A great rug pad should have firm but supportive cushioning and keep a strong grip on both your rug and the floor; it should also fit the dimensions of your rug, and it should not damage your floors over years of wear. Rug pads can be made from many materials, including PVC, rubber, felt, or memory foam. Generally, the best rug pads combine a layer of synthetic felt with natural-rubber backing.
We primarily considered three types of rug pad:
Felt and rubber: Our experts agreed that felt backed with rubber was superior to other pad types because the felt provides cushion underfoot while the rubber backing excels at gripping the floor and preventing slips. Paul Iskyan, a rug expert who cleans carpets for ABC Carpet & Home in New York, told us that felt density was more important than thickness in a rug pad, because a denser pad wouldn’t flatten over time like a less dense one might.
Felt: If you have a large area rug with heavy furniture on it, a felt-only pad could be sufficient, but this type generally provides the least amount of grip.
Rubber mesh: Iskyan said he preferred felt-and-rubber pads for most uses, but did concede that sometimes an all-rubber mesh pad would be necessary for areas with low-clearance doors, or places that get wet frequently, such as outdoor areas. Mesh pads don’t provide as much padding as felt pads, so your rugs will wear more quickly with them. Many rubber-mesh pads are also made with fillers like clay and sand, which can leave a powdery residue on the floor beneath your rugs, so it’s best to seek out pads made of 100 percent rubber. Iskyan told us you should never buy a rug pad made from PVC, because it can stain or discolor floors.
A good rug pad can (and should) last for many years. Some come with 10- or 20-year warranties, and many should easily outlast those. Stephanie Waterman, from Armadillo rug company, told us that “in many cases the pads outlive your rug and can be easily cut down and used again and again.” Since there was so much inconsistency in coverage, we decided a good warranty was helpful, but not critical to finding a quality rug pad.
Some of our experts said that a good rug pad should be made from felt so densely woven that it would be difficult to trim with home scissors. We generally agree with that advice, but we have found that, in a pinch, it’s reasonable to trim a pad—especially a rubber-mesh pad or a thinner felt pad—down to size.
With those criteria in mind, we searched for dual-layered, felt-and-rubber pads that ranked high on the websites of Amazon, West Elm, Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn, IKEA, Home Depot, and Wayfair. We didn’t set a limit for thickness, but it turned out that all the rug pads we considered were less than ⅓ inch thick—rug pads of that thickness are simply more popular than thicker pads. We also focused on nonslip pads, since most people buy rug pads to hold their rugs in place. After narrowing the field to 14 options (11 felt-and-rubber, one all-felt, and three rubber-only), we set out to test them.
We quickly noticed that many of the rug pads we brought in looked nearly identical. We eliminated those that were too slippery on our cork floors or didn’t feel cushiony enough underfoot. We tried each mat with rugs of varying thickness and pile, and we tested on hardwood floors in addition to cork. After narrowing down the group to our top five, we asked a panel of testers to try them out.
