Last Updated on October 4, 2026 by Umar Farooq
The short version of how to wash pillows is this: check the filling first, then wash two at a time on a gentle cycle with an extra rinse — never one on its own. Memory foam and latex do not go in at all. Everything else that does go in has to be balanced by a second pillow sitting opposite it, because a single pillow is, mechanically, close to the worst object you can put in a washing machine.
Every other page on this subject is a cleaning article. This one is written from the machine’s side, which is a different problem. A pillow is bulky, it floats, it soaks up far more water than its dry weight suggests, and the moment the drum accelerates it slides into one dense lump against the wall. That is the exact condition washers are built to refuse — which is why so many people end up not with a clean pillow but with a machine stuck at 14 minutes remaining, sloshing back and forth, going nowhere.
Check the filling first — two fillings must never go in a washing machine
This is the step that decides whether the rest of the page applies to you, and almost every article buries it under the word “pillows” as though they were one product. They are not. A polyester pillow and a memory foam pillow have about as much in common in a washing machine as a towel and a bicycle helmet. The care label settles it; if the label is gone, the filling is usually still named on the seam tag.
Memory foam and latex are the two absolute exclusions. Foam is a continuous open-cell structure, and tumbling it wet does not clean it — it tears it internally, which is why foam pillows come out of a wash cycle in crumbs and never recover their shape. Whirlpool states it plainly: “To keep the foam from breaking apart, memory foam pillows should never be washed in a washing machine” (how to wash pillows for a clean night’s sleep). Tempur-Pedic, whose entire product is that foam, is blunter still — asked directly whether its pillows can be washed, the answer is “No, the pillows are not washable, as TEMPUR-Material® is very sensitive to liquids” (Can I wash my pillow?).
| Filling | Machine washable? | What actually happens |
|---|---|---|
| Polyester / down alternative | Yes | The most forgiving filling. Tolerates warm water and a low-heat dry |
| Down | Yes, gently | Washes well, but clumps hard when wet and needs a long, patient dry |
| Feather | Yes, gently | As down, and quills can work through a tired ticking — check the seams first |
| Memory foam | No | Agitation breaks the cell structure apart. Spot clean and vacuum |
| Latex | No | Same reason, plus it degrades with heat. Spot clean only |
| Buckwheat | No — empty it first | The hulls turn to mush in water. Empty the hulls out, wash the casing alone |
| Microbead | Usually not | The beads escape through the seam and end up in your pump filter |
Buckwheat and microbead are the two that catch people out, because both feel like ordinary fabric pillows from the outside. A buckwheat casing is washable and its contents are not, so the hulls have to be emptied into a bowl first. Microbeads are worse — small enough to pass a torn seam and travel with the drain water, and a pump full of polystyrene beads is a genuinely irritating afternoon.
How to wash pillows without the machine aborting the spin
Once the filling is cleared, the method is short. What makes it work is not the detergent or the temperature — it is the pairing and the rinse. Everything below assumes two pillows of the same filling, because two pillows of wildly different weights balance no better than one.
- Strip the covers off and check the seams. A seam that is already opening will finish opening in the drum, and then you are picking filling out of the pump filter rather than off the bed.
- Load two, and push them apart. Put one on each side of the drum so the load starts balanced rather than hoping the machine sorts it out. If you genuinely only have one pillow, add two or three bath towels as a counterweight (what cycle to use for towels) — not one towel, and not a single sheet, which weighs nothing wet.
- Use about a tablespoon of detergent. A pillow is a thick sponge that will happily hold detergent through a rinse and hand it back as residue. This is the one load where under-dosing is clearly the right call.
- Gentle or delicate cycle, warm water if the care tag allows it, and an extra rinse. The extra rinse is not optional on a load this absorbent.
- Dry low or no heat, with dryer balls, and longer than you think. A pillow that feels dry on the outside is very often still damp in the core, and a damp core smells within a week.
Step four is where two of Whirlpool’s own live pages disagree, and that is worth naming rather than quietly picking a side. The blog article says a gentle cycle protects the pillow’s structure and that “the bulky cycle isn’t necessary.” The product-help troubleshooting page says Bulky is exactly what pillows are for: “The bulky cycle is intended only for oversized, nonabsorbent items such as comforters, pillows, and poly-filled jackets” (Vibration – Washing a Single Item). Both pages are current. Gentle is the safer default for the pillow; Bulky is the better answer if yours keep coming out washed on one side only.
The float problem: a pillow on top of the water is not being washed
Here is the thing nobody tells you, and it is why a pillow can come out of a full cycle still smelling faintly of the person who slept on it. A dry pillow is mostly air. Dropped into a filling drum it does not sink — it rides on the surface while the drum turns underneath it. That is not a wash. It is one face of the pillow being rinsed for forty minutes while the other stays dry.
Manufacturers know this, which is why the Bulky cycle exists at all. Whirlpool says items on the wrong cycle “could float above the impeller, unevenly distribute around the basket, and not agitate properly” — a precise description of a pillow. Bulky answers it by filling in stages rather than all at once: Whirlpool calls it “a series of fills while agitating” and notes it “could take up to 10-12 minutes to completely fill” (Whirlpool Product Help, “Water Level Using Bulky Cycle”, read live on 2 September 2026). Each partial fill weighs down a little more of the load, dragging the pillow under instead of letting it bob.
If your machine has no Bulky option, do it by hand: pause the cycle a minute or two into the fill, open the lid, and push both pillows under until they stop springing back. Thirty seconds, and it is the difference between a washed pillow and a rinsed one.
Why one pillow cannot balance and two can
A washing machine balances a load statistically. It expects many small items that will spread themselves around the drum wall as it accelerates, so the centre of mass stays near the axis. One pillow does not spread. It is a single object heavy enough to matter and flexible enough to migrate, and once it is soaked it settles into one dense mass on one side of the drum. Spin that and the whole cabinet is being swung around by an off-centre weight.
The machine will not allow it, and that refusal is a safety system rather than a fault. Both Samsung and LG carry a whole family of unbalanced-load codes for exactly this — dc, Ub and UE among them — and LG’s description of UE reads like a description of a pillow: it “occurs when the laundry is piled up on one side of the drum, causing an imbalance, despite the drum’s movements to evenly distribute the load.” That last clause is the machine telling you it already tried.
Two pillows fix this for a reason that is pure geometry rather than laundry lore: two similar masses free to sit opposite each other cancel out, and one mass has nothing to cancel against. Whirlpool gives the same instruction from the other direction — “load in pillows two at a time, if possible, to balance the load.” It is also why the towel trick works and why a single towel does not. You are building a counterweight of roughly equal soaked mass, not adding a token item.
A front-loader and a top-loader with an agitator are two different jobs
The mechanics change enough between machine types that one instruction is not right for all three. A front-loader is the easiest: the pillow tumbles rather than being churned, there is no post to catch on, and the low water level drags the pillow through the water instead of letting it float. What front-loaders punish is imbalance, because the drum is horizontal and the whole cabinet takes the swing — so the two-pillow rule matters most here.
A top-loader with a central agitator is the one to be careful with. The agitator’s job is to grab fabric and force it through the water, and a pillow is a large soft object being pushed against a hard post several thousand times. Seams open, filling drags into a corner, and a pillow can wrap or jam against the post and stall the wash action outright. Use the gentlest cycle the machine offers, stand both pillows vertically around the post rather than draping them over it, and accept that a badly worn pillow may not survive.
An impeller top-loader — the low disc instead of a post — sits between the two. Nothing to snag on, but the float problem is at its worst here, because these machines wash in a shallow pool and a pillow will sit above it doing nothing at all. Push both under before you close the lid.
It comes out heavier than it went in, and that changes everything after
A dry pillow weighs almost nothing. A soaked one is dramatically heavier — nobody publishes a multiplier for it, and none is needed, because lifting a wet pillow out of a drum tells you everything in about a second. That extra mass drives every problem that shows up after the wash: it turns a mild imbalance into a violent one, it makes the machine reduce spin speed to compensate, and it leaves the pillow sopping when the cycle ends (clothes soaking wet after wash).
There is a real trade-off in spin speed that most guides skip. A faster spin removes more water and cuts drying time, which matters here, because a damp core is a mildew problem rather than an inconvenience. But a high spin is also what compresses filling into hard clumps, and what a marginally balanced load fails at. Medium spin, then patience in the dryer (washer spin speed explained).
Resist the urge to add a third and a fourth pillow to make the load feel worth running. A washer needs free space to move a load around, and LG puts the optimal fill at about two-thirds of the tub’s capacity — so packing it out gets you to the same failed spin by a different route (washer load size and how full to fill it).
FAQ
How often should you wash pillows?
Whirlpool’s guidance is that “pillows themselves should be washed at least twice a year to remove dirt, oil, dust mites and bacteria that build up over time” (how to wash pillows for a clean night’s sleep). That is a manufacturer putting its name to a number, which is more than can be said for the “every six months” figure repeated across most of the internet with no source attached to it.
Can you wash memory foam pillows in the washing machine?
No. Whirlpool says memory foam “should never be washed in a washing machine,” and Tempur-Pedic says outright that its pillows “are not washable.” Vacuum the surface, spot clean stains with a barely damp cloth, and wash the removable cover instead.
Can I wash just one pillow if that is all I have?
You can, but pair it with two or three bath towels so the drum has a counterweight. One pillow alone in a drum is the single most reliable way to produce an unbalanced-load code and a cycle that never finishes (washing machine spins only when empty).
Can pillows go in the dryer?
Yes, on low or no heat, with dryer balls, and for far longer than you expect. Heat is what damages filling, and a pillow that is dry to the touch is regularly still damp in the middle — which is how a freshly washed pillow ends up smelling worse than it did before.
Why does my washer shake or stop when I wash pillows?
Because it has detected a load it cannot balance and is declining to spin it, which is a safety system working rather than a fault. Redistribute the pillows to opposite sides of the drum and restart the spin (washing machine shakes during spin).
Hot or cold water for pillows?
Whatever the care tag allows, and no hotter. Warm lifts body oils better than cold, but heat also shrinks ticking and degrades filling.
My pillows came out lumpy — are they ruined?
Usually not. Clumping is wet filling stuck to itself, and a long tumble on low heat with dryer balls breaks most of it up. If a foam or shredded-foam pillow went in and came out crumbly, that is structural and it does not come back.
Washable, worth washing, and never one at a time
Pillows are washable and worth washing, and the reason so many people end up with a lumpy grey thing and a machine full of standing water is not that they used the wrong detergent. It is that they put one pillow in a drum designed for many small items and asked it to spin.
So: two at a time, gentle, a tablespoon of detergent, an extra rinse, and a long low-heat dry. Check the filling first, because for memory foam and latex the correct number of trips to the washing machine is zero. And if you only own one pillow, the towels are not padding — they are the reason the cycle finishes.
