How often you should actually be washing your towels and bedsheets

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Most people wait far longer than they should between washing their sheets, and towels don't fare much better.

Three weeks is the rough average for how long bedding goes unwashed in most households, which is a long time for sweat, dead skin and dust mites to sit on something you sleep on every night. The general hygiene guidance is a lot stricter than that, even if most of us treat laundry as something to do whenever it starts to smell.

What the guidance actually says

Bath towels should generally be washed every two to three uses. They spend their working life on the most sensitive parts of the body, and damp fabric left hanging in a bathroom is exactly the kind of environment bacteria and mould need to take hold. If a bathroom doesn't dry out properly between showers, that number drops even lower. Washcloths and face towels need changing more often again, since facial skin is thinner and more reactive than skin elsewhere on the body.

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Gym towels and pool towels sit in their own category. Both should really be washed after a single use. Gym towels pick up whatever's on shared equipment, and pool towels carry chlorine, organic debris and bacteria that thrive in warm, wet conditions, including the kind responsible for hot tub folliculitis.

Sheets are simpler: once a week is the standard. Anyone who doesn't sweat heavily and has no allergies can sometimes stretch that to a fortnight without much issue, but eczema, asthma, dust mite allergies or regular night sweats are all reasons to wash more often, not less. A pet sleeping on the bed pushes the schedule up too.

Pillowcases deserve more attention than the rest of the set. They're against the face for hours every night, so changing them every three to four days is worth doing even in weeks when the sheets themselves stay on slightly longer. They should be washed together with the sheets rather than swapped in fresh on their own, since putting a clean pillowcase on unwashed bedding just transfers everything straight back.

A couple of small habits make the gap between washes less of a problem. Showering at night rather than in the morning cuts down on what ends up in the sheets overnight. Cotton and linen tend to hold up better between washes than synthetic fabrics, thanks to mild antimicrobial properties built into the fibres themselves. And leaving a bed unmade for a short while after waking, rather than pulling the duvet straight up, gives the sheets a chance to dry out before they're slept in again.

None of this calls for a complete overhaul. Towels twice a week instead of whenever they smell, sheets on a fixed weekly slot instead of an open-ended one. Given how much time both spend against the skin, it's a small adjustment for a fairly obvious payoff.