dished surface rather than a flat one.

A foam slab compresses across a region instead. Memory foam does this better than ordinary polyurethane because it is viscoelastic and creeps to shape, but it still pulls neighboring material down with it. In practice the Zinus is the better buy if the frame does not fold — a daybed, a trundle, a wall bed — and the DHP is the better buy if the frame has to bi-fold, because the Zinus does not fold at all.

The floor futon problem, stated plainly

A Japanese floor futon is the best-storing guest bed there is — the MAXYOYO is 10 to 14.5 lb depending on size and rolls away to nothing. It is also, in its standard four-inch form, the worst surface on this page for a side sleeper, and we would rather say so than sell it to you.

Four inches on a hard floor is four inches. The manufacturer’s own framing is that side sleepers and anyone much over 200 lb will feel the floor through it, and that is correct. On a carpeted floor it is better than on tile or laminate, but not by enough to change the answer.

The way to make it work is to buy up the range rather than buy a topper. MAXYOYO sells the same mattress in 4.5, 6 and 8 inch versions. An 8-inch floor futon is a genuinely different product from a 4-inch one for this purpose, and it still rolls away — which is the only reason to be in this format at all. Full coverage of the category is in the best Japanese floor futons.

The other route, if the four-inch futon is already bought, is three inches of high-density foam on top of it. The ViscoSoft topper is a single block over 3 lb per cubic foot with a strapped cover, which matters on a floor setup because a loose topper on a floor futon walks across the room overnight.

The frame matters too, and most frames cap you at eight inches

Before you buy depth, check what your frame accepts. This is a constraint buyers routinely discover after the mattress arrives.

Daybed frames are the strictest: the Novogratz Bushwick publishes a hard 8-inch maximum mattress depth, and the Dream Solutions pop-up trundle the same. On a trundle that has to rise level with the daybed, exceeding the stated maximum does not just look wrong — the two surfaces stop meeting.

Wall beds are the most generous: Bestar’s queen models take 8 to 12 inches at 60 to 90 lb, and a Lori takes up to 12 inches at 80 lb maximum. If you are a side sleeper and the room can take a wall bed, that is the configuration where you get a real mattress with no depth compromise at all — see the best Murphy bed mattresses.

And if the piece has to be a sofa, the relevant figure is open sleep height rather than mattress depth, because a split-back has no separate mattress. The Tallulah’s 17.5 inches is the highest in our registry and its memory-over-high-density construction is the closest this format gets, which is why it is here despite publishing no foam depth. The wider comparison is in the best sleeper sofas for back pain, which shares most of the same physics.