Best Hard Floor Cleaner 2025: Give Your Floor the Treatment It Deserves
Ditch the mop and bucket and give your floors a real clean with the best hard floor cleaners reviewed by us
The best hard floor cleaner will actively lift away dirt, sanitize floors, and leave them looking fresh and new. The classic mop and bucket will wash your floors but will also leave them sopping wet and won’t pick up all the dirt and hair that builds up over time. This is why it makes sense to invest in a good hard floor cleaner if you’ve got a lot of sealed hard flooring in your home. Some will even vacuum, wash, and dry in one go, meaning you don’t have to put half a day aside to refresh your floors.
In this article, we’ll help you choose the best hard floor cleaner for your needs. The reviews on this page are a mix of real, in-person testing and thorough research done by our team of expert testers in cases where we’ve been unable to get our hands on the product.
Our buying guide at the bottom of this page has some questions and information you might find useful. Be sure to also check out our at-a-glance list for quick links to our favorites, or jump to our mini reviews of the best hard floor cleaners.
Best hard floor cleaner: At a glance
| Best for small homes | Dyson Omni-glide (~$294) | Check price at Amazon |
| Best premium hard floor cleaner | Dyson WashG1 (~$700) | Check price at Best Buy |
| Best for big spaces | Karcher FC5 Hard Floor Cleaner (~$260) | Check price at Amazon |
The best hard floor cleaners you can buy in 2025
1. Dyson WashG1: Best premium hard floor cleaner
Price when reviewed: $700 | Check price at Best Buy
- Great for… quick, effective cleaning
- Not so great for… an affordable option
The brand’s first dedicated hard floor cleaner, the Dyson WashG1 is a premium piece of kit with many of the features to match. The WashG1 has a generous 27.5fl oz capacity for clean water and a 33.8fl oz tank for dirty water, a brilliant 34 minutes of tested battery life, and a cleaning head with dual rollers and two brush bars. All of this helps it wash floors in a flash, as well as pick up solid debris.
In terms of cleaning power, the Dyson WashG1 performed impressively in our tests. Taking on our trio of controlled spills of mud, fruit syrup, and ketchup, it cleared these dried-on messes much more easily than rival models from Eufy and Shark. It also has an easily readable color screen that allows you to cycle through three levels of water flow, depending on the size of the job you’re carrying out.
While it is impressive, the WashG1 isn’t perfect and with it being incredibly expensive, it’s important to look at its flaws. At 10.8lb, it can be heavy and cumbersome in use, especially compared to its nippier sibling, the Dyson Omni-glide. And like many hard floor cleaners, it can prove unpleasant to empty. All that said, if you regularly clean large hard-floor surfaces, you’ll find plenty of value and ease in the high-performing Dyson WashG1.
Key specs – Capacity: 27.5fl oz; Runtime: 34 minutes; Charge time: 4 hours; Weight: 10.8lb; Dimensions: 11.8 x 8.9 x 44.9in (WDH)
2. Dyson Omni-glide: Best for small homes
Price when reviewed: $294 | Check price at Amazon
- Great for… vacuuming small areas of hard floor
- Not so great for… large houses or mopping
Most traditional hard floor cleaners are bulky both in weight and size, making them difficult to store in small spaces. Dyson tackles this problem with the Omni-Glide, a compact, lightweight hard floor dry vacuum cleaner specifically designed for small apartments. Dyson might be best known for its carpet vacuums but this cordless cleaner, which weighs just 4.2lb, glides effortlessly around hard floors.
The main cleaning head has a suction tube sandwiched between two soft rollers that rotate in opposing directions, but you can move the head in any direction you please, meaning it’s great at getting around awkward table legs and weird nooks. Unlike other hard floor cleaners, this doesn’t come with a wet clean or wash option, but it does have plenty of attachments, and we found it works well as a handheld vacuum, too.
In testing, it coped just as well with larger debris as it did with smaller dust particles, exceeding our expectations in almost every way. The battery life is ok, but not amazing, lasting 22mins 33secs in Standard mode and 8mins 40secs on Max. There are additional battery packs available to buy separately though and we think the Standard mode should provide more than enough power for most cleaning jobs.
Key specs – Capacity: 6.76fl oz; Runtime: 22 minutes; Charge time: 3.5 hours; Weight: 4.2lb; Dimensions: 8 x 3.6 x 42.4in (WDH); Warranty: 2 years
3. Karcher FC 5 Hard Floor Cleaner: Best for big spaces
Price when reviewed: $260 | Check price at Amazon
- Great for… washing and drying large areas
- Not so great for… low capacity of water tank
The FC 5 is essentially a heavy-duty, corded version of Karcher’s cordless EMW 2, which washes and dries all in one.
Like its cordless counterpart, the unique brush roll design means you can clean much closer to the edge of your rooms, something we have found other hard floor cleaners struggle with due to their size and build. The roller brushes can be easily removed and washed for reuse and additional rollers are also available via the Karcher website if you get through them quickly.
No battery means you can keep cleaning for as long as you like but the small 13.53fl oz fresh water tank means you will need to refill at least once during cleaning if you’re tackling a big job. Despite this, the Karcher FC 5 corded is still a high-performing floor cleaner with an attractive price tag.
Key specs – Capacity: 13.53fl oz; Runtime: N/A; Charge time: N/A; Weight: 11.5lb; Dimensions: 12.6 x 10.6x 48in (WDH)
How to choose the best hard floor cleaner for you
What’s the difference between a hard floor cleaner and a steam cleaner?
While both hard floor cleaners and steam cleaners will clean hard floors, steam cleaners, perhaps unsurprisingly, simply use hot steam to blast away dirt. Hard floor cleaners, on the other hand, tend to use a combination of vacuuming and spinning roller brushes to simultaneously vacuum up debris and wash away dirt.
What are the benefits of a hard floor cleaner?
As mentioned above, most hard floor cleaners vacuum, wash, and dry your floors at the same time, significantly cutting down the time and effort spent cleaning, as well as the time spent waiting for floors to dry.
When used with a cleaning solution, especially an antibacterial one, hard floor cleaners will do a much better job of banishing any nasty bacteria that might be lurking. Most have dual water tanks, which means that only clean water will be pulled through the rollers and onto your floor.
What type of flooring can I clean?
You can use a hard floor cleaner on any hard flooring including wood, laminate, linoleum, vinyl, and stone, as long as it’s sealed. Some cleaners are even multi-purpose and can be used on both hard floors and carpet. Wood and stone that has not been sealed should not be cleaned with a hard floor cleaner, as the moisture could damage the flooring.
