There is a version of this task that takes ten minutes and leaves the bed properly clean, and a version that takes an hour and leaves it smelling worse in a fortnight. The difference is almost entirely sequence.
The short version: vacuum before water, wash the cover hot and alone, use detergent and nothing else, clean the foam separately without soaking it, and do not put it back together until everything is dry all the way through. Everything below is the reasoning behind those five rules and the awkward cases.
Vacuum first. This is the step everyone skips.
Dog hair in a washing machine does not dissolve. It mats into a felt layer that traps water in the fabric, which means the cover comes out heavier, takes far longer to dry, and is more likely to go back on damp. It also ends up in the machine filter.
Two minutes with an upholstery tool over the whole bed — seams, the gusset, and the underside of any bolster where hair collects — makes every subsequent step work better. If you only do one thing from this page, do this one before the bed goes anywhere near the machine.
Check for two zips, not one
Most beds worth buying have a removable outer cover. A good number also have an inner waterproof liner wrapped around the foam, with its own separate zip — the PetFusion we rank elsewhere states a liner that is fully waterproof rather than merely water-resistant, and the bolsters and base unzip separately so they can be reloaded after washing.
That inner liner is the part that decides whether an accident ends the bed, and it is almost always the part with the most restrictive care label. Read both labels before you pick a temperature. If the liner says warm and the cover says hot, wash them on separate cycles rather than splitting the difference.
Hot, alone, and no fabric softener
Wash the cover on its own. Not with towels, not with bedding — on its own, because whatever is on the cover is going onto everything else in the drum, and because a full load does not let a bulky cover move.
Use the hottest cycle the label allows. The best available evidence on this is adjacent rather than exact: a 2023 study of 96 dog food bowls found Enterobacteriaceae counts were higherafter hand washing than after a dishwasher cycle. That is bowls, not bedding, and we are not going to pretend it measures beds — but the mechanism is the same, and it points the same way every time. A sustained hot cycle beats a lukewarm scrub.
Detergent only. Fabric softener is the single most common reason a washable cover stops working: it leaves a coating on the fibres, and a coated cover neither absorbs nor releases properly. On a waterproof liner it is worse, because it sits on the membrane. Add an extra rinse if your machine has one.
Pre-treating: enzymes, not bleach
Urine odor is biological. An enzyme cleaner breaks the compounds down; a scented surface cleaner covers them until the fabric warms up again under a sleeping dog, at which point the smell returns and people conclude the bed is ruined.
Spray, leave it for however long the bottle says, and do not rinse before washing. Skip bleach: it weakens fibres and strips color, and it does not do the job enzymes do. The one thing worth saying about handling is the obvious one — the CDC’s guidance on dogs notes that dog waste carries parasites and germs that can infect people, so a bed that has been soiled rather than just slept on is soiled laundry. Wash your hands properly afterwards and keep that load separate.
The foam core, and the mistake that kills beds
Do not soak the foam. A saturated foam slab holds water in the middle for days, and what grows in there is mildew you cannot see and cannot wash out. This is how most otherwise-fine beds end up at the tip.
Wipe the core with a damp cloth and a little detergent, blot it dry with a towel, then stand it on edge in a ventilated room — on edge, so air gets to both faces. A fan pointed at it halves the time. Then the rule that matters more than anything else on this page: do not reassemble until both the cover and the core are dry all the way through. A bed put back together slightly damp will smell inside a week, and you will wash it again and get the same result.
How often, and the bed that makes it easy
Weekly for the cover is a sensible default. Every two weeks is fine for a clean adult dog that stays out of mud. Weekly or more if the dog has a skin condition, or if it swims, or if it is a puppy.
What actually determines whether this happens is how annoying the bed makes it. The 2022 bowl-hygiene survey found that 22% of owners washed about once a week, 12% daily and 18% less often than quarterly — again a different object, but the pattern is human rather than canine, and it is the reason the single most valuable specification on a dog bed is a cover that comes off in ten seconds. The AKC’s bed guidance ranks size, style and support; washability is the one that decides whether the bed is still in use in year three.
