5 Best Vacuums for Laminate Floors

You’ve waited ages to finally trade that dusty, old carpeting for your beautiful new laminate flooring. But how do you keep that flooring looking like the day it was installed? Easy: Vacuum often to remove grit that can scratch and mar your floor’s finish. One of your greatest tools in this effort is a vacuum cleaner designed for cleaning bare floors. Here are some of the best vacuum cleaners for laminate floors.

What to Look for in a Vacuum for Your Laminate Floor

For homes with mostly bare floor, a canister vacuum with a floor brush is an excellent choice for power, versatility and portability. But, if you prefer to push your vacuum rather than pull it, or you have a mix of bare and carpeted floors, an upright vacuum might be a better fit.

Most upright vacuum cleaners feature a spinning beater brush that’s great for cleaning carpets. But when vacuuming hard surfaces, the brush roll tends to push debris away from the vacuum before it can be suctioned. What you want is the option to turn off the brush roll. This switches the vacuum to “suction only” for quick and easy cleaning of hard floors. Besides a brush roll on/off switch, look for a bare floor height adjustment and onboard cleaning tools.

For smaller areas of bare floor, such as laminate flooring in your kitchen, consider the light weight and convenience of an upright cordless or electric (a.k.a. stick) vacuum.

Whatever vacuum you prefer, choose bagless. A bagged vacuum tends to lose its effectiveness as the bag fills with debris. With a bagless vacuum, you can clearly see when it’s time to empty it. And there’s no bag to fill up and clog. The result is more constant air flow and suction — just what you need for cleaning laminate floors.

Best Upright

The Shark Navigator Lift-Away Pro offers the best of everything for cleaning your laminate floors — an on/off switch for the beater brush, bare floor setting, and onboard attachments for cleaning stairs, upholstery and more. What’s unique about this upright is that you can separate the canister from the base, giving you the portability and versatility of a canister vacuum as well.

Best Canister Vacuum

You could spend a lot on a canister vacuum, but Eureka’s Whirlwind Canister Vacuum offers excellent value for the money. Remember, you need powerful suction more than anything. For that, this vacuum gets five stars out of five.

The swiveling head lets you clean along edges, under furniture and around chair legs with ease. And the tools you need regularly (crevice tool and dusting brush) are ingeniously built into the wand for easy accessibility. Plus it’s got automatic cord rewind and one-touch canister emptying.

Best Budget-Friendly

After installing your laminate floors, you might not have much money left to keep them clean.

To go easy on your wallet but heavy on cleaning, check out the Bissell Featherweight Vacuum Cleaner. It costs around $30, has a super lightweight design that’s easy to maneuver around your floors and stairs. Plus it converts easily to a hand vacuum with crevice tool and nozzle for stairs.

Best Cordless

Time to take the cleaning gloves off and really see what’s possible with a cordless vacuum. This one stands above the other feature-packed models: the Bissell 2554A CrossWave Cordless Max All in One Wet-Dry Vacuum Cleaner and Mop. It vacuums from edge to edge, safely mops up spills and it cleans itself in its three-in-one docking station — all while giving you the freedom of cordless vacuuming.

This vacuum might spoil you, as it did for reviewer Boymom on Bissell’s website, who said, “I have about 1,000 sq. ft. of laminate flooring … My favorite thing about this machine is that I don’t have to sweep the floors first, this saves SO much time!…I can’t go back to traditional sweeping and mopping ever again!”

Best Robotic Vacuum

For those interested in simply pressing a button and letting technology do all the work, check out the RoboVac 30C Vacuum Cleaner. This robot vacuum automatically increases suction as needed, perfect for the various textures in laminate surfaces — all while being as quiet as a microwave. And did we mention you can control it using Alexa or your smartphone?