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Whether you’re mopping up after pets or kids, or just want to be prepared for spillages, here are our favourite upright and standalone carpet cleaners for tackling grubby floors at home
The best steam cleaners and mops for a sparkling home
Andy Shaw Wed 14 Oct 2026 19.00 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google I ’ve tested a few carpet cleaners in my time, but I have to admit I learned new things putting these eight models through a series of punishing tests. My main takeaway is this: if you have light-coloured carpet, don’t eat curry over it. If you do, and the worst happens, clean it up as quickly as you can, because every second counts.
I also learned that no carpet cleaner in this group comes with a magic wand you can wave over a mess to make it disappear. I doubt there’s a machine on earth that can make a single pass over a dollop of tikka masala paste and leave no trace of it behind.
Don’t let this put you off, though. All the machines I’ve tested here put up a good fight against a variety of stains. Just be warned that even with the very best carpet cleaner, you’ll need to add time, elbow grease and persistence if you want a carpet that looks as good as it did before the mess hit the floor.
Best overall carpet cleaner Vax Platinum SmartWash XL Advanced
Best budget carpet cleaner Henry Numatic Henry Wash
Best overall spot washer Rug Doctor Portable spot cleaner
Best budget spot washer Russell Hobbs Hot & Cold spot cleaner
Why you should trust me While I’ve spent more time in the past few years testing vacuum cleaners (even my kids call me “the Hoover reviewer”, not least because they know how much it annoys me when they use a trademark as a generic term), I’ve also worked with a good number of carpet cleaners. I’ve reviewed enough of them to be known to my neighbours as someone who might have a carpet cleaner on test that they can borrow, particularly when their carpets have been subjected to a teenager’s house party, a toddler with a stomach bug or an incontinent pet.
Beyond cleaning, I’ve been testing all sorts of products for more than 30 years, from laptops and printers to smartphones and video doorbells .
View image in fullscreen Our tester attempting to remove curry, coffee, red wine, soot and urine from a rug. Photograph: Andy Shaw/The Guardian Before handing me the task of testing carpet cleaners, the Guardian asked a professional for five of the hardest substances to remove from carpet. They came back with curry, coffee, red wine, soot and urine. No way was I going to drop any of that on to my own carpets, so I bought two rugs to test on: a relatively short-pile Seattle washable rug from the Range and a longer-pile Marvel shaggy washable rug from Dunelm .
I started with the four full-size cleaners spreading measured quantities of the five substances across the two rugs. I was asked to test them with dried-in stains, so I left them overnight. Don’t do this at home; you’ll end up with a foul-smelling house and stains that are very hard to remove.
I passed the full-size cleaners over each of the stains multiple times in an attempt to get the mess out. Urine wasn’t that visible, but the curry was particularly bad, leaving the espresso, spoonful of soot and measure of Waitrose’s cheapest red somewhere in between.
View image in fullscreen A fluffy assistant inspects the t…