Curtains are the thing in a room people clean least and notice least, right up until they take them down and discover the top eight inches are a different colour from the rest. They hold more dust than the carpet under them, and because the change happens over years, nobody spots it.
The honest answer to whether you can wash them is: sometimes, and the cost of getting it wrong is high. A shrunken curtain cannot be un-shrunk, and a puckered lining cannot be flattened out. So before anything goes near water, there are three things to check.
Three checks before you wash anything
1. The care label
Usually stitched into the side hem near the bottom, or occasionally into the heading tape. If it says dry clean only, believe it. Curtain makers are not being cautious for fun. That symbol usually means there is a lining, an interlining or a coating that reacts badly to water.
No label at all is common on made-to-measure curtains and on anything older. In that case, work from the fabric and construction instead.
2. Is it lined?
This is the one that catches most people. Pinch the bottom hem between your fingers. If you can feel two distinct layers of fabric, it is lined. Three layers means interlined, which is the heavy, expensive construction with a soft layer sandwiched in the middle.
Lined curtains are risky because the face fabric and the lining are different materials, sewn together, and they shrink at different rates when wet. The face might lose two percent and the lining four. The result is a curtain that hangs with a rippled, bubbled surface and will not sit flat again. Interlined curtains should simply never be washed at home.
3. The heading
A simple gathered tape at the top will usually survive. Pinch pleats, goblet pleats, or any heading that has been hand-finished, will not reliably come back to shape after a wash, and re-dressing them is a job in itself. Eyelet curtains raise a different problem: the metal rings can rust or mark the fabric in a machine, even if the fabric itself would be fine.
What can and cannot go in the machine
| Curtain type | Wash at home? |
|---|---|
| Unlined polyester or poly-blend | Yes. The most forgiving of all. Cool, gentle cycle |
| Unlined cotton or linen | Usually, but expect some shrinkage. Cold water only |
| Voile and net | Yes. Cool, gentle, in a mesh bag to stop snagging |
| Lined curtains | Risky. Differential shrinkage puckers the panel |
| Interlined | No. Three layers, three shrink rates |
| Blackout | No. The coating cracks or separates |
| Silk, velvet, wool | No. Water marks silk and crushes velvet pile |
| Sun-faded or very old | No. UV weakens fibres and they tear when wet |
The sun-damage trap. Curtains that have hung in a south-facing window for years can look perfectly sound and still be structurally weak, because UV degrades the fibre from the outside in. They come out of a wash with splits along the fold lines. If a curtain has visibly faded down one edge, treat that as a warning rather than a cosmetic issue.
If you are going to wash them, do it like this
- Vacuum them first, while they are still hanging. Loose dust turns to a grey slurry in water and can leave tide marks. Two minutes with the upholstery brush saves this.
- Take the hooks out and note how they were spaced. Photograph the heading before you start. Rehanging is far easier when you are not guessing.
- Wash cool and gentle, one curtain at a time. Thirty degrees at most, on a delicates cycle, with a reduced spin. A full-drop curtain is heavy when wet and will unbalance a drum if you cram two in.
- Never tumble dry. This is where most shrinkage actually happens, not in the wash itself.
- Hang them damp, straight back on the rail. The weight of the wet fabric pulls the creases out as it dries, which saves you ironing a nine-foot panel. Put a towel down underneath and open a window.
Cleaning them without taking them down
For most people, most of the time, this is the better answer. It carries no shrinkage risk at all and takes fifteen minutes.
- Vacuum monthly with the upholstery brush, working top to bottom in overlapping sections. Do the heading and hem twice, since dust concentrates there.
- Steam them with a handheld garment steamer held slightly off the fabric. Relaxes creases, freshens the fabric, no soaking involved.
- Shake them out and draw them fully open and closed a few times. More effective than it sounds for shifting loose dust.
- Spot-treat single marks with a barely-damp cloth rather than washing the whole panel for one stain.
When to hand them over
Lined, interlined, silk, velvet, blackout or pleated headings, anything valuable or made-to-measure, and anything that has been up long enough to have faded. Also, practically speaking, anything you cannot physically get down and back up safely on your own.
On-site cleaning is worth knowing about as an option: curtains can be cleaned while still hanging, using low-moisture methods, which removes the shrinkage question entirely and means you never have to rehang them. Once they are back up, our guide to how often curtains should be cleaned sets out a schedule that keeps them from getting to this point again.
Where this advice comes from
We work to the standards below, and we have pointed you to them directly so you can check anything here yourself rather than taking our word for it.
- Textile Services Association — The UK trade body for textile care and dry cleaning. Useful background on which fabrics need solvent cleaning rather than water.
- Which? laundry advice — Independent testing on washing machines, detergents and fabric care symbols, if you want the care label decoded properly.
- National Carpet Cleaners Association (NCCA) — Members handle soft furnishings including on-site curtain cleaning, which is the route for anything too large or delicate to take down.
What we would actually buy
The steamer and the vacuum brush between them will keep most curtains presentable for years without a single wash.
Your vacuum upholstery brush
Curtains hold a startling amount of dust and almost nobody vacuums them. Top to bottom, in sections, once a month. It halves how often they need actual washing.
A handheld garment steamer
Relaxes creases and freshens fabric without soaking it, and you can do it with the curtains still hanging. Genuinely the best purchase on this list if you have long or lined curtains.
A non-biological, colour-safe detergent
Biological enzymes can be harsh on older or natural-fibre curtains, particularly anything sun-weakened. A gentle non-bio on a cool cycle is the safer choice.
A barely-damp microfibre cloth and clear washing-up liquid
For a single mark, treating the spot beats washing the whole curtain. Blot, do not rub, and feather the damp area outwards so it does not dry with a ring.
Tumble drying, ever
The single fastest way to shrink a curtain beyond rescue. Heat plus agitation on a large panel of fabric does in forty minutes what years of use would not.
Nobody pays us to list these and there are no affiliate links on this page. They are simply what we have found works, and in several cases the cheapest option genuinely is the best one. Whatever you use, patch-test it somewhere hidden first.
The Carpetix Team
We are a carpet, upholstery and rug cleaning team based in Leytonstone, East London. We write these guides from what we run into on actual jobs, which is why you will find us telling you when to leave something alone or handle it yourself rather than call anyone out. If a guide here saves you a call, it has done its job.
Last reviewed and updated 31 July 2026
