Best Electric Lawn Mowers of 2026

Rear-wheel drive with a variable-speed bar is the reason to look here: on a slope the mower pulls and you steer. Two 4.0Ah packs ride on the machine and switch over on their own, so a long cut does not stop for a battery swap halfway up the yard.

The rest of the package is what makes it our value pick among the self-propelled machines. Twenty and a quarter inches of cut, seven height positions from 1 to 4 inches, and four modes: mulch, bag, side discharge, and a turbo setting for leaf pickup in the fall. The headlight is a genuinely useful addition if you mow after work, and we used it more than we expected to.

Sixty-five pounds is the price of the drive and the bigger deck, and it is a two-hand lift into a truck bed. The drive engages through a bar you hold, and reversing means letting it go and pulling the mower back, the one habit worth learning in the first week rather than the fifth.

Charging is the other half of the story: two packs, one charger, and a four-year warranty that is the longest in this group. If your lawn is flat and small, the lighter push mowers here are easier to live with. If it is not, this is where the money belongs.

A hundred minutes is the number that matters, and it comes from two 6.0Ah packs plus a low-runtime blade in EGO's Select Cut system. On a property where a single battery quits halfway, that is the difference between one session and three.

Select Cut is worth understanding before you buy. The lower blade unbolts, and you fit the mulching blade, the high-lift bagging blade, or the extended-runtime blade depending on the job, a quick swap with the mower tipped on its side. It changes the machine's appetite for grass and for charge, and it is the sort of thing you use twice a season once you know your lawn.

Touch drive is the feature we did not expect to like as much as we did. Push your palm against the handle and the mower moves at whatever speed you have set between 0.9 and 3.1 mph, slow enough to follow a bed edge and quick enough to finish a long strip. At 96 pounds it is the heaviest machine here, and that weight is exactly why the drive matters.

What keeps it from being the default recommendation is the money and the bag: the chute can pack up before the bag is full in damp grass, and you will clear it. On a half acre with a slope and a few trees, those are annoyances you forgive. On a small flat lawn they are reasons to buy something simpler.

Sixteen inches of deck and one 4.0Ah battery tell you most of what this mower is for. Aim it at a half acre of thick spring grass and you will spend as long charging as cutting. Aim it at the kind of lawn that takes fifteen minutes, and it is the least fussy mowing you will do all summer.

Lightness is the thing we kept noticing. At 37.5 pounds it is a mower you can lift with one hand onto a step, steer around a birdbath with a palm on the handle, and hang on two hooks once the handle folds. A single lever drops the deck through five positions from 1.25 to 3.75 inches, which is the adjustment you will actually use between a dry spell and a wet week.

The 40V platform is the other argument: the same pack runs Greenworks trimmers, blowers, and saws, so a second battery bought for the mower does double duty. Mulch or bag, your choice, and the mulch plug goes in without tools, which is where ours stayed for most of the season.

Two practical notes: the bag is small enough that a leafy fall cut means a couple of empties, and the 35 minutes on the label is a fair-weather figure. On a small lot neither costs you more than a minute, and on a large one they are the reason to look at the 21-inch machines here instead.

Fourteen inches is the smallest deck here, and on the right lawn that is a feature rather than a compromise. The deck is offset so the blade reaches the edge of the housing, which means you can run it along a fence line or a flower bed and skip the string trimmer pass afterwards. On a townhouse lot that saves more time than the extra passes cost.

At 21.7 pounds it is the lightest cordless mower in this group, and it folds down to something you carry in one hand and stand in a corner of a shed. Six height positions from 1 to 3 inches move on a single lever, and the brushless motor holds its speed in grass taller than it has any right to be.

The 5.0Ah pack is part of Worx's PowerShare line, so it runs the brand's other 20V tools, and the 2-in-1 setup switches between bagging and mulching. The bag is small, a couple of front-lawn passes and it is full, which is the trade for a deck this size.

Where it falls down is an open lawn. At 14 inches you walk more passes than with anything else here, and 3 inches is the lowest maximum height in the group, so a lawn that gets away from you in June is work. Buy it for borders, gates, and a courtyard rather than for the whole property.

The cord is the whole proposition. Plug it into an outdoor outlet and the mower runs until you stop, which means no pack to recharge, no pack to replace in a few years, and no watching the last bar while you finish the back strip. What you give up is the freedom to start anywhere: the route has to keep the cord behind you, trailing over grass you have already cut.

At 21 pounds it is the lightest machine here by a wide margin, and a 15-inch deck makes it nimble along a fence line. The 9.2-gallon bag is unusually large for a mower this size, where most small-deck machines make you empty something half as big, so a courtyard and a front strip can be one trip to the compost. Height adjusts in five steps from 1 to 3 inches.

Where it makes sense is the lawn you can see all of from the back door, with an outlet on the wall of the house. On that lawn it is the least expensive way to stop buying gas, and the 11-amp motor holds blade speed through damp spring growth that would have a small battery mower stuttering. Push it onto a quarter acre and the arithmetic changes: three-foot passes, a cord to mind, and a lot of walking.

The safety layout is the part that surprised us. A lock-out button and a hold-to-run lever mean the blade stops the instant your hand comes off, which is the behavior you want on a machine with a cord attached to it. Check the reach from your outlet to the far corner before you order; that distance is the real specification here.

Two 20V 4.0Ah batteries, a charger that takes both, a 17-inch deck, and a 50-liter bag: the parts list reads like mowers that cost a good deal more. At 30 pounds it is the second lightest machine here, light enough that the mower goes where you point it rather than where the camber of the lawn wants it to go.

The six-position lever runs from 1 to 3 inches, and 17 inches is the sensible middle of this group, narrow enough for a side gate and wide enough that a small front lawn is four or five passes. Clippings travel up the chute into the bag without clogging on us, and the bag lifts off with one clip.

The dual charger is the detail we did not expect at this price. Both packs charge at once rather than one after the other, so the pair is ready in the time a single-battery mower takes to top up one, and on a small-to-medium lot that matters more than the 40-minute label suggests.

Here is the trade: a one-year warranty, where the Greenworks push mower here carries three years and the 60V self-propelled carries four. That is the difference between this and a first-tier machine at a lot more money, a shorter safety net on a mower with a short record. As a light second mower for a rental or a first mower for a small lot, it is a reasonable bet. As a machine to keep a decade, it is not.