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Home & garden.

12 August 2021

Top five lawn mowers for 2021

We round up the top-scoring budget, electric, cylinder, petrol and push lawn mowers to help you find the best one for your garden.

Rebecca Jakeman

In this article

Best budget lawn mower
Best corded electric lawn mower
Best high-end mower
Best budget petrol lawn mower
Best hand push lawn mower
Some of the worst lawn mowers
Two lawn mowers to avoid
We review more lawn mowers than anyone else

Our tests have uncovered big differences in quality across the full range of lawn mowers available on the market.

In the past we’ve found Don’t Buy lawn mowers costing over £600 and Best Buy lawn mowers for less than £150. We've also seen that sometimes, older models will outperform newly launched models, so new doesn't always mean improved.

All of the lawn mowers in the table below have been put through our rigorous field testing, so you can be sure they’re the best of the bunch for cutting grass while also being easy to use. Take a look at our top picks of lawn mowers in the table below.

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Best budget lawn mower

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74%
£150.00
At less than £200, this cordless mower is an absolute steal. It leaves an excellent finish on both standard and wet grass, and copes well with difficult terrain. It’s lightweight and manoeuvrable, and the battery lasts for a decent length of time, so one charge should easily be enough to cover a small garden.
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Best corded electric lawn mower

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74%
£289.00
Scoring well in our tests thanks to excellent cutting performance across all types of grass, this electric mower is one to consider. Although its size has a slight impact on how easy it is to weave around the garden, it's still an excellent choice for people with a larger lawn.
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Best high-end mower

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76%
£550.00
This excellent mower is one of our top-scoring cordless mowers. It copes well with long and rough grass and gives a neat finish on short lawns too. It's self-propelled so it doesn't require lots of pushing and is overall very easy to use. We were a little disappointed with how efficiently it collected grass, but it shouldn't be a problem unless your lawn is unusually large.
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Best budget petrol lawn mower

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75%
£385.00
This Best Buy mower is a very good price for a petrol machine, plus it handles all grass types with ease. It also collects grass clippings very efficiently and we found it easy to operate and manoeuvre. You'll need to make sure you have enough storage space for this hefty mower, but otherwise it's a great choice.
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Best hand push lawn mower

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65%
£120.00
If you're after a beautiful lawn without the noise and fuss of a powered machine then this large push cylinder mower is an ideal choice. It's quite wide so covers the ground quickly and gives a neat finish. This robust mower copes well with cutting both long and damp grass and collects the clippings quite well. It has a wide range of cutting heights and gives an impressively neat cut on short grass. The cutting-height adjuster is very easy to use.
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Not found the right product for you? Browse all our lawn mower reviews.

Some of the worst lawn mowers

The only way to tell if a lawn mower is any good is to use it to cut lawns in a variety of different conditions, which is why we do exactly that in our Which? independent lab tests. We cut long and short grass when it's dry and when it's wet to find out how well the mowers will cope with cutting your lawn.

Not all lawn mowers are great. Here are two models that could leave you feeling underwhelmed, either because they don't cut well or because they're tricky to use.

Two lawn mowers to avoid

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54%
£230.00
While this mower is very easy to use, you'll be disappointed with its grass-cutting performance, poor grass collection and noisiness. The battery life is very unimpressive too.
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52%
£245.00
This cordless mower disappoints on grass cutting and collection, meaning you'll make lots of unnecessary trips to the compost heap. It has a terrible battery life too, plus it's noisy.
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We review more lawn mowers than anyone else

Which? tests around 3,300 products every year, from washing-up liquid to cars.

When testing lawn mowers:

We measure how well each one cuts grass – from short, ornamental lawns to long meadow grass.
Time how long it takes to cut the grass.
How well the mower collects the grass clippings.
How neat it leaves the lawn edges and how smart the finished lawn is.
We also rate each lawn mower on how easy is it to use.

Find out more about how we test lawn mowers.