5 Duvet Covers We Love in 2025
As part of our research for this guide in 2016, we interviewed Shannon Maher, an assistant professor in the Home Products Development department at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and former product designer for The Company Store. She helped us with our testing strategy and gave us useful information on bedding fibers and construction. We then looked closely at customer reviews on various department store and home bedding sites.
We drew on our research, interviews with bedding experts, and years of experience testing sheets (most of our duvet cover picks are made with the same fabric as sheets we recommend) to come up with these criteria for a duvet cover:
Softness: We wanted covers that were soft enough to use without a top sheet, directly against the skin. A duvet cover should keep its softness after being washed and dried. We know from our years of testing that companies often add finishes to home textiles to give them shelf appeal, and once those are washed away you get a true sense of the fabric’s feel, so a cover should feel as soft or softer out of the dryer as it does out of the package.
Natural fibers: Natural fibers are more breathable and best for regulating temperature, so we looked specifically at covers made from high-quality cottons and linens. They do wrinkle and shrink more than synthetics, but they can also be washed on hotter temperatures (cotton can withstand more heat than linen), which is the best way to get them clean. If you tend to stain your bedding, choose white, the easiest color to wash on hot with bleach or OxiClean.
Solid construction: The best duvet covers have strong seams that don’t fray, they shrink minimally in the wash, and they have securely attached buttons, zippers, or snaps at the closure.
Inner ties: Not every cover we recommend has inner ties to secure the cover to a duvet, but most of them do—it’s a definite bonus for keeping the duvet from bunching up inside the cover. You can use duvet clips to keep them secure without ties (I’ve used this style many times over the years), but they can break easily, so invest in a few sets for backup.
A variety of colors and prints: A duvet cover is the first thing you see on a made bed so it’s often the focal point of a bedroom. We focused on covers with plenty of color options, and some with prints, to fit a variety of tastes and room styles.
Range of sizes: We looked for covers available in all bed sizes. Not every cover we recommend comes in every size, but there is enough variety here to find something that will fit.
Reliable brands: We pay attention to companies’ responsiveness, website navigation, inventory, return policies, and the quality of the bedding itself so that we’re confident that you will have the same experience we did. From our years of testing bedding we know the brands that are the most consistent—from their fabrics to their quality control to their customer service. No cover is perfect, and we’ve noted the flaws we found in our picks (and if they’re worth overlooking).
Since 2016, we’ve researched 38 covers and tested 16, all on a king-size bed. We measured them straight out of the bag, then again after a wash to account for any initial shrinkage. We compared all of the fabrics for smoothness, softness, pilling, and weight.
We washed and dried all of the covers without any fabric softeners, and with all of their closures fastened. We also left them in the dryer for a while after the cycle was finished. In everyday life, we’re not always right there to pull laundry out immediately, and we wanted to see how wrinkled and rumpled these covers would get. We also folded every cover after washing to see if the seams stayed straight and even—twisted seams and uneven sides can look messy on a made bed. Then we put each cover on a test duvet (comforter) and laid it on the bed to see how it looked, and crawled under each to see how they felt as we moved around and (often) fell asleep.
