Replacement Sofa Cushion Foam

Replacement sofa cushion foam, cut to your exact size. A sagging sofa almost never needs replacing — the frame usually outlasts the foam by years. New inserts cut to your existing covers cost a fraction of a new suite and take an afternoon to fit.

Measure your covers and see the price →

Is it the foam or is it the sofa?

Worth five minutes before you spend anything. Take the cushions off and press down hard on the deck — the platform the cushions sit on.

  • Deck feels solid, cushions feel dead. New foam will fix it. This is most sofas.
  • Deck sags or you can feel the frame through it. The webbing or springs have gone. New cushions will sit in a dip and still feel wrong — fix the deck first.
  • Frame creaks or moves when you rock it. A joint has failed. Worth repairing if the sofa is decent, but foam is not the answer.

Sit on one cushion turned upside down, too. If the underside feels noticeably better than the top, the foam has simply compressed on one face and you have confirmed the diagnosis.

Measure the cover, not the old foam

The mistake nearly everyone makes. Foam that has been sat on for a decade can be 3–4 cm smaller than the cover it lives in. Copy those measurements and your new cushions will be too small on the day they arrive.

Unzip the cover, take the old foam out, and measure the empty cover laid flat. Length, width, and the depth of the gusset — the side panel — which gives you the thickness.

Foam should fill the cover firmly enough that you have to work it into the corners. That resistance is what a plump cushion looks like from the outside.

Fire safety

Foam used in furniture in UK homes is covered by the Furniture and Furnishings (Fire) (Safety) Regulations 1988. The foam we cut is supplied to meet those requirements, so a cushion you re-foam with us is on the same footing as the one that came with the sofa.

Worth knowing if you are re-covering as well as re-foaming: the regulations cover the cover fabric separately from the filling. Foam from us does not make a non-compliant fabric compliant, so ask your fabric supplier for theirs.

Seat cushions and back cushions are not the same order

They do different jobs and want different foam. Ordering both the same is the second most common mistake after mismeasuring.

  • Seat cushions — Blue, 33 kg/m³. These take your full weight every time you sit. This is standard UK domestic seating grade and the right call for a family sofa.
  • Back cushions — White, 28 kg/m³. You lean against these. Seating-grade foam in a back is uncomfortably rigid and makes the sofa feel like a bench.

If your back cushions are the loose, floppy kind filled with fibre rather than a foam block, foam is usually the wrong replacement — they are meant to be soft and shapeless, and a foam block changes the character of the sofa entirely.

Thickness

Match the gusset depth of your cover. Most sofa seat cushions are 10–15 cm (4–6 inch); back cushions 8–12 cm (3–5 inch). If the cover has no gusset and is a flat, pillow-style cushion, measure the old foam's thickness and add a centimetre for the compression it has lost.

Getting a professional-looking finish

Two things separate a home refill from an upholsterer's:

Wadding. A bare foam block leaves hard edges and hollow corners. Wrapping the foam in polyester wadding before it goes in fills the cover out and softens the edge. If you wrap, order the foam slightly smaller so the wrapped size matches the cover.

Fitting technique. Foam does not slide into a tight cover. Either roll it lengthways and feed it in, or slip it inside a plastic bag, push it in, then pull the bag out — the bag lets the foam slide, and it is the trick every upholsterer uses.

Sizes

  • Maximum single piece: 203 cm × 116 cm
  • Thickness: 1 cm to 100 cm

Three-seater bench cushions longer than 203 cm are made as two pieces butted together inside one cover. You cannot feel the join once it is filled and wrapped.

What it costs against a new sofa

Foam is priced by volume, so you pay for the piece you order and nothing more. Refilling a whole three-seater — three seat cushions and three backs — works out at roughly:

  • Compact three-seater — 55 × 55 × 10 cm seats, 55 × 40 × 8 cm backs: around £140
  • Typical three-seater — 60 × 60 × 12 cm seats, 60 × 45 × 10 cm backs: around £200
  • Large three-seater — 65 × 60 × 14 cm seats, 65 × 45 × 10 cm backs: around £245

Against £700–£1,200 for a comparable new sofa, that is roughly a fifth to a quarter of the price — and you keep the frame, which is usually the best part of it. Delivery is free over £75, so a full refill ships free.

Doing one pair of tired cushions rather than the whole sofa is cheaper again, and it is where most people start.

Related

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