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Best vacuum cleaner to pick up dog hair


Best vacuums for pet hair in 2023

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Andrea Smith/CNN Underscored

Cats and dogs bring joy, comfort and companionship to your household. But they also bring hair — lots of hair, on your clothing, on your furniture and all over the floor. As with children and mess, controlling cat and dog hair in the house is a running battle, one you signed up for when you brought those bundles of chaos into your house.

A vacuum cleaner is a crucial tool against pet hair, dander and dust, especially for people with allergies, and many models now include specially designed floor heads and accessories for cleaning up after pets. We’ve found the best vacuums for pet hair among the seven cordless stick vacuums, 10 robot vacuums, six uprights and nine canister vacuums we’ve tested.

iLife V3S Pro

The best robot vacuum for pet hair

iLife V3S Pro Robot Vacuum

Amazon

The budget-priced iLife V3S Pro uses a suction tube like a traditional vacuum cleaner rather than the roller brushes employed by other robot vacuums, and does a better job picking up pet hair without clogging.

$160 $107 at Amazon

iRobot Roomba j7+

The best robot vacuum that can allegedly avoid dog poop

The Roomba j7+.

iRobot

The iRobot j7+ is the best robot vacuum you can buy right now, with simpler mapping, more cleaning power and smarter features (like dog poop avoidance) than anything else we tested.

$800 $600 at Bed Bath & Beyond

Dyson V11 Animal

Best cordless stick vacuum for pet hair and deep carpet

Dyson V11 Animal Cord-Free Vacuum

Dyson

With impressive power and the ability to tackle cleaning tasks on surfaces ranging from high-pile carpet to hard floors, the Dyson V11 Animal is the most capable cordless stick vacuum we tested.

$649 $599 at Amazon

Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright Vacuum

Best upright vacuum for pet hair

BISSELL Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright Vacuum

BISSELL

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright Vacuum's standout feature is the Pet Turboeraser tool, which has a spinning brush head with bristles that easily pull dog and cat hair off upholstery and stairs, making it the best upright vacuum for pet owners.

$370 at Amazon

Kenmore BC4026 Pet-Friendly Pop-N-Go

Best canister vacuum for pet hair and thick carpet

Kenmore Pop-N-Go canister vacuum cleaner

Kenmore

The Kenmore BC4026 canister vacuum is great for large homes, deep-pile carpet and folks with allergies. It's bulky and inelegant, but its powered floorhead outperforms vacuums twice its price, the motorized pet hair mini brush keeps upholstery looking fresh and its dust bags and exhaust filter are HEPA-compliant.

$320 at Target

Bissell Pet Hair Eraser

Best handheld vacuum for pet hair

Walmart

With a motorized brush that picks up more pet hair than any other handheld vacuum we tested, the powerful Bissell Pet Hair Eraser lets you take care of pet messes on floors, upholstery, in the care, or anywhere it might accumulate.

$93 $69 at Walmart

Andrea Smith/CNN Underscored

Key Specs

Of the 10 robot vacuums we tested, the iLife V3S Pro was the best at removing pet hair without clogging, thanks to its lack of roller brushes. At around $160, it costs hundreds less than most robot vacuums.

The iLife V3S Pro does a great job removing pet hair and cat litter from hardwood floor and low carpet. It uses bump-and-run navigation, rather than mapping, and it can’t avoid cords or poop like the Roomba j7+ can, but it’ll clean your whole space eventually. It can’t empty itself, unlike more expensive robots, and it doesn’t have a bin fill indicator. But if you make it a habit to empty the dust bin every day, it’ll drastically cut down on pet hair in your space for very little effort on your part.

iRobot Roomba j7+

Andrea Smith/CNN

Key Specs

If you have money to spare and want a robot vacuum that’s smarter than you are, consider the iRobot Roomba j7+. Unlike the iLife V3S Pro, it’s not bump-and-run: It maps your house, including no-go zones, and it has built-in object detection that helps it avoid power cords, headphones and — most importantly — pet waste, so you can hopefully avoid pooptastrophe.

The j7+ is self-emptying, unlike the iLife V3S Pro, which needs to be emptied after each run, and its rubber multi-surface brushes were second only to the V3S Pro, which has no brushes at all, in avoiding pet hair tangles. The Dirt Detect feature lets it focus on specific messes, like a cat litter spill, and go back over the area until it’s clean.

The Roomba j7+ is the best robot vacuum you can buy, but it’s expensive, and in our testing its self-empty cycle briefly made a noise like a jet engine. If you have the money, though, and especially if you have pets prone to pooping inside, it’s a compelling upgrade over the iLife V3S Pro.

The Dyson V11 Animal

Lindsay Boyers/CNN Underscored

Key Specs

The Dyson V11 Animal is the best cordless stick vacuum for pet hair, and the best stick vacuum of the seven we tested.  If you live in an apartment or smaller home, it might even be the only vacuum you need. Its swiveling floor head makes fast work of pet hair and dust even in high-pile carpets, and in handheld mode, the crevice tool and mini motorized brush tool are fantastic for cleaning upholstered furniture, cat towers and pet beds. It’s lightweight, maneuverable and cordless, so getting the vacuum out isn’t a hassle like it can be for upright and canister vacuums.

The V11 Animal’s biggest weakness is battery life. At its automatic and Boost settings, it gets 30 to 45 minutes of runtime, which might not be enough. Unlike other stick vacuums with swappable batteries, the Dyson’s rechargeable battery is built in, so once it’s out of juice, you have to wait for it to recharge. The Dyson also uses a trigger-style power switch, which you have to hold down the entire time you’re vacuuming — it’s fine for smaller tasks, but you might find it taxing if you’re cleaning an entire apartment.

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright Pet Vacuum

Lindsay Boyers/CNN Underscored

Key Specs

If you have a home too large to vacuum in a single charge of a stick vacuum, especially one with lots of carpet, you should consider a corded upright vacuum. While larger, heavier and less maneuverable than cordless stick vacuums, they have higher suction, and won’t run out of charge.

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright is the best upright vacuum for pet hair, thanks to its Pet Turboeraser mini brush tool, which does a better job removing pet hair from stairs and upholstery than the five other uprights we tested (though it’s powered by suction, rather than motorized, so it won’t be as effective as a motorized pet hair tool like the one on the Kenmore BC4026 canister vacuum, below).

The Pet Hair Eraser’s lift-off feature means the canister, hose, wand and motor detach from the floor head, so you can easily use it to vacuum upholstery, drapes, fixtures and other things above floor level. At 18 pounds, the vacuum isn’t the lightest of the six upright vacuums we tested, and it’s not the best on hard floors, but it’s the best upright option for people with pets. However, people with dust or dander sensitivities should consider a bagged canister vacuum rather than a bagless upright like the Bissell.

The Kenmore 600-Series BC4026 Pet Friendly Pop-N-Go canister vacuum

Nathan Edwards/CNN Underscored

Key Specs

For folks with pets, carpets and dust or dander sensitivities, a canister vacuum can offer even more powerful suction, deeper carpet cleaning and better air filtration than an upright. The Kenmore BC4026 Pet-Friendly Pop-N-Go isn’t particularly maneuverable, even by canister vacuum standards, but its electric floor sweeper brush pulls an unbelievable amount of dust and pet hair from the thickest of carpets. Like the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser upright, it has a mini turbo brush (here called a Pet Powermate) that makes quick work of cat hair on cat trees, microfiber upholstery and pet beds. Unlike the Bissell, Kenmore’s version is motorized, so you can change the suction level without changing the brush speed, which really helps get pet hair off of upholstery without inhaling the fabric.

Both the dust bag and exhaust filter of the BC4026 are HEPA-compliant, and offer much better air filtration and dust containment than a bagless vacuum, as well as three times the dust capacity of the Dyson V11 Animal stick vacuum or Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Lift-Off Upright. But that’s at the cost of portability and maneuverability; at 22 pounds, the Kenmore is 4 pounds more than the Bissell upright, and neither its floor head nor canister are as nimble. But for sheer power, you can’t beat a canister vac, and the Kenmore is far more affordable than the much more maneuverable Miele Complete C3 Kona.

Bissel Pet Hair Eraser

Alex Rennie/CNN Underscored

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser is the best handheld vacuum for pet hair — it has a motorized brush that lets it pick up pet hair from upholstery, floors, in the car and everywhere else we found the stuff (which, as you know if you’re a cat or dog parent, is pretty much everyplace). Even though the Pet Hair Eraser is on the larger side (thanks to its sizable canister) at 17 inches long and weighs around 3 pounds, it’s still well balanced and comfortable to use.

The motorized pet hair brush attaches securely and let us get at dog hair embedded deep in carpeting, rugs, and couches, and even in our test vehicle’s carpeting. The 23.6 ounce canister—the largest of all the handheld vacuums we tested—sucked up a large amount of hair before needing to be emptied, and along with the 17-minute runtime let us work until the job was truly complete, and the long crevice tool and flat upholstery brush let us get into nooks and crannies where the motorized main brush couldn’t go.

The Bissell Pet Hair Eraser is versatile enough that you could use it as your only handheld vacuum. whether you’re looking for something to use around the house or to keep your car clean, though it’s extra power and capacity makes it a bit bulkier and a bit more cumbersome to handle than some of its competitors. You might look elsewhere if you are looking to pick up after kids, as the nozzle was too narrow to suck up Cheerios. It also doesn’t have a charging base, but comes with a wall-wart power supply cable — a less convenient setup than our other favorite handheld vacuums.

Our test supervisor assess how the robots stack up

Andrea Smith/CNN Underscored

The bristles on a vacuum’s brush head are designed to agitate carpet and to lift dust, debris and hair from the floor. As anyone who’s used a hairbrush knows, though, over time hairs get caught in the bristles. If you have pets that shed a lot, the hair can accumulate so fast on the brush that it clogs the vacuum, lowering suction or preventing the brush from turning at all. That’s why many companies sell vacuums optimized for pet hair, with brushes designed not to clog on hair, along with powered mini brush head attachments to get pet hair off of upholstery and stairs.

Pet-specific vacuums often include HEPA filters, aimed at controlling dust, dander and pet-related allergens in general. If you’re concerned about such issues, you may want to seek out a bagged vacuum rather than a bagless model; the bag provides an extra filtration stage and also lets you avoid dust spillage when emptying.

If you have a houseful of cats and dogs, a canister vacuum or upright vacuum will give you the power and tools to deal with animal hair, dander and dust on any surface. These corded units have more-powerful motors and stronger suction and pet-friendly models offer powered brushes designed to make short work of hair without clogging. While they may be a little more ungainly than cordless sticks, they won’t run out of power midway through your weekly cleaning.

An apartment or small house can likely get by with a cordless stick vacuum, especially if you have mostly bare floors. If you have a large house or lots of carpet, an upright or canister vacuum is a better choice; they can provide more suction than cordless stick vacuum, and won’t run out of batteries in the middle of a job. Many of these also double as handheld vacuums, which are great for keeping upholstery hair-free or for tackling small pet-associated messes.

A robot vacuum probably shouldn’t be your only vacuum if you’re trying to clean up after pets, but it’s a great complement to a cordless stick, upright or canister vacuum. Running a robot vacuum daily can keep the day-to-day buildup of fuzz to a manageable minimum so your weekly chores are less of a chore. The small roller brushes on most robot vacuums can clog quickly with pet hair, however, so you’ll want to pay attention to regular maintenance. Our current favorite in the category, the iLife V3S Pro, avoids this nagging issue by not using a roller brush at all.

Note: The prices above reflect the retailers' listed price at the time of publication.

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What’s the Best Vacuum for Pet Hair?

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  1. Appliances
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FYI

We’ve updated this guide with more robot vacuum recommendations, and new promising pet-hair vacs we plan to test.

As any pet owner knows, even if you own a good vacuum, there always seems to be some pet hair around. So instead of asking ourselves what’s the best vacuum for pet hair, we asked something more to the point: What’s the best way to keep pet hair to a minimum in your home?

Any good vacuum—upright or canister, corded or cordless—will do an excellent job of picking up pet hair, on both hard floors and carpets. We’ve tested all these styles, using bagfuls of genuine cat and dog hair, and all our picks have excelled at the task. Some models with “pet” or “animal” in their name come with extra features or tools that help clean hair off a couch or prevent hair from tangling around the brush, for example, and they’re sometimes helpful (more on those later).

That said, no matter how good your traditional vacuum is, you’re unlikely to keep up with the rate of shedding—unless you have a vacuum that can work constantly. In other words, a robot vacuum is the best vacuum for pet hair.

Our pick

iRobot Roomba i3 EVO

This sturdy robot vacuum won’t get bored or distracted, so it’ll do a better job keeping pet hair off your floors than anything driven by a human. The i3 is better than competitors at getting pet hair out of rugs, and its nimble nav system consistently and thoroughly cleans large spaces.

Any robot vacuum can keep up with pet hair, but the iRobot Roomba line is particularly noteworthy because of how durable and fuss-free the vacuums are for the money. The super-basic Roomba 694 or the Eufy RoboVac 11S are fine choices. But paying more for our top pick, the Roomba i3, will get you extra suction, a nimble navigation system, and tangle-resistant brushes that can make the life of a pet owner even easier. (The iRobot Roomba i3+ EVO includes the i3 EVO robot, plus a charging dock that automatically sucks the debris out of the robot and stores it in a disposable bag, which you’ll only have to change once a month. ) The Roborock Q5 (or the Roborock Q5+, which has a self-emptying dock) is slightly easier to automate–for example, using Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Siri Shortcuts–and has a larger dustbin and longer battery life. It’s not quite as good at cleaning as the Roomba i3, though, especially on carpets.

Sizing up the problem of pet hair

According to Cats International, a typical domesticated cat has 60,000 hairs per square inch of skin on its back (and as many as 120,000 per square inch on its belly). Each hair is shed two or three times per year. If you conservatively estimate that a typical cat has about 227 square inches of surface area (that’s a 5-by-12-inch cylinder) and use the lower of the per-square-inch and hairs-shed numbers given above, that works out to at least 27,240,000 shed hairs per cat per year, or almost 75,000 per day.

Even if you vacuum daily, you can see the problem: By the time you vacuum again, 75,000 new hairs are coating your floor and upholstery. If you vacuum weekly, the number tops half a million.

One cat, one living room, 48 hours’ accumulation of cat hair (and other schmutz), picked up by Tim Heffernan’s Dyson V7. A robot vacuum can keep such accumulation under control. Photo: Tim Heffernan

Of course, not all cat breeds are alike—imagine the numbers for a Maine coon—and we haven’t even attempted to figure out the number for a “typical dog.” But the fundamental concern holds true: Most cats and many dogs shed continuously, and few pet owners can manually vacuum frequently enough to keep up.

That’s why a robot vacuum is a particularly useful tool for pet hair. If you run one daily or at least a few times a week, it will keep your floors tidy pretty much all the time.

However, pet hair also has a way of clinging to furniture and embedding itself in thicker rugs—two places today’s robot vacuums can’t reach. At a minimum, you need a lint roller to get hair off your couches and chairs, if not a handheld vacuum (which can come in handy for all kinds of other jobs, too). And if you want to deep-clean your rugs, you need a more traditional vacuum, whether it’s a plug-in or a cordless machine.

Are pet vacuums worth it? What makes it a “pet” vacuum anyway?

Shark Navigator Lift-Away NV352

Any decent vacuum can clean up pet hair, so don’t fret about this. The Shark Navigator is our favorite vacuum overall, and it’s great whether you have pets or not. As a plug-in vacuum, it’s a much better value for the money than a cordless machine.

Dyson V8 Animal

Pet-oriented vacuums aren’t always especially great at getting hair out of rugs, but some excellent models come in such variants, like this Dyson, which has an extra upholstery-cleaning brush. The V8 is cordless and especially convenient, but it costs a lot more than a plug-in over the short and long term.

When a vacuum includes “pet” or “animal” or “cat and dog” in its model name, that usually means it comes with a small brush attachment that helps get hair off upholstery, a brush roll that resists tangling, or (less commonly) an odor-reducing air filter, or some combination of those features.

All of those extras can be useful, though none of them actually make the vacuum better (or worse) at getting pet hair off the floor. Even the cheapest vacuums can pick up pet hair off a bare floor, and any vacuum that’s good at getting dust out of rugs should also be good at digging pet hair out of rugs. Your best bet is to first look for a vacuum with all-around great cleaning ability—such as our favorite all-purpose upright, the Shark Navigator Lift-Away NV352—and then see if the company has any pet-oriented variations of that vacuum (Shark offers a special upholstery brush that you can buy separately).

Although our favorite cordless stick vacuum, the pet-agnostic Tineco S11, is a decent cleaner and a good all-around vacuum, our runner-up pick, the Dyson V8 Animal is better for this particular use. In our tests the Dyson just picked up more pet hair than the Tineco, particularly from carpets. We also found that pet hair was more likely to get wrapped around the Tineco’s brush or jammed somewhere in the intake than with many other models. Plus, the Dyson comes with a mini motorized brush attachment that’s great for getting hair off of upholstery.

One note about tangle-resistant brushes: They aren’t all equally effective. We haven’t tested them extensively, but we have found that the anti-tangle system in certain Shark vacuums seems to make the vacuum more prone to clogging. Vacuum Wars, the best vacuum-review channel on YouTube, has suggested that the brush on the Bissell IconPet cordless vacuum is one of the best (video) at avoiding tangles without causing clogs. All that said, the Dyson picks up much more pet hair than the Bissell, and it’s easy to detangle any ol’ brush roll with scissors as long as you do it pretty regularly.

And here’s an edge case to consider: If you have a lot of hairy pets, like four golden retrievers or a half-dozen long-haired cats, you might want to avoid bagged vacuums. Pet hair stuffs a bag pretty quickly, and the cost of replacements can add up over the years.

What to look forward to

We plan to test several new models from Dyson that offer promising features and accessories for taming pet hair. The new Dyson Ball Animal 3 upright vacuum has the same anti-tangle and comb hair removal technology that Dyson’s cordless stick vacuums use, and includes a pet grooming attachment, among other accessories. We also plan to retest the Dyson V8, which has been updated to include anti-tangle technology, and the new Dyson V12 Detect Slim, which has many of the same features as the V15, our upgrade cordless vacuum pick.

Frequently asked questions

Are bagged vacuums better than bagless for pet hair?

Bagged or bagless has no meaningful, direct impact on how much hair a vacuum can pick up. However, if you have several very hairy pets, bagged vacuums will fill up quickly, and the cost of new bags can become a burden. Bagless vacuums, on the other hand, have lower operating costs.

What is the best vacuum for pet hair and allergies?

Plenty of vacuums are great at picking up pet hair, plenty of vacuums are great at filtration, and plenty of vacuums are great at both things. Several of our favorite vacuums, including the Shark Navigator line, the Dyson V7, and especially the Miele C2 or C3 (among plenty of others), will suck up a ton of pet hair and improve the air quality in your home. If you have severe allergies that cause serious quality-of-life problems, the consensus among experts is that you should choose a bagged, sealed-system vacuum with a HEPA filter. Such vacuums can also be excellent at cleaning pet hair (though their bags may fill pretty quickly if you’re using them to clean up after several hairy pets).

About your guides

Tim Heffernan

Tim Heffernan is a senior staff writer at Wirecutter and a former writer-editor for The Atlantic, Esquire, and others. He has anchored our unequaled coverage of air purifiers and water filters since 2015. In 2018, he established Wirecutter’s ongoing collaboration with The New York Times’s Smarter Living. When he’s not here, he’s on his bike.

Liam McCabe

Liam McCabe is a former senior staff writer for Wirecutter, and has covered the wild world of appliances since 2011. After testing dozens of robot vacuums, he is neither worried about AI nor holding his breath for self-driving cars. He enjoys visiting factories and learning about regulatory loopholes, and has flooded our testing area only three times.

Further reading

Wirecutter is the product recommendation service from The New York Times. Our journalists combine independent research with (occasionally) over-the-top testing so you can make quick and confident buying decisions. Whether it’s finding great products or discovering helpful advice, we’ll help you get it right (the first time).

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