Solved

Best vacuums for pet hair in 2024: Tested by our home tech experts to help you keep your home fur-free

Whether you're looking for a lightweight cordless stick, or a powerhouse to deep clean carpets, here's our definitive list of pet hair vacuums worth considering

A dog next to one of the picks for best vacuum for pet hair as it cleans a tile floor
(Image credit: Alamy)
Recent updates

3 December 2024. Three vacuums from this guide are still on sale after the Cyber weekend, some at their lowest prices ever. I've included them at the top of the page. 8 September 2024 Added Shark POWERDETECT as the new best upright, replacing the Shark Stratos which is now better suited to best for odors. 5 August 2024 Added the Shark CarpetXpert, one of the most comprehensive cleaners we've ever tested and the only model that can handle pet messes.

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.

Dyson V15 Detect Absolute | was $749.99, now $499.99 at Dyson (save $200)
The best

Dyson V15 Detect Absolute | was $749.99, now $499.99 at Dyson (save $200)

The Dyson V15 Detect is the best vacuum for pet hair we've ever tested, and it's now on offer with $250 off, putting it at its lowest price ever. In our Dyson V15 Detect review, we found it to be one of the best vacuums we've ever tested (rivalled only by the Dyson Gen5detect), topping all others in terms of cleaning power, dust detection, pet hair pickup, and ease of use.

Shark POWERDETECT | was $399, now $299 at Shark (save $100 with code POWER100)
Best upright vacuum for pet hair

Shark POWERDETECT | was $399, now $299 at Shark (save $100 with code POWER100)

The Shark POWERDETECT is currently the best upright vacuum we've ever tested and our best upright vacuum for pet hair.

Testing on carpet, the POWERDETECT picked up 'every visible piece of hair (as well as litter near the litter box) from the carpet, filling the dust bin with an amount of hair equal to a second cat.' The same performance was found when vacuuming other messes, too, with dust and large debris being collected in a single pass.

Read our full Shark POWERDETECT review to learn more.

Dyson V12 Detect Slim | was $649.99, now $399.99 at Walmart and Dyson (save $250)
Editor's choice

Dyson V12 Detect Slim | was $649.99, now $399.99 at Walmart and Dyson (save $250)

This is the smaller version of our best vacuum for pet hair (the Dyson V15 Detect) and it shares all of the same features, just with a smaller dustbin and lighter weight. Now, it's at its lowest price ever.

It has no problem whatsoever vacuuming hair from carpets and hard floors, and it has a specialized anti-tangle Motorbar brushroll that's designed for that exact purpose. The other brushroll, designed for hard floors, has a green laser that illuminates hidden dust.

It's also the vacuum cleaner I use in my own home after testing 12 of the world's bests for H&G. Read our full Dyson V12 Detect Slim review to learn more.

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.

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

1. Dyson V15 Detect

The best vacuum for pet hair

Specifications

Type: Cordless
Battery life: Up to 60 minutes
Dust bin: 0.2gal
Weight: 6.8lbs
Noise level: 78dB
Power: 230 air watts
Warranty: 2 years

Reasons to buy

+
Green Laser dust detection on Fluffy brush roll illuminates dust particles invisible to the eye
+
Piezo sensor and LCD screen shows the size and number of dust particles collected in real-time
+
New anti-tangle hair screw keeps pet hair from getting stuck
+
Incredible suction
+
Versatile attachments

Reasons to avoid

-
Green laser only shows dust on hard floors, harder to see in bright daylight
-
Dust gets stucks in dust bin
-
High Torque cleaner head with anti-tangle technology (secondary floorhead) doesn't move as easily, and it doesn't have an LED Light
-
Must hold trigger for continual operation

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.

Best upright vacuum for pet hair