Bed bugs die at temperatures above 45C, held there for at least 30 minutes. Wash whatever you can at a hot cycle, then tumble dry it on high. Anything that can’t take the heat goes in a sealed bag in the freezer instead, for three or four days.
The rest of this piece is about finding what the wash misses, and knowing when to hand it to a professional.
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What you’re looking for
An adult bed bug is up to 7mm long, oval, and usually brown, darkening towards red once it has fed. Juveniles are only a couple of millimetres across, pale and close to see-through, so they’re easy to miss. They hide in bed frames, mattresses, clothing, furniture, behind pictures, and under loose wallpaper.
Bites alone don’t prove anything. When they show, they tend to appear in a line or a cluster, raised and itchy, red on pale skin and harder to spot as purple on darker skin. Better evidence is small brown spots on the sheets, which are faecal marks, or blood smears left when a fed bug is crushed in the night. If you find something you think is a bed bug, photograph it next to a coin for scale and send the photo to a pest expert rather than guessing.
Why they keep coming back
Rentokil recorded a 65% year-on-year jump in UK bed bug infestations in the second quarter of 2023. Professor James Logan, of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, names two drivers. Warmer weather suits the insects, and pre-pandemic travel has resumed, with bed bugs moving between homes by hitching a ride in someone’s luggage. Good Housekeeping’s reporting adds a third: the growth in second-hand furniture sales during the cost-of-living crisis. The mattress retailer Martin Seeley says the insects have “a particular love for upholstered furniture such as headboards and chairs.”
The British Pest Control Association is more cautious. Its Natalie Bungay told the BBC she wasn’t aware of any unusual increase, and that the numbers may just be recovering from a dip during Covid, when nobody was travelling.
Where a hot wash can’t reach
A washing machine and a dryer only treat what goes into them. Everything else needs a physical search. Check the bed frame, the underside of the mattress, and the upholstery for small reddish-brown or dark spots about a millimetre wide. Look too for the pale, grain-sized eggs and shed skins that mark an active colony.
Alex Wade is a pest management expert and a consultant member of the British Pest Control Association. He told Which? that catching an infestation early changes the odds: a small, localised population is one you stand a decent chance of treating yourself. For what a hot wash can’t reach, Wade recommends a steam cleaner, though he warns it has to be worked close in, running the hot nozzle directly over the seam rather than across the surface.
What a course of treatment actually looks like
The Guardian spoke to people for whom one pass never worked. Adam, a Briton flat-sharing in New York, had his apartment treated by pest control three times. Even then, he and his flatmate sealed every gap in the floor, suspecting the bugs were climbing up from the flat below.
Noel Butterworth, who lives in Switzerland, put the cost of clearing his family’s infestation at more than £25,000, after an initial round of spraying and packing failed and weeks more treatment followed.
When to call someone in
Bungay’s advice is not to be ashamed of an infestation, and to call a pest controller once it’s established: bed bugs are, in her words, “notoriously difficult to treat.” They aren’t proven to spread disease. The toll instead is psychological, and, as the Butterworths found, financial.
The bites need their own treatment
Bites usually settle on their own within a week, or up to two. A cool, damp cloth eases the itch, an antihistamine helps if it’s bad, and a pharmacist can advise on hydrocortisone cream. See a GP if the swelling spreads or the bites stay painful after that, since it can mean an infection rather than an ordinary bite reaction.
Adam, five years on from his own infestation, still won’t sleep on a mattress that isn’t properly covered.
