The best vacuums for cleaning up pet hair

About a quarter of the standard and stick vacuums in our test results have the words “pet”, “animal”, “cat” or “dog” in their model name. Vacuum manufacturers must have worked out that marketing their products this way is good for business. 

But are these pet vacs actually better at sucking up cat and dog hair?  

When we test vacs, one of the measures we score them on is how well they suck up pet hair. We source fur from a grooming company, methodically embed it in carpet, vacuum the area and weigh the collected fur. Each vacuum then gets a pet hair score shown as a percentage.

Most of the pet vacs get a score of 90–100% for how well they pick up pet hair – but so do plenty of models that don’t market themselves as pet vacs.

Some pet vacs get a score of 80% for pet hair, so you’d be better off looking for a vac that gets a higher score and ignoring whether it markets itself as a pet vac.

Erin Bennett oversees our vacuum test at Consumer NZ and says checking our test results is the easiest way to know if you are really getting a vac that makes cleaning up pet fur easier. 

“There are a lot of pet vacuums that do a great job of sucking up fur, but some vacuums that aren’t marketed to pet owners will do it just as well and can cost less,” Erin says. 

A few vacuums we’ve tested got terrible scores of 40% for picking up pet hair, so make sure you check our test results to make sure you’re not taking home one of those if you’ve got a furry friend.

What about a robot vacuum?

If you’re constantly vacuuming up fur, you might be considering getting a robot vac to whizz around and do the job for you. Some do a terrible job of sucking up pet hair - a couple scored only 25%. Check out our robot vacuum test results before you buy.