Tom’s Guide Sleep Awards 2025: Best Affordable Mattress
This memory foam mattress offers an unbeatable blend of comfort, support and sheer value for money
Buying a mattress is a long-term investment in your health — but that doesn't mean that price should ever be a barrier to a decent night's sleep. In our quest to crown the Best Affordable Mattress in the Tom's Guide Sleep Awards 2025, we were looking for a bed that delivered in terms of all round comfort and support at an accessible price.
After testing 120+ mattresses in order to curate our guide to the very best mattresses for all sleepers and budgets, the Nectar Classic came out as one of the best affordable options in its field, scoring highly in our Nectar Classic mattress review.
The Nectar Classic is an all-foam mattress that's on the firmer side of medium-firm, and made with dense foams that hit the perfect balance of full-body support and pressure relief. That's not an easy combination to get right, particularly in a budget mattress, but the Classic does a great job while costing you $649 for a queen.
Comfortable in all sleep positions and excellent at absorbing motion, the Nectar Classic is the best mattress option for anyone who wants quality at lower price. Keep reading to learn why the Nectar Classic is the best affordable mattress you can buy, and check our full Tom's Guide Sleep Awards listings for even more top-rated sleep products.
Nectar Classic: Affordably brilliant
The Classic is the best-selling mainstay in Nectar's mattress line-up, and it features a straightforward design: three layers of CeriPUR-US certified foam that combine to contour and cushion your body while keeping everything aligned so you don't wake up with aches and pains.
It doesn't deliver that much of the sink-in feel that you might associate with memory foam, but the Classic's medium-firm feel proved to be winner with our entire testing team. It's a particularly good fit for side and back sleepers, although we'd sound a note of caution for lighter side sleepers, who might not get the cushioning they'll need for their hips and shoulders.
Anyone in search of an affordable mattress will find plenty of options to rival the Nectar Classic in this year's Black Friday mattress deals. A slightly more expensive alternative would be the DreamCloud Classic, which has a similar feel in a hybrid construction. Alternatively if you're after something cheaper, the Siena 10" Signature mattress is an impressive, if slightly firmer, option.
In our tests the Nectar Classic performed admirably. At 12" deep it looks luxurious, and as well as providing plenty of pressure relief it also features a tactile, balanced sleep surface that feels lovely to lie down on, cushioning and supporting just where you need it.
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Where the Nectar Classic particularly excels is in its motion isolation: it aced all our motion transfer tests, which means that if you share a bed with a restless partner you won't be woken up by their movements throughout the night. And considering that it's an all-foam mattress, the Nectar Classic is surprisingly good at temperature regulation: this latest version features a breathable, cool-to-the-touch cover that enhances airflow through the mattress and helps stop things getting too hot.
The only mild disappointment to the Nectar Classic is its edge support: while it's good enough for you to sleep right up to the sides of the bed, there's a bit of squishiness when you sit on the edge, but not enough to make it hard for people with mobility issues to get out of bed easily.
All in all the Nectar Classic performs incredibly well considering its price point, making it a clear choice for the best affordable mattress.

Jim is a freelance writer and performer based in Bath, UK, whose work can be found on sites including TechRadar, Tom's Guide, T3, PetsRadar and Creative Bloq. Jim started out over a quarter of a century ago, covering technology and video games, and they've been expanding their repertoire ever since. On any given week Jim's likely to be writing about design, sleep, wellness and even cats, and has learned an awful lot about the mattress industry over the past few years.
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