Because of the finite lifetime of the Rydberg states, the dressed ground state interactions come at a cost of an effective decoherence rate 1/τ0 for each qubit. However, as there is only a small Rydberg component admixed, the effective decay rate is also only a correspondingly small fraction of the bare Rydberg decay rate. Ultimately, the figure of merit for fully coherent operation of the quantum annealer is the ratio of the attained interaction strength versus the effective decay rate. In the enhanced dressing scheme this ratio becomes particularly favourable and is of the order of for the system parameters above (Supplementary Note 2).