Best Vacuums for Pet Hair

Upright vacuums are a good choice if you have a lot of carpet and area rugs in your home; uprights tend to be better than canisters at carpet cleaning.​​ These highly rated models earn top-level marks on vacuuming both pet hair and bare floors.

If you have stairs in your home, a canister vacuum may be a good option. This configuration is easier to use on stairs than a traditional upright because its weight is distributed between the powerhead and the canister. In addition to earning an excellent score for cleaning up pet hair, these four models also have very good hose suction strength. 

Stick vacuums are great for quick messes, and their cleaning power has improved in recent years. They’re lightweight and easy to pull out of a closet. Some even ace our pet hair test. Here are some top picks from the corded and cordless stick vacuums we test that earn excellent scores for picking up pet hair.

Handheld vacuums aren’t designed for heavy cleaning; they’re best for whisking up cereal from under a high chair or off the floor mats in your car. Few can tackle pet hair, but here are some notable exceptions. Those models also earn very good marks in our bare-floor and carpet tests. 

Note that CR doesn’t collect reliability or satisfaction data on this type of vacuum, because consumers tend to replace rather than repair handheld vacs, given their relatively modest price.

Robovacs have gotten better and cheaper since we first began testing them several years ago. For pet parents, that means you can get your floors reasonably clean while walking the dog. The highly rated models below got top scores in our pet hair tests, are easy to use, and are especially good at cleaning bare floors.

To rate vacuums on how well they pick up pet hair, we devised a pet hair lab test for full-sized upright and canister vacuums in which technicians take 5 grams of long, feathery fur from Maine Coon cats and scatter, stomp, and smash the hair into a medium-pile carpet.

Then we make multiple passes with each vacuum to see how much it picks up. Vacuums that get top ratings collect all the fur in a bag or bin. Average vacuums, by comparison, leave behind visible patches, or the fur becomes entangled in the brush. 

We also test smaller vacuums (robotic, stick, and handheld models) for pet hair pickup. Because we don’t expect them to accomplish the deep cleaning of a full-sized vacuum, we use a bit less cat hair in our tests. In other words, we design our tests to challenge the cleaning capabilities of each type of vacuum we rate.

Given companies’ fuzzy claims about their vacuums’ ability to whisk away what our furry friends leave behind, we filter vacuums down to models that get top marks in performance ratings across our pet hair and other key tests. If you’re sensitive to pet hair, we suggest a bagged vacuum over a bagless model because every time you empty a bagless bin, the fur can fly. For more choices, see our full vacuum ratings.