The label under a new sofa, and what it tells you

Where to look

Most people never read it. Tip a seat cushion off, or look under the deck of the sofa, and you will usually find a sewn-in label next to the fabric content label. It carries one sentence in English, in black on white, with a black border around it.

It has to be sewn or fixed to the sofa itself. A card on a string does not count, however official it looks.

What the rule is for

The rule is short to state. Federal law since 2020 sets flammability requirements for upholstered furniture, and the safety agency wrote them into the Code of Federal Regulations as part 1640.

In plain terms, the fabric and the filling have to resist a smouldering source, the kind of slow burn a dropped cigarette starts, for long enough that a small accident does not become a house fire.

Which sofas it applies to

The date matters if you are buying second hand or inheriting a sofa. The test standard applies to furniture made or imported from mid 2021, and the label requirement followed a year later.

The test method comes from California's Technical Bulletin 117-2013, and the federal rule took it up for the whole country.

When the label became compulsory

A sofa made between those two dates had to pass the test but did not have to say so on a label. So a missing label on an older piece is not proof of anything, good or bad.

What the test actually checks

The standard breaks a sofa into its parts: cover fabric, filling, any barrier layer between them, and the decking under the seat cushions. Each part is tested on its own.

That tells you what the label is about. It is a smoulder test. It does not describe what happens with a candle knocked over, a space heater left too close, or a fire that starts somewhere else in the room. Keep heat sources away from upholstery whatever the label says.

Why patio cushions are different

The rule is written for seating used indoors, and it lists outdoor cushions among the items it does not cover.

So a wicker patio set will not carry the label, and that is expected. The same logic runs the other way: an outdoor cushion is built for sun and rain, not tested for a living room, so do not bring the patio cushions indoors as sofa cushions for the winter.

Sofa beds sit on the boundary

Mattresses have their own federal rules, and a sofa bed can fall under either set depending on how it is built.

A frameless sofa bed like ours has no separate mattress at all. The foam blocks you sit on are the same blocks you sleep on, so it is treated as one piece of upholstered furniture.

A short checklist for a new sofa

• Look for the sewn-in label under a cushion or under the deck, not on a hangtag.
• Read the sentence on it. It should name the federal flammability requirements for upholstered furniture.
• Keep candles, heaters and fireplaces a sensible distance from any fabric, labelled or not.
• Leave outdoor cushions outdoors, or in dry storage, rather than using them on indoor seating.

Everything above comes from the federal agency's guidance for makers and importers, which is written in plain enough English to read yourself. The link is below.