Shipping a mattress: what it costs, single or double, and how to do it

The short answer

You can ship a mattress by courier only if it's rolled and packed in a box: a single foam mattress costs €19.30 with Poste Italiane or €27 plus VAT with BRT (rates read on 25 September 2026). An open mattress, or a double with springs, is over the limits couriers set for private customers: you need dedicated transport.

I worked the figures out myself from the public rate cards of Poste Delivery Standard and BRT's rates for private customers, which BRT itself calls "indicative". The sums, case by case, are in the table below.

Moving mattresses is my job: Smoves was born in Milan in 2026, picks up at home in the city as well as in the Lomellina or around Crema, and scores 4.4 out of 5 on Trustpilot. When a mattress doesn't fit a courier's limits, we collect it from your home and send it where it needs to go: that's our furniture transport with home pickup, on a quote.

How much it costs to ship a mattress: the sums on public rate cards

No courier publishes a price "per mattress". They publish weight bands and size limits, and leave the math to you, with all the generosity of a teacher handing out exercises without the answers. I did it, with two real IKEA mattresses and two open mattresses of a common size; yes, I spent a morning working out the volume of a giant cannolo, and somebody had to.

The detail that changes everything is **volumetric weight**. BRT doesn't charge for what the mattress weighs, but for the space it takes up in the truck: its rate card says "RVP=250", the couriers' convention of 250 kg for every cubic meter. A mattress is mostly air with an opinion about your back, so it weighs little and takes up a lot. The IKEA package sizes come from the product pages of ÅFJÄLL and VALEVÅG.

How much does it cost to ship a double mattress?

With a courier for private customers, you usually just don't. An open 160 × 190 cm double is over BRT's maximum width, 75 cm, and Poste's maximum length, 1.5 meters, before it even reaches the scales. For once, the scales are the least of your problems.

If you try BRT anyway, the math goes like this: 0.76 cubic meters make 190 volumetric kilos, and above 100 kg the rate is charged per 100 kg, rounded up. Two lots at €53 make €106 plus VAT, plus a manual handling surcharge the rate card doesn't quantify. And the public prices are "shop to home": you take the mattress to the BRT point yourself, maybe on the tram at rush hour, with people looking at you the way you'd look at a sail.

Rolled is better, but not enough. The VALEVÅG 160 × 200 leaves the factory as a roll 175 cm long and 36 kg heavy: too heavy for Poste, which stops at 20 kg, and too long for BRT's automatic sorting, which stops at 150 cm. The double cannolo is still a cannolo, just a more ambitious one.

For a double, the realistic route is dedicated transport: a van, someone to load it, a price for that trip. That's what we do with furniture transport: we collect it from your home, anywhere from Como to Piacenza, and send it to the address you give us, in Italy or abroad, on a quote.

Why couriers don't want your mattress

It isn't personal, it's the conveyor belt. Express couriers' parcels run through automatic sorting systems, and a mattress is designed to lie still under a person, not to glide along a roller at thirty kilometers an hour.

BRT says so in its guide to outsized shipments: for automatic sorting a parcel must have a regular shape, at most 150 × 75 × 75 cm and 50 kg, with length plus width within 180 cm. Among its examples of "incompatible" parcels it lists cylindrical containers, which is exactly the shape of a rolled mattress left in its plastic. The cannolo, in short, goes in a box.

Poste Delivery Standard is tighter still: 20 kg at most, and a 1.5-meter side in the larger format. An open single mattress almost always measures 190 or 200 cm, so it won't fit even if it holds its breath.

Can you roll it? It depends on what's inside

The trick everyone suggests is to roll the mattress and vacuum-pack it. For some mattresses it works; for others it's the fastest way to turn them into a hammock.

Mattresses that arrive rolled were compressed at the factory: Emma, which makes them, explains that the presses apply hundreds of kilos per square centimeter and that only well-built mattresses survive it. Doing it at home with a vacuum cleaner and a wardrobe bag is a different operation, however hard the vacuum cleaner tries.

The rule of thumb, by type of mattress:

• Memory and foam: they roll, for short periods. The easy case.

• Latex: carefully, and not for long.

• Traditional springs: no. Mattress sellers advise against it because the springs can deform for good, and a mattress with bent springs doesn't come back with an apology.

• Pocket springs: at the factory, with the right machines, yes. At home it's a bet on the spring pockets, and the mattress usually loses it.

How to ship a mattress, step by step

First, read the label sewn into the cover or the maker's instructions: if it says not to fold it, don't. If you find nothing, treat it like a spring mattress, which is the cautious assumption.

If yours is a single foam mattress, you can manage on your own. This is the order that saves you the second trip to the drop-off point, the one with the mattress under your arm and the face of someone who has already understood everything.

1. Measure the mattress, then the finished parcel: length, width, height and weight. The courier does the sums on the parcel.

2. Check what's inside, foam, latex or springs: that decides whether it can be rolled.

3. Protect it with a mattress cover or a plastic sheet taped shut, even if it then goes in a box.

4. If it's rolled, pack it in a rigid box: a bare roll is a cylindrical parcel, and at BRT it ends up in manual handling.

5. Work out the volumetric weight (length times width times height in meters, times 250) and compare the bands before you book.

6. If a side is over 150 cm or the parcel is over 50 kg, stop looking for the right courier and ask for dedicated transport.

Packing and hygiene: the mattress travels clean or it doesn't travel

A mattress spends years in contact with a person, and on a journey it passes through the hands, yards and vans of complete strangers. A waterproof cover, or a plastic sheet taped shut properly, keeps dust and rain off it. It costs little, and saves you spending your first evening dusting the thing you sleep on.

Air it and let it dry completely before you close it up. A damp mattress sealed in plastic for days does not improve, and on arrival your nose finds out before your eyes do.

If it has to wait in storage before leaving, our warehouse rule applies: anything dirty or wet doesn't go in. A clean, dry, protected mattress we load as it is, no box, like the other furniture in furniture storage in Milan. If you'd rather we packed it, that's a paid extra.

What we see when we load a mattress

In June 2026 we picked up more than 200 items from students, mostly around Bocconi. There was a bit of everything among the boxes, and every pickup taught the same lesson: what makes a load tricky is never how much something weighs, it's its shape. A twenty-kilo box lifts and stacks; a soft object two meters long decides for itself where it's going, like a cat.

With mattresses it counts double. An open mattress handles one thing badly, being bent to fit where it doesn't fit. That's why we take it as it is, no improvised cannoli, and send it on with furniture transport, even if you have nothing in storage with us.

Then there's the part a courier doesn't do: coming to your home to collect it. At the pickup we need you or someone you've delegated to be there. If a bed to dismantle, or half a bedroom, is leaving with the mattress, it becomes a small move, and there's the page on small moves in Milan. If it's going abroad because you're moving too, read how moving abroad from Milan works.

Ship it or throw it out? In Milan, curbside collection is free

Before you pay for a trip, ask the awkward question: is this mattress worth the journey? A ten-year-old one that left you a backache as a keepsake may deserve a goodbye, not a ticket.

In Milan the goodbye is cheap. AMSA, the city's waste company, collects bulky items from home, mattresses included: free if you leave it on the sidewalk outside the street number in the booking, paid if you want it collected from your floor. The limits are 2.5 meters and 50 kg per item, and one booking every 30 days. In the towns of the province served by AMSA, the page changes from town to town.

And having the old one taken away when you buy a new one? The legally required "one for one" take-back applies to appliances and other electronic equipment, as the Italian WEEE Coordination Center explains, not to mattresses. If a store takes your old mattress, that's its own service: ask about terms and price before you pay, not when the driver is already on the landing.