This roundup was written by Anna Mejorada, a writer for The Spruce, who shares her home with a happy pomeranian named Gidget who politely leaves the room when a vacuum enters the space. Before researching and writing about pet products for a living, Mejorada embarked on a self-mandated, ongoing quest to find the optimal items for her dog. She is now delightfully devoted to helping humans discover and select the most favorable products for their pets.
If you have a pet or pets in the house and you or a family member suffer from allergies or asthma, the HEPA filter will help you breathe easier.- It has an “Anti-Allergen Complete Seal” (Shark terminology). This means the vacuum is designed such that unfiltered air cannot bypass the HEPA filter or leak out through cracks or poor seals in the vacuum body. The result is that you always get properly filtered air leaving the vacuum cleaner. As with all products that CR tests, the ratings they earn across our battery of tests and our surveys inform our Overall Score for each upright vacuum. How We Picked the Best Upright VacuumsTo determine the best upright vacuums listed below, we filtered upright vacuum models based on their Overall Score. As you scroll through the models—which are listed in alphabetical order—we recommend considering the model’s size and weight, noise level, and reliability, as well as its pet-friendliness (if you have a pet).
The bin vacuums we selected all feature a button or lever to keep the emptying experience primarily hands-free while reducing, if not illuminating, a dust cloud. A bin may require the need to manually reach in and clear pet hair from time to time, but most are clear so it’s easier to monitor when it needs to be emptied. They are primarily made of plastic which can crack if the vacuum hits a hard surface, and over time you may find that it starts to pick up the scent of the items you vacuum (e.g. pet hair). To empty, the canister features a quick-release lever that shoots all of the particles down into a waste bin. The internal filter is not HEPA certified, but it’s effective—capturing 99.99 percent of particles—and easy to maintain with a quick rinse in water.
We also continued testing these vacuums in our homes for the last six months and added further insights on how they held up over time. You always want to look for powerful suction in a vacuum, but it’s particularly important for a model designed to suck up pet hair. “Strong suction ensures the flying fur tumbleweed on your floors actually gets sucked in instead of blown around,” says Melissa Homer, cleaning expert and Chief Cleaning Officer at MaidPro. Of the 37 vacuums tested, this was the only one that pulled in perfect scores in every category, from effectiveness to noise level to portability. This canister vacuum performed especially well on carpet, grabbing all of the pet hair in a single or at most two passes, even when on the lowest suction setting.
This 2-in-1 vacuum and mop robot from Shark is by far one of our favorite models from the brand. We’ve had the opportunity to test it in a variety of real-world settings to understand its performance completely. While our initial setup experience was a bit confusing because there is not much guidance given on setting up the shark canister vacuum home base and emptying station, we found the actual programming of the vacuum to be a breeze. The Shark app leads you through a series of programming settings and the robot maps out your home. You can also tweak the map to get it exactly how you want and establish no-go zones and carpeted zones and name different rooms.
We tested the top-of-the-line Shark Apex and found it to be a good vacuum, but probably not worth the extra cost over the Navigator. It has a dual-brush cleaning head that supposedly helps it pick up hair and dusty debris off of bare floors. But that adds a lot of bulk to the vacuum, and we never found bare-floor pickup to be a problem with the single-brush models in the first place. The Miele canister vacuums are among the quietest vacuum cleaners you can buy. We measured a C3 model—running with the power head attached and the brush roll spinning at the maximum suction setting—at 74 dBc, which is about five dBc quieter than our main pick.