We study the uniform boundedness of solutions to reaction–diffusion systems possessing a Lyapunov-like function and satisfying an intermediate sum condition. This significantly generalizes the mass dissipation condition in the literature and thus allows the nonlinearities to have arbitrary polynomial growth. We show that two dimensional reaction–diffusion systems, with quadratic intermediate sum conditions, have global solutions which are bounded uniformly in time. In higher dimensions, bounded solutions are obtained under the condition that the diffusion coefficients are quasi-uniform, i.e. they are close to each other. Applications include boundedness of solutions to chemical reaction networks with diffusion.