Wet-dry vacuum cleaners have come a long way over the past few years. The best models can vacuum, wash and dry your hard floors in a single pass, making them a faster, less messy alternative to reaching for one of the best vacuum cleaners and a separate mop every time someone tracks muddy footprints through the house or dinner ends up on the kitchen floor.
There are now more options than ever, though, and they aren't all built for the same jobs. Some focus on everyday hard-floor cleaning, while others can tackle sticky spills, pet mess and even refresh rugs. There are also robot vacuum and mop combos if you'd rather automate the whole process. That's where this guide comes in.
Our reviewers have tested more than 200 vacuum cleaners, including dedicated wet-dry vacs from Tineco, Roborock, Shark, Dyson and Dreame. We've compared how well they clean, how easy they are to maneuver, how thorough their self-cleaning systems are and whether they're actually worth the price. Below, you'll find the models we'd recommend for every budget, home and cleaning style.
These best wet and dry vacuums: the long list
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The best wet-dry vacuum for most people
The Roborock F25 Ultra is a bit of a beast, but it has the cleaning power to back that up. It vacuums and mops hard floors, using steam and hot water to tackle stubborn grime alongside its hefty 22,000Pa suction. It's also surprisingly easy to steer around the house, thanks to powered wheels that do much of the pushing for you.
Our reviewer was particularly impressed by how thoroughly it cleaned, calling it the most powerful and capable wet-dry vacuum they'd tested. One of its more unusual tricks is remote control, which lets you steer the F25 Ultra underneath furniture from your phone. It's a handy way to get at dust and dirt lurking beneath sofas without having to drag them across the room.
There's plenty of cleaning power on tap, plus a self-cleaning system to deal with the roller after use. Battery life is generous too, with up to 60 minutes from a charge. The catch? At 5.2kg, it's no lightweight, and there's no carrying handle to help you lug it upstairs. The roller also falls short of the full mop width, so you'll still need to get into those edges yourself. It's a pricey bit of kit, too.
Read our full Roborock F25 Ultra
The best budget wet-dry vacuum
The Bissell CrossWave Reach Plus is one of the more convincing options if you want to vacuum and mop your hard floors in a single pass without spending a fortune. Its cleaning performance is particularly strong on fine and medium-sized debris, picking up coffee grounds, rice, crumbs and pet hair without needing multiple passes. It impressed our reviewer even more when tackling spills, removing ketchup, mustard and coffee in a single pass and leaving floors dry within minutes.
Its 180-degree hinge is a useful addition, allowing the cleaner to lie almost flat and reach beneath sofas and beds. Edge cleaning is more uneven. It gets within around a quarter of an inch of the wall on its right-hand side, but leaves a wider gap at the front and left. Battery life is respectable, too, delivering almost 40 minutes in Eco mode, although Turbo cuts that to around 23 minutes.
The main weakness is its handling of larger debris. Cereal and popcorn are too much for the CrossWave, which tends to push them around rather than pick them up. It also runs vacuuming and mopping together, with no option to switch to either function independently. Both wet and dry debris end up in the same tank, making it less pleasant to empty than a cleaner with separate compartments.
Those compromises matter, but they don't undo what the CrossWave does well. For homes with mostly hard floors and the usual collection of crumbs, pet hair and spillages, it's a strong-value alternative to vacuuming and mopping separately.
Read our full Bissell CrossWave Reach Plus review
The best lightweight wet and dry vacuum
The Dyson V15s Detect Submarine is similar to the Samsung model above (#3) in that it's a regular vacuum, with a compatible mopping floorhead. The base model is the Dyson V15 Detect – one of the best Dyson vacuums you can buy – so the vacuuming is predictably excellent. The suction is strong, the build is very easy to maneuver, and the vacuuming attachments – including the laser-equipped Fluffy head for hard floors – are well designed and useful.
The mopping head is also great... to a point. Our reviewer found it could clean up everything from muddy footprints to wet spills, as well as picking up fine dust missed on a vacuuming run. However, the dirty water tank isn't sealed, and it's all-too-easy to spill dirty water on the floor when removing the Submarine cleaning head. That's quite a shortcoming that might be enough to put some people off, particularly considering the Dyson V15s Detect Submarine's premium price point.
However if you can work around this (which is achievable once you figure out how to minimize spillage), there's no denying the Submarine's all-round performance. If you have a mix of carpets and hard floors and want an all-in-one to keep them all spotless, this one's well up to the job.
Alternatives
If you just need something to deal with hard floor cleaning, check out the Dyson WashG1 – the brand's dedicated wet cleaner. It doesn't vacuuming, so it's not eligible for this guide, but it is more competent at mopping than the V15s (see exactly how the two models compare in our Dyson WashG1 vs Dyson V15s Detect Submarine article).
Read our full Dyson V15s Detect Submarine review
The best wet-dry robot vacuum
The Eufy Omni S2 is proof that robot vacuums have become seriously ambitious. This flagship wet-dry cleaner pairs superb mopping with a huge leap in vacuuming power, making it one of the most capable hands-off floor-cleaning systems we've tested. Its 30,000Pa suction lifted every oat from our carpet test, while its roller mop tackled dried ketchup in a single pass. It also gets impressively close to obstacles without nudging your shoes across the room or trying to eat your charging cable.
The S2 is clever about getting around, too. It maps rooms quickly, navigates neatly around clutter and can climb thresholds up to 4.2cm high, so it’s less likely to abandon its duties at the doorway. Its app is among the best we've used, with easy map editing, handy cleaning shortcuts and even off-peak charging if you’d rather run it when electricity is cheaper.
The docking station is the real star of the show. It empties the robot, refills its water, washes the mop with hot water and dries it with hot air. The S2 even has an integrated fragrance system, so your floors can smell lovely after the dog has tracked half the garden indoors. After weeks of testing, our reviewer found the brushes, rollers and dust bin still looked practically new.
There’s one rather sizeable catch...the price. At $1,599/£1,599, this is a serious investment, and replacement parts, detergent and fragrance refills add to the running costs. If you want exceptional cleaning without the legwork, the Omni S2 is one of the best ways to get it.
Read our full Eufy Omni S2 review
Best wet-dry vacuum: specs compared
Model |
Clean / dirty tanks |
Weight |
Max runtime |
|---|---|---|---|
Roborock F25 Ultra |
1L / 0.72L |
11.5lbs / 5.2kg |
60 mins |
Bissell CrossWave Reach Plus |
0.45L / 0.6L |
8.8lbs / 3.99kg |
40 mins |
Dyson V15s Detect Submarine |
0.3L |
8.4lbs / 3.8kg |
60 mins |
Eufy Omni S2 |
3L / 2L (dock tanks) |
9.9lbs / 4.5kg |
180 mins |
How to choose the best wet-dry vacuum
Before you rush out and buy one of the best wet-dry vacuums, you really need to think about the kind of flooring you have in your home; specifically, how much of it is hard floor and how much is carpets and rugs.
If your home is entirely (or mostly) hard floors, a dedicated floor cleaner like our top choice, the Roborock F25 Ultra, will be your best options. These models are built to mop and to dry up after themselves, and the leading models feature self-propulsion so you won't wear yourself out pushing them around.
If you have a mix of carpets and hard floors, look for a combination option such as the the Dyson V15s Detect Submarine. These cleaners can do it all and tend to feature swappable floorheads so that you can choose the right one for your floor type: a standard vacuum floorhead for dealing with carpets and rugs, and a mop head, usually with a built-in water tank, for mopping hard floors. These can be good all-rounders, but they'll often lack water capacity compared with more mopping-focused machines, and their mopping performance isn't always as effective.
Finally, if you want clean floors with the least effort, it's worth looking for a robot vacuum and mop like the Eufy Omni S2. Many of the latest robovacs provide a mopping function and a few can be had for a surprisingly low price, although the cheaper options tend to only offer basic functionality, with only a clean water tank and static mopping pads that you have to switch in by hand. More advanced options feature clean and dirty water tanks, and rotating pads that automatically lift up when the robot encounters carpets. However, mopping on robovacs tends to me relatively gentle – don't expect them to really scrub your floors.
How does a wet-dry vacuum cleaner work?
The best wet-dry vacuum cleaners tend to feed clean water (with added detergent in some cases) onto a brush roll, which then picks up muck from your floor, and then everything gets sucked up into the vacuum's dirty water tank. It's an effective system, but one that requires maintenance: you'll need to empty the dirty water tank regularly (ideally after every use), and while some wet-dry vacs will clean the brush roll for you, you'll still need to give it the occasional clean yourself.
Some wet-dry vacuums aren't quite as sophisticated, and are primarily vacuums that feature a mopping attachment with a single clean water tank to spray water onto the floor, and simple pads for cleaning. They're a good choice if you have a lot of carpet and some hard floor that you want to keep shiny, but for mopping your entire kitchen you'd get better results by rolling up your sleeves and getting out an old-fashioned mop and bucket.
