Last Updated on October 4, 2026 by Umar Farooq
Use Cottons or Heavy Duty, the highest spin your machine offers, and about half the detergent you would normally reach for. Whites and light towels take hot water, roughly 130–140°F; colored towels take warm, roughly 90–110°F. Wash them on their own, and never with fabric softener.
Those temperature bands are approximate — your machine’s own “hot” depends on the model and on your incoming supply — so treat them as a target, not a dial position. Only one item on that list is controversial, and it is the detergent. Cutting the dose is the single change that makes the biggest difference to how a towel feels.
That is the whole answer, and the rest of this page is why. For every other fabric, see what wash cycle should I use. If your towels are already stiff, already smell, or the machine is banging its way through the spin with a load of them in it, those are the sections below.
How to wash towels, step by step
- Wash them on their own. Towels shed lint onto everything smooth and soak up the water the rest of a mixed load needed.
- Load to about two-thirds, judged dry. You should be able to lay a flat hand between the top of the towels and the top of the drum.
- Cottons or Heavy Duty, hot for whites and warm for colours. Roughly 130–140°F and 90–110°F respectively, as a target rather than a dial position.
- Halve the detergent. This is the step that decides how the towel feels, and it is the one nobody believes.
- Highest spin the cycle allows, plus the extra-spin option if you have one. Then out of the drum and into the dryer immediately.
No fabric softener at any point, and no dryer sheets. The reasoning for each of those is below, starting with the cycle itself.
What cycle for towels, and why they get their own
A cycle is a recipe with four variables: drum movement, temperature, spin speed and time. Towels want the aggressive end of all four, which is why Cottons and Heavy Duty are the right family and Normal is the acceptable compromise. Terry cotton is dense and built to survive, and there is nothing in a towel load that a vigorous tumble can stretch, felt or pill. The gentleness that protects a knit is wasted on a bath sheet.
The reason towels need the longer wash is not that they are dirtier. It is that they are thicker. Detergent and water have to penetrate a deep pile of loops rather than a single layer of woven fabric, and that takes contact time the way heavy soil takes contact time. A short cycle wets the outside of a towel and the middle of the pile barely participates. That is also why a towel load rinses badly on a short program, which brings us to the part nobody explains.
Wash them on their own, and not for hygiene reasons: towels shed lint onto everything smooth, and they soak up water the rest of a mixed load needed.
Towels feel rough because of residue, not because of the wash
Stiff, scratchy towels are almost always carrying detergent, not damage — and the fix is to use less of it, not to wash them harder. It runs against instinct hard enough that people read it and dose normally anyway.
Here is the mechanism. A bath towel presents an enormous surface area: thousands of loops of yarn standing up off the base weave, each one a separate thing for liquid to cling to. That structure is what makes a towel absorbent, and it is what makes it hold detergent. A rinse designed around flat woven fabric moves clean water past the surface without flushing the inside of the pile, so a proportion of every dose stays behind, dries in place, and stiffens the loops.
A drum full of towels also soaks up much of the water metered out for rinsing, so the load that most needs a thorough rinse gets the least effective one. Add the usual overdose and you get the whole symptom set at once: stiffness, dullness, white marks, and a machine pausing to handle suds.
Manufacturers describe that last part in their own terms. Samsung says its Sud / 5d message “does not indicate that service is needed” and is “caused by an incorrect use of detergent” (Samsung — washing machine information and error codes). LG puts a number on it: too many suds during spinning stops the machine, and “this adds about 2 hours to the cycle time” (LG — front load washer error code list). Overdosing on towels is not a preference. It is a documented cause of a two-hour cycle.
Halve the dose, and add an extra rinse for the first few loads to clear what is already in there. If you are seeing white marks as well, white residue on clothes covers the dosing correction.
Softener coats the fibre that is supposed to absorb
Fabric softener works by depositing a thin waxy coating on the fibers, and a coated fiber cannot absorb water. It makes a towel worse at the one job a towel has. There is no dose of softener that is correct for a towel load.
Softener feels like the answer because the problem it appears to solve is real — towels do get stiff — but it treats that symptom by adding another film on top of the film already causing it. The first result is convincing: the towel comes out fluffy and smells of the bottle. Three or four washes later it pushes water around your skin instead of taking it up, and it dries more slowly on the rail, which is how the sour smell starts.
The buildup is cumulative and does not rinse off on its own, which is why a towel softened for a year will not recover from one plain wash. To strip it, run the towels hot with no detergent and no softener, or with a cup of white vinegar in place of the softener, and repeat once. The vinegar is a stripping agent rather than a softener substitute — once the towels are clean you do not need it either. Dryer sheets deposit the same kind of coating by a different route, so drop those too. What makes a towel feel soft is a correct detergent dose and a full tumble dry with room to move.
Load size: towels are the heaviest load you own
A dry towel is light and a wet one is not, and the whole set of towel-related machine complaints lives in that gap. Terry holds several times its own weight in water, so a drum that looked comfortably loaded when you filled it is carrying a very different mass by the time the spin starts. Judge it dry: you should be able to lay a flat hand between the top of the towels and the top of the drum.
LG puts the optimal load at about two-thirds of capacity, and the same page documents what happens when the machine finds more water than it expected — a load of dry towels estimated at 30 minutes was detected as already wet and the estimate jumped to 1 hour 52 minutes (LG — frontload washer wash time keeps extending). That is not a fault; it is the machine re-sizing the cycle around the weight it sensed, and towels trigger it more than anything else. The fill rule in full is in how full should a washing machine be.
Set the spin to the highest the cycle allows, and take the extra-spin option if your machine offers one. Spin speed decides one thing: how much water leaves in the machine rather than in the dryer. On a knit that force is a cost; on terry cotton there is nothing to protect, so maximum spin is free — and it gets the towels dry before they develop a smell.
Towels and machine balance: the load behind the symptom
Towels are the load most likely to make a healthy machine look broken, worth knowing before you diagnose one. Wet terry is heavy, and heavy items migrate. A few towels wrapped around each other form a single dense mass on one side of the drum, and no amount of tumbling redistributes a knot. The machine senses the imbalance, slows, retries, and finishes at a reduced spin rather than risk the vibration — which is how a towel load comes out soaked on a machine whose spin system is fine.
LG describes the condition plainly: UE “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” (LG — front load washer error code list). Two or three heavy bath towels are the classic version. The fix is composition, not repair: load them loosely one at a time rather than as a bundle, mix sizes so small items fill the gaps, and never wash a single bath sheet alone.
| What you’re seeing after a towel load | What the load did | What to change |
|---|---|---|
| Towels stiff and scratchy | Detergent residue trapped in the pile | Halve the dose, add an extra rinse |
| Towels no longer absorb water | Fabric softener or dryer sheet coating | Stop both; strip with a hot no-detergent wash |
| Sour smell within a day of use | Left damp — spin too low, or dried slowly | Max spin, dry fully, don’t leave the load in the drum |
| Cycle time jumped by an hour or more | A heavier wet load than expected, or a suds pause | Load two-thirds, cut the detergent — see washing machine stops mid cycle |
| Banging and walking during spin | A dense knot of wet towels on one side | Load loosely, mix sizes — see washing machine shakes during spin |
| Towels come out dripping | Spin aborted after a failed balance retry | Redistribute, run a spin-only — see clothes soaking wet after wash |
UE / Ub / dc on the display | Unbalanced load, not a component fault | See Samsung washer UE or Ub error |
| Suds message mid-cycle | Overdosing on a load that rinses badly | See Samsung washer Sud or 5d error |
Keeping towels absorbent and odor-free
Get the wash right and the drying still decides how the towel ends up. A towel left damp for hours grows the bacteria behind the sour smell, and no amount of scent covers that once it has started.
- Take the load out as soon as the cycle ends. Not later that evening.
- Dry fully, with room to tumble — an overpacked dryer leaves the middle of the pile damp.
- Hang used towels spread out, not folded over a hook.
- Wash bath towels after three or four uses, hand towels more often.
If the machine itself has started to smell, the towels will pick it up and no wash setting fixes that — see tub clean cycle explained.
How often should you wash towels?
Every three or four uses for a bath towel, and more often for hand towels, which get used by more people and spend longer damp. A gym or swimming towel goes in after every single use, because it never gets the chance to dry properly in a bag.
The number matters less than the drying, though. A towel used twice and hung spread out will be fresher than one used once and left in a heap, because the smell comes from how long it stayed wet rather than from how many times it touched you. If your towels start to smell before the third use, the problem is the rail, not the wash frequency.
When a hotter wash is actually the answer
Most towel complaints are residue, not bacteria, and hotter washing will not fix a rinsing problem. But there is a narrow exception — towels used by someone who has been ill, or in a house with a serious allergy. That is what a sanitize cycle is for, and it is a different thing from a hot wash: see the sanitize cycle explained.
FAQ
Can I use Heavy Duty for towels every time?
Yes. There is nothing in a terry cotton load that the extra agitation will damage.
Is vinegar a good softener replacement?
It is a stripping agent for existing buildup, not a softener. Use it to reset the towels, then stop.
Why are my new towels not absorbent?
Most new towels carry a manufacturing finish. Wash them once, hot, with a small dose of detergent and no softener before first use.
Should I add an extra rinse?
For the first few loads after cutting your dose, yes. If you need one every time, the dose is still too high.
What temperature should you wash towels at?
Hot for whites, roughly 130–140°F, and warm for colours, roughly 90–110°F. Treat those as targets — what your machine calls “hot” depends on the model and your incoming supply.
Can you wash towels with clothes?
Better not to. Towels shed lint onto smooth fabrics, they absorb the water the rest of the load needs, and they want a hotter, longer cycle than most clothing.
Nothing spins properly, towels or otherwise. Then it isn’t the load. See washing machine won’t spin.
