Whether your carpet has accumulated stubborn grime, muddy paw prints, or red wine spills, a good carpet cleaner, or rug cleaner, can come to the rescue. The best carpet cleaners CR tests are full-sized models, which are designed to give entire rugs a thorough cleaning. If you’re looking for something smaller and handier, we also test smaller, portable carpet cleaners that are mostly meant for spot cleaning, but they don’t match the cleaning power of the full-sized models.
The highest-performing carpet cleaners have a range of settings and options, from different brush attachments to varying hose lengths. They also do a better job of cleaning and drying your carpet and are easier to use.
In this article
- Best Carpet Cleaners
- How CR Tests Carpet Cleaners
- How to Choose a Carpet Cleaner
More on Carpet Cleaning
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Bissell Little Green Carpet and Upholstery Cleaners
Though you can rent heavy-duty carpet cleaners or hire a cleaning service, owning a carpet cleaner ends up a better financial deal in the long run, assuming you use it at least a handful of times, and it’s definitely more convenient to have one on hand.
To narrow down your choices before you start shopping, you should start with our guide on what to look for in a carpet cleaner to determine the most suitable style for your home’s unique needs. You can also consult our carpet cleaner buying guide for an overview of popular features, along with tips for using your carpet cleaner.
The five top-performing carpet cleaners, below, all feature large tanks, moving brushes, and a long hose. CR members can also see our full carpet cleaner ratings of more than 30 products.
How CR Tests Carpet Cleaners
We put each carpet cleaner through a battery of cleaning tests in our lab—each model takes three days to test. Our engineers soil large swatches of off-white nylon carpet with red Georgia clay. We then run a cleaner over the carpet for four wet cycles and four dry cycles, simulating how you’d clean a particularly dirty spot on a well-trafficked carpet. Then we repeat the test on two more swatches. A reliable carpet cleaner will remove the embedded dirt and grime without leaving behind a trail of water and a soggy carpet.
We also rate carpet cleaners on ease of use and how noisy they are—some are so loud that we recommend wearing hearing protection. In our full ratings, members can access the results of all our tests and additional information about each model, including hose length, the amount of carpet it cleans with each tank, and its weight when filled and when empty.
Is Buying a Carpet Cleaner Worth the Money?
To better understand whether it’s worth it to buy your own carpet cleaner, you might consider how often you plan to clean your carpets, then compare the cost of buying one against the cost of renting one or hiring a carpet cleaning service. Though the initial cost of buying a carpet cleaner can be higher than a one-time rental or service—our carpet cleaner recommendations range in price from about $100 to a little over $500—it ends up being more economical to own a carpet cleaner after a few uses.
How to Choose a Carpet Cleaner
First off, take stock of the layout of your home and the areas you’ll be cleaning. If you live in a one-story house, for instance, you might not need a model with a particularly long hose. “On the other hand, if you have carpeted stairs, you want a carpet cleaner with a long hose so you can reach up the steps,” says Larry Ciufo, who oversees Consumer Reports’ carpet cleaner tests. “You don’t want to put the cleaner on the top step and tug on the hose; the machine could barrel down on top of you.”
Carpet cleaners can also clean more than just carpets: Many models can clean upholstery and things like pet beds and rugs. Several models also include more than one type of brush or attachment, with different brushes designed to help with different types of messes, from embedded dirt to liquid stains and spills.
You should also consider a carpet cleaner’s tank setup. Some have one tank with two chambers, one for fresh cleaning solution and the other for dirty water. But our testers have found that carpet cleaners with two separate tanks—one for the cleaning solution and another for dirty water—are more convenient to use. Some carpet cleaners also havedispensers that add the cleaning agent to clean water so that you don’t have to measure out a full tank of solution every time.
The weight of a carpet cleaner also matters. Carpet cleaners on their own, with empty tanks, weigh between 10 and 20 pounds; filling the tanks can bring the total weight to well over 20 pounds. Make sure you can comfortably move and manage a carpet cleaner when its tanks are full.
Remember, too, that a carpet cleaner can’t go it alone. You’ll need a good upright or canister vacuum cleaner to suck up loose debris before using a carpet cleaner. This ensures that you’re not wetting the carpet with excess dust or dirt, creating a bigger mess.
Finally, don’t select a carpet cleaner based on brand name alone. In our tests, we found big differences among models from the same brand. While Bissell models hold several spots near the top of our rankings, for example, one of its models is also in one of the lowest spots.
Worst Carpet Cleaners
Although their names might look similar to the ones that sit near the top of our ratings chart, these machines land at the bottom.
- While the Hoover Turbo Scrub FH50138 leaves carpets fairly dry, it has a subpar cleaning performance, leaving more debris than many of the other carpet cleaners in our ratings. It’s also among the loudest we test. It does have some nice convenience features, however, such as separate tanks for clean and dirty water, a hose that’s more than 8 feet long, a carrying handle, and brush attachments. But bells and whistles don’t make up for poor performance in our tests.
- Two Bissell models sit atop the list of carpet cleaners that CR tests, but the brand also makes one of the worst-rated models in our ratings. The Bissell ProHeat Essential 1887 offers middling cleaning performance, but its below-par drying and inconvenient tank setup (it doesn’t have separate tanks for solution and dirty water) hold it back. It has a slightly longer hose but is a touch heavier than Bissell’s other options despite its significantly smaller coverage area of 32 square feet. You can get better performance from this brand for even less.
- Another carpet cleaner with “pet” in its name that can’t compete with other models by the same brand is the Hoover SmartWash Pet Complete FH53000PC. This model struggles with both cleaning and drying. But it does have a carrying handle, separate tanks for clean and dirty water, and a long hose (29 feet).
