Sofa Beds

How to choose a sofa bed

The first question is how often you'll actually sleep on it. A sofa bed used twice a year for guests can get away with a thin foam mattress and a click-clack frame. A sofa bed that's someone's main bed every night needs a proper sprung mattress and a pull-out mechanism, and you should budget like you're buying both a sofa and a bed, because you are.

Mechanism matters more than people realise. The three common types behave very differently:

• Pull-out: the mattress folds out from inside the seat, usually on a sprung steel frame. Deepest sleep surface, takes a fuller mattress (often 10-15cm), best for regular use. Costs more and weighs more.
• Click-clack: the back drops flat. The "mattress" is whatever the seat and back cushions add up to, which is rarely thicker than 8cm. Fine for the odd guest, painful for back sleepers over a few nights.
• Fold-out or futon: a single piece that folds in half. Cheaper, lighter, and awkward to convert if you don't have wall space.

Mattress depth is the spec most often hidden in the fine print. Anything under 10cm is a guest-only proposition. 12 to 15cm of pocket-sprung or hybrid foam will sleep like a real bed. Jay-Be's e-Pocket and Saturn ranges sit in this bracket and price accordingly (around £800 to £1,500). The £200 click-clacks on the listing have their place, but not as a primary bed.

Footprint when open is the dimension to measure before you order. A double sofa bed adds roughly 90 to 100cm of depth when extended. Studio flats and box rooms struggle with that. Check the open-bed dimensions on the product page, mark them out on the floor with masking tape, and walk the route from sofa to door before you commit.

The brands and retailers we list

We pull thousands of sofa beds from a long list of UK retailers. The names below are the ones that show up most often.

Jay-Be is the British sofa bed specialist. Known for deep pocket-sprung mattresses on folding metal frames, sold through John Lewis and a long tail of independents. Daily-use territory. Price band roughly £800 to £1,800.

Designer Sofas 4U builds upholstered sofa beds in Manchester, made-to-order in fabric and leather. Slower to deliver than the flat-pack range, but the build matches the price. From around £999.

Homescapes covers the budget-to-mid end. A wide range of click-clacks and futons in fabric and faux leather, usually on a five-to-seven day delivery. Good for spare-room duty.

HOMCOM is flat-pack and value-led, sold via Aosom and Robert Dyas. Mostly metal-frame click-clacks under £400. Buy on size and colour, not on longevity.

The Range is the biggest single retailer in this category for us, with 900+ listings spanning every mechanism and size. Worth filtering down by price and mattress depth rather than browsing the whole grid.

Robert Dyas is strong on the mid-market click-clack and fold-out range, often with seasonal voucher codes that beat the headline price. Around 600 sofa beds at any time.

Filter the grid above by colour, material or price to narrow things down, or browse all sofa beds without filters to see everything in stock. Prices update daily.