How to Wash a Saddle Pad

Brush the pad dry first, wash in cold water on a gentle cycle with a pH-neutral soap, and air-dry it out of direct heat. Heat is what destroys saddle pads and it destroys anti-slip surfaces faster than anything else on the pad.

By the riders at Farris · Updated August 2026

Key takeaways

• Brush thoroughly before washing. Hair and grit in the fibres is most of the dirt.
• Cold water, gentle cycle, pH-neutral soap. Riding Warehouse's guidance is cold water if you are unsure.
• Never tumble-dry on heat it shrinks pads, makes them lumpy, and hardens grip surfaces.
• Thick felt pads are usually washed with water only, so soap does not embed in them.
• A dirty pad is a slippery pad. Washing is often the fix for a pad that has started sliding.

Why this matters more than it sounds

Two reasons, and the second is the one people miss.

The obvious one is absorbency. A pad's job is to take up sweat, and fibres that are already loaded with dried salt and grease cannot take up much more. Washing restores the thing you bought the pad for.

The less obvious one is grip. Anti-slip undersides work by friction against the coat, and friction needs a clean surface. Hair, grease and sweat salt build a slick film over silicone or rubberised material, and a grippy pad quietly becomes a slippery one over a season. If your pad has started sliding backwards when it never used to, wash it before you spend anything.

Before you wash: brush

Most of what is on a saddle pad is hair and grit, and neither belongs in a washing machine. Wet hair mats into fibres and is much harder to remove afterwards.

Work over both sides with a stiff brush in circular motions, paying attention to the underside where hair packs in densest. A small handheld vacuum does this faster if you have one. Rubber curry combs work well on quilted cotton.

Do this after every ride if you can. Five seconds with a brush at the tack room door saves most of the washing.

Washing, by material

Cotton and quilted pads

The most forgiving. Machine wash cold on a gentle cycle with a small amount of pH-neutral soap. Turn the pad inside out so the dirtier underside gets the most agitation.

Riding Warehouse's care guide recommends washing in cold water on a gentle cycle if you are unsure, and using a pH-neutral soap to avoid weakening the pad.

Synthetic fleece

Also machine washable and durable, but avoid fabric softener it coats the fibres and reduces both absorbency and grip. Cold wash, gentle cycle, air dry.

Sheepskin and wool

The most demanding. Use a sheepskin-safe soap specifically, because ordinary detergent strips the lanolin that keeps the hide supple. Cold water only. Never wring, and reshape while damp.

Horse & Hound's guide to cleaning numnahs, sheepskin and half-pads is worth reading in full if you own sheepskin it is an expensive material to get wrong.

Thick felt pads

Usually washed with water only. As Riding Warehouse notes, soap tends to become embedded in thick felt and is very difficult to rinse out, so plain water and a brush is the standard approach.

Inserts and shims

If your pad has removable foam or gel inserts, take them out first and clean them separately. Riding Warehouse is explicit that you should not use soap or bleach on inserts and shims, as those are typically too harsh for the material.

Anti-slip and silicone undersides

This is the part that generic cleaning guides skip, and it is where most grip gets destroyed.

Cold water, always. Hot water softens silicone and rubberised coatings. Repeated hot washes make them go glassy and lose their texture.

No fabric softener, no bleach. Softener leaves a film directly on the surface that does the gripping. Bleach degrades the material.

Brush the grip surface specifically. Grease sits on top of silicone rather than soaking in, so a soft brush and cold water does more for grip than a machine cycle does.

Never tumble-dry. Heat is the single fastest way to ruin an anti-slip pad. The grip surface hardens, the backing can separate, and the effect is permanent.

Lie flat to dry. Hanging a heavy wet pad over a rail stretches it, and a stretched grip surface makes poorer contact.

Drying

Air-dry in a well-ventilated space, out of direct sun. Riding Warehouse warns that hot temperatures damage saddle pads and shorten their lifespan, and that a dryer can make materials shrink or go lumpy. If you must use a machine, cool or cold on the delicate setting only.

Direct sun fades coloured and white pads UV is harsh on dyes. Shade and airflow beat sun and stillness.

Reshape the pad while it is damp so it dries to the shape it should be, particularly at the wither and spine.

How often

There is no universal schedule, but a reasonable rule is: brush after every ride, wash when the underside no longer feels clean to the hand, and always before a show.

In practice that means roughly weekly for a horse in daily work through summer, and every two to three weeks in cold weather. Horses that sweat heavily need more; a pad used twice a week in winter needs much less.

Two pads in rotation makes all of this easier one on the horse, one drying.

What washing will not fix

It will not restore a pad that has compressed flat. Once padding has lost its loft it does not come back, and a pad that has gone thin and hard is finished regardless of how clean it is.

It will not fix a pad that is the wrong material for how much your horse sweats  if a cotton pad is soaked through every ride, the issue is absorbency capacity, not cleanliness.

And it will not stop a pad slipping if the cause is a loose girth or a saddle that does not fit.

If you carry anything in the pad

Empty every pocket before washing obvious, but worth saying, because a zip pocket is exactly the kind of thing that gets forgotten. Close all zips and fastenings before the pad goes in, so they cannot catch on the drum or on the fabric.

Saddle pads with a phone pocket should be washed with the zip closed and the pocket empty, and air-dried with the pocket open so the inside dries properly.

The Farris saddle pad follows the same rules as any anti-slip pad: cold, gentle, no softener, air dry flat.

Back to the English saddle pad buying guide.

Sources

• How to Clean Saddle Pads  Riding Warehouse
• How to clean a saddle pad: numnahs, sheepskin and half-pads  Horse & Hound