Encase it, then treat the room. About 85% of bed bugs turn up in or near the bed, so the mattress, box spring, bed frame and headboard are where an infestation concentrates, not where it starts and stays. A sealed encasement stops the mattress itself from being a harborage; the heat, cold or chemical work described below is what addresses the insects already living in the room around it.
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Does a mattress encasement actually work?
Two sourced measures cover the mattress and box spring directly, and they do different jobs — one prevents, one interrupts.
Sealed encasement
3- Shown effective in laboratory research at preventing bed bugs from establishing harborage on the mattress
- Anything already sealed inside eventually dies of starvation, not from a chemical or a temperature
- Covers both the mattress and the box springthe box spring is not a lower-priority item
US EPA: purchase protective covers that seal; with a cover that seals, bed bugs get trapped inside and die.
Vacuuming and interceptors
3- Vacuum the mattress and box-spring seams directlya single pass rarely gets all the bugs and eggs, so it is repeated
- Interceptors placed under the bed's legs trapped six times more bed bugs than visual searching alone in the underlying research
- Neither step kills what is already inside the mattress; both reduce what is moving across the floor and up the legs
UC IPM Pest Notes 7454 lists both as part of an integrated plan, not as a replacement for it.
What temperature does it take to kill bed bugs in a mattress?
The figure that matters is the temperature reached inside the mattress, not the air reading in the room. At 113 °F an adult reaches 99% mortality in 94.8 minutes; an egg at the same temperature needs 428.5 minutes — roughly seven hours — because eggs are consistently the harder target. Raise the temperature to 118.4 °F and the egg dies in 71.5 minutes instead, which is the trade-off whole-room heat services are built around.
- 113 °FMinimum lethal temperature, at the insect
- 94.8 minAdults at 113 °F, 99% mortality
- 428.5 minEggs at 113 °F, 99% mortality — about 7 hours
- 71.5 minEggs at 118.4 °F, 99% mortality
This is also why solar-wrapping a mattress in black plastic is not a substitute for a measured heat treatment. In one documented case the upper surface of a mattress wrapped this way reached 85 °C in the sun while the lower surface, resting against the floor or a frame, stayed below the lethal temperature the whole time. A mattress is thick and layered enough that heat applied to one face does not reliably reach the other.
Can you just freeze a mattress instead?
Not in practice, even though cold does kill bed bugs. The sourced cold figures — 0 °F for at least 3.5 days, or UC IPM's slower 32 °F for several days — describe items small enough to sit inside a household freezer or a sealed unit held at that temperature for that long. A mattress does not fit inside either, and there is no sourced method for chilling one in place at a controlled temperature for days at a time.
- 0 °FMinimum, held for ≥3.5 days
- −31.2 °CLower lethal temperature, all stages
- −12 °CMeasurable survival for a week at this milder cold
Cold stays relevant to a mattress indirectly: it is freeze-intolerant across every life stage, with a lower lethal temperature of −31.2 °C, but the same research found measurable survival above −12 °C even after a week of continuous exposure at that milder cold. That gap between a cold garage and an actual freezer is the reason cold is a tool for bagged items, not for furniture.
Do you have to throw the mattress away?
Not automatically. An encased mattress is not disposed of — it is sealed, and whatever was inside it is left to starve. Replacement becomes a question only when the mattress is damaged, when a household decides not to live with an encasement, or when a professional inspecting the piece recommends it.
If a mattress or another piece of furniture does go, how it leaves the home matters. The sourced advice is specific: don't leave it on the curb or the porch. Take it to the dump, or mark it clearly as infested; EPA's own wording is to slash or otherwise destroy it, so it isn't carried into someone else's home by a passerby who doesn't know what it is.
Sources
7 cited- Where bed bugs concentrate and why an inspection starts at the bed: UC IPM Pest Notes Publication 7454, Bed Bugs, May 2013 (checked 2026-08-18).
- Encasements and vacuuming: UC IPM Pest Notes 7454; US EPA, Do-it-yourself Bed Bug Control (checked 2026-08-18).
- Interceptor research: UC IPM Pest Notes 7454, reporting the underlying interceptor study (checked 2026-08-18).
- Heat, temperature and exposure time: Kells & Goblirsch 2011, Insects 2(3):412–422, doi:10.3390/insects2030412; US EPA, Controlling Bed Bugs Using Integrated Pest Management (checked 2026-08-18).
- The solar-wrap mattress example: Doggett et al. 2006, cited in Ohio State University, Bed Bug Control: Heat and Cold research reference (checked 2026-08-18).
- Cold tolerance and freezing figures: Olson, Eaton, Kells, Morin & Wang 2013, J. Econ. Entomol. 106(6):2433–2441; US EPA, Do-it-yourself Bed Bug Control (checked 2026-08-18).
- Disposal of infested items: UC IPM Pest Notes 7454; US EPA, Top Ten Tips to Prevent or Control Bed Bugs (checked 2026-08-18).