- Deals
- The Verdict
- Quick List
- 1. The best vacuum for pet hair
- 2. Best upright
- 3. Best value
- 4. Best for pet messes
- 5. Best for odors
- 6. Best for allergies
- 7. Best robot
- 8. Best for apartments
- 9. Best dust-free
- 10. Best budget
- 11. Best canister
- 12. Best handheld
- How to choose
- How we test
- Meet our expert testers
- FAQs
- Glossary
The best vacuum for pet hair will do more than pick up fur. It’ll remove pet odors from your home, capture allergenic pet dander along with all of your home’s other messes, it'll be easy to use and get into crevices and under furniture.
As Homes & Gardens' home tech editor, myself and a team of dedicated product experts test and review the best vacuum cleaners in our homes and in our test center. And after we've spent more than 200 hours testing 47 of the world's best vacuums, these are the 12 best-on-test vacuums for pet hair.
Our guide is here to help you make a decision, and we robustly assessed each vacuum on pet hair pickup, odor and allergen capturing, ease of use, cleaning, price, features, tools and attachments, and everything else that should make life easier as a pet owner.
Deals on vacuums for pet hair
Though the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales are officially over, many of the vacuums in this guide are still discounted, which I've included below. Keep scrolling for the full guide.
Best vacuum for pet hair - The Verdict
The cordless Dyson V15 Detect is the best choice in almost every way. It has the best pet hair pickup we've ever seen, as well as a green laser that illuminates hidden particles, adaptive suction power, tight, anti-allergenic HEPA filtration and an attachment that can deep clean pet beds. Even though Dyson have released the upgraded Gen5detect, the V15 Detect still wins as it's almost identical but $100s more affordable.
The best upright vacuum for pet owners is the Shark POWERDETECT, a powerhouse that excels on every floor type with every debris type, cleaning every visible strand of pet hair in a single pass, even on carpet. And if you're looking to save money, the cordless Ultenic U12 Vesla is surprisingly impressive on fur considering it costs under $200.
A common and effective solution from pet owners is to invest in a robot vacuum that'll regularly take care of all the fur on the floor, and the iRobot Roomba Combo j9+ is the best we've ever tested, as it’s one of the only robots that can actually remove deeply-embedded fur from carpet.
If your home is mostly carpet, you won't find a better solution than the Shark CarpetXpert. It's the most comprehensive carpet cleaner we've ever tested on pet hair, food, stains, and all other debris – and there's even a dedicated tool for cleaning up pet mess straight from the floor.
The Quick List
Here's a quick overview of our best vacuums for pet hair. If any stand out, click on the jump links to take you to the more in-depth details below.
To better understand what to look for, there's a detailed how to choose guide at the bottom of the page. And, if any of the terms in this guide sound like vacuum jargon, I've included a handy glossary to clear any confusion. You can navigate both on desktop with our side navigation bar that will travel up and down the screen with. On mobile, you can scroll the navigation bar at the top of the page, left to right, which will stick with you as you move through the article.
Best vacuum for pet hair
This is the best vacuum you can buy for pet hair, in almost every way. It has the strongest performance on hair we've ever tested, as well as a green laser to illuminate hidden particles and an intuitive, easy to use design.
Best upright vacuum for pet hair
One of the most powerful vacuums on this list, the latest upright vac from Shark boasts flawless pet hair pickup, floor and dust detection, a HEPA filter and anti-allergen seals, and incredible suction power on every floor type.
Best value vacuum for pet hair
You won't find a better vacuum cleaner for under $200. This has smart features, good suction power, and an adjustable height, and it picked up every strand of hair on test.
Best carpet cleaner for pet hair and pet messes
No vacuum will deep clean pet stains from carpets as well as the CarpetXpert. You can even suck up pet messes directly from the floor.
Best vacuum for pet hair and odors
Effective pet hair removal at a fair price. This nimble upright also has odor-neutralising tech that removes pet smells.
Best pet hair vacuum for allergies
Samsung's Bespoke Jet combines HEPA filtration and a unique bagged base to protect you from fur and allergies at home.
Best robot vacuum for pet hair
The best robot vacuum cleaner we've ever tested. It picks up hair (along with pretty much anything else on your floors) with ease.
Best pet hair vacuum for apartments
The smaller, lighter and more affordable version of the Dyson V15 Detect, with all the same core features like particle detection and powerful suction.
Best dust-free vacuum for pet hair
The Henry Quick's dust pods not only save you from dusty messes, they also trap pet odors and allergens for a more comfortable home environment.
Best cylinder pet hair vacuum
The sealed bag system on this compact cylinder makes it great for allergy sufferers.
Best handheld vacuum for pet hair
No supplement for your main vacuum, but the perfect complement to your everyday cleaning routine.
The best vacuums for pet hair in 2024
You can trust Homes & Gardens. Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing the latest products, helping you choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.
For more detail, here's our rundown of the very best vacuums for pet hair. We've personally tested every single one to see how they fared with fur.
The best vacuum for pet hair
This is the best vacuum cleaner for pet hair, and one of the best in the world on every surface. It boasts unparalleled, market-leading suction power and exceptional performance on pet hair, especially when using Dyson's dedicated Motorbar cleaner head and hair screw tool that are designed exactly for that purpose.
Our expert tester Jaclyn Turner saw this first-hand when she tried the hair screw tool on her dog's lounge mat. She says, 'It is one of the only vacuum tools I've tried that not only revived the faux-sherpa bottom that is an absolute magnet for dirt but brightened the fleece top from a dusty blue back to its original turquoise.' Not only does it pick up pet hair effortlessly, it's so powerful that it revived an old dog bed to its original color.
The Dyson V15 Detect, along with the newer (and more expensive) Gen5detect, leads the line up of the best vacuums in the world. This is in part thanks to the green diode laser (see Glossary) which illuminates dust and particles that the naked eye can't see, and a particle sensor which measures microscopic dust particles in real time so that it can automatically adjust suction power when needed. If the vacuum gets to a particularly dusty part of the floor, or moves onto a rug or carpet, the V15 Detect will up the suction in a fraction of a second.
But like most Dyson products, this quality comes at a cost. This is the best vacuum you can possibly buy for pet hair, with the best suction we've ever seen in a vacuum cleaner, but it will set you back more than $700. You may also find that dust occasionally gets stuck in the dust bin, and that having to hold down the trigger to keep it running might become uncomfortable, particularly if you have limited mobility in your hands (if that's off-putting, the Gen5detect and the V12 Detect Slim which we've reviewed as well have an on/off power button instead).
If you're willing to part with the money, you won't get any better than this. It also has a HEPA filter that can trap more than just the hair, but also the dander and super-fine particles that trigger allergies and spread odors at home.
Read our full Dyson V15 Detect review for more details.
