Ready to buy a new lawn mower in the UK? Here, I’ve shared my top lawn mower buying tips to help you get the best deal on a mower that best suits your needs.
✅ Key Takeaways:
Our top tips for buying a lawn mower are:
Start by establishing your budget
Make sure you know all the mower types available
Buy off-season to avoid peak prices
Shop online to compare deals
Size your mower appropriately for your lawn size
Tailor your choice to your ideal mowing situation
Read customer reviews before you spend your money
Only consider mowers with a warranty
Table of Contents
📝 8 Top Lawn Mower Buying Tips
Here are my top 8 tips for buying the best lawn mower in the UK:
💰 Tip 1: Establish Your Budget Before Anything Else
Before you start looking for lawn mowers, it’s important to know how much you should expect to spend on a mower, so you can budget accordingly.
Different mowers have different price points:
The smallest electric rotary mowers start at around £75
Cordless mower models cost £125 upwards
Robotic mowers have a starting price of around £300
Manual mowers cost as little as £55 upfront
The smallest petrol mowers start at around £175
You want to make sure you have enough money to buy a quality mower in the category you’re interested in. This might mean waiting a few months to save up more money so that you don’t end up cheaping out on a mower that doesn’t even last until the end of the year.
However, you don’t have to buy the most expensive lawn mower to get the best value from your purchase.
While it’s true that expensive often have the highest quality builds and the most powerful motors, there are other factors that affect lawn mower price, like size and features. There’s no point stretching your budget to buy a mower with extra features that you don’t need, or a cutting deck that’s too wide for your lawn.
Bonus tip: Stay away from the “super deals” if they seem too good to be true. Never buy from a website that looks shady, and if a mower costs half the price of similar models, be vigilant, check for a warranty, and read plenty of customer reviews before you spend your money.
📊 Tip 2: Make Sure You’re Aware Of All Your Options
The lawn mower market has come a long way in a short space of time, and no longer are petrol mowers and corded electric are only two options for cutting grass at home.
We now have the choice between a range of different mower types, including:
Manual mowers
Corded electric mowers
Cordless (battery-powered) mowers
Manual mowers
Hover mowers
Petrol mowers
You will also need to choose between a rotary mower (the most common option for domestic use) and a cylinder mower (more common for sports turf and manicured gardens).
We’ve written about each of these mower types on our blog. If you want a good starting point, our guide to the different mower types offers a basic explanation of the mowers you’re likely to come across today, including an overview of their pros and cons.
You should also be aware of the essential and optional features that you can find on lawn mowers today.
Essential features are all the features that everyone should look for, regardless of mowing preferences.
Some essential lawn mower features are:
Cut height adjustments
Grass box (for collecting grass clippings)
Powerful motor or engine
Durable blades
Storage features
You might decide that certain add-on features are worth the extra spend. While these features aren’t absolutely necessary, they can enhance your mowing experience and help you to achieve a better result.
Some of the extra lawn mower features include:
A mulching plug
A self-propelled function
A rear roller for lawn stripes
Grass combs for edge cutting
If you want to read up on the features of a lawn mower to look out for, take a look at our article on the top 9 lawn mower features.
⛈ Tip 3: Buy Off-Season For Lower Prices
You can save a lot of money on a lawn mower if you wait until the off-season.
The price of lawn mowers increases by up to 50% in May, June, and July, when everyone needs a solution to cut their grass.
In the late autumn and winter months, grass doesn’t grow, and nobody needs a lawn mower. Manufacturers often lower their mower prices during these seasons to try and make their products more appealing at a time when they’re not essential.
So, if it’s not an emergency (e.g. your old mower has broken down and you need to buy a new mower in a hurry), try to wait for the summer to end before you start mower shopping.
You can read more detailed advice on the best time to buy a lawn mower, and view real examples of mower price changes, in our guide on which month to buy a lawn mower in the UK.
💻 Tip 4: Shop Online To Get The Best Deal
Now you know when to buy a mower to get a good deal, you also need to know where to spend your money.
Our advice is to shop online. That way, you can compare prices, and you can also use tools like Honey, which tell you on certain websites when the price of a mower has gone up or down, and how much by. You’re likely to get a better deal than if you bought a mower in-store.
Marketplaces like Amazon are a great place to buy mowers because they give you a huge selection from a variety of brands, including brands that are less popular in the UK but have a big following in Europe or the US.
Lawn mowers typically qualify for free postage because of their higher upfront cost, so you usually won’t have to pay extra for shipping.
Shopping online also gives you a chance to read reviews (which I’ve advised on at the end of this guide). You wouldn’t be able to do this if you simply walked into your nearest DIY store and bought the first mower you saw. In that scenario, you might end up with a mower that customers don’t recommend, and you’d be none the wiser.
📐 Tip 5: Choose The Right Size Mower For Your Lawn
One of the most important considerations when buying a lawn mower is your lawn size.
The bigger your lawn, the more you’ll benefit from a mower with a wider cutting width, which you can use to mow your lawn faster and in fewer laps.
On the other end, it’s usually better to use a smaller mower with a narrower cutting width to mow a smaller lawn, because you might not have a lot of space for turning a mower, or your garden may have obstacles and tight spots that only a small mower can navigate.
Measure the size of your lawn to the closest m², then compare your lawn size to the correlating recommended mower size on the below chart:
| Lawn Size (m²) | Mower Cutting Width (cm) |
|---|---|
| Less than 50 | 22-25 |
| 50-100 | 26-30 |
| 100-250 | 30-36 |
| 250-500 | 36-40 |
| 500-650 | 42-46+ |
We’ve shared a more detailed step-by-step guide to sizing a lawn mower in our article on how to choose the right-size mower for your garden size.
🟩 Tip 6: Imagine Your Ideal Mowing Situation
You want your lawn mower to give you the results you’re looking for as conveniently as possible.
While lawn mowing duties aren’t most people’s idea of fun, you can still make the mowing experience as tolerable as possible by buying a mower that best fits your needs and preferences.
When you consider your ideal mowing scenario, ask yourself the following questions:
What’s my preferred mowing schedule? Would I rather mow once every 2-4 weeks in peak season or am I happy to mow more frequently in the summer months?
How quickly do I want to get the job done? Am I happy to take my time with a smaller mower, or would I rather power through with a bigger model?
What are my physical capabilities? Do I have any mobility restrictions that mean I’d benefit from a lighter mower, a specific mower type, or an ergonomic mower?
What do I want to do with the grass clippings? Do I want to mulch them or collect them in a grass box? Or am I happy to rake up the clippings once I’ve finished mowing?
What’s my lawn like? Does it accumulate a lot of twigs, leaves, and other debris? Is my grass rough and thick or sparser? What sort of motor power will I need to effectively mow my garden space?
Once you’ve answered all these questions, you’ll have a much clearer idea of the type of mowers you’re interested in, and the features that are important to you. So, when you start shopping for a new lawn mower, you’ll find it much easier to shortlist your top products based on how many of your boxes they tick.
💬 Tip 7: Read Customer Reviews
Our final piece of advice is to read customer reviews before you spend your money on a lawn mower.
Don’t take product descriptions and marketing materials at face value. Manufacturers exaggerate the benefits of their mowers, and the only way to learn about the true user experience for a mower is to see what real customers have to say about the product.
I recommend reading reviews on marketplaces like Amazon to give you the best understanding of a mower’s performance. You can be certain that customers haven’t been paid for their reviews due to Amazon’s strict buyer policies*, so you know that reviews are accurate to the customer’s experience.
Pay close attention to the 3 and 4-star reviews. These aren’t from furious customers who have written a review in a fit of rage, so they’re often a lot fairer and more logical when weighing up a mower’s pros and cons.
A few common negative features of some mowers are:
Difficulty adjusting the cut height
Having to partially disassemble the mower to fold the handles
Plasticy, “cheap” design
Poor battery life (in cordless mowers)
Loud motor
Note down any negative points that you find in customer reviews and ask yourself whether these potential setbacks outweigh the mower’s positive points.
If a mower has an Amazon star rating below 3.8, don’t buy it unless the bad reviews pulling the rating down refer to something that you genuinely don’t care about. You can find plenty of lawn mowers with 4.0-star ratings and higher, so it’s easy to spend your money on a product that’s recommended by the majority.
Keep in mind that there are bad eggs in all product lines, so take negative reviews with a pinch of salt. One person’s bad experience doesn’t guarantee that a lawn mower is a waste of money.
*It’s worth being aware that some Vine customers may receive free products to review. Vine reviews are supposed to be honest and impartial, but I think receiving a free product clouds a person’s judgment somewhat because they’re not getting a true sense of the value for the money they’ve paid. Vine reviewers have “VINE VOICE” next to their review title.
✏️ Tip 8: Only Consider Mowers With A Warranty
Finally, if you want to guarantee that your lawn mower purchase is protected in a worst-case scenario, make sure to buy a mower that’s backed by a warranty of at least 1 year.
I recommend avoiding lawn mowers that don’t have a warranty. If the manufacturer doesn’t offer any sort of purchase protection, you risk ending up with a product that’s faulty or problematic on arrival, with no option to claim a refund or return the mower for a working model.
Here’s a list of the different lawn mowers and their average warranty periods:
Electric rotary lawn mowers: 2 years
Manual lawn mowers: 1-2 years
Battery-powered mowers: 2 years
Petrol mowers: 2-3 years
Robotic lawn mowers: 2-3 years
Some lawn mower manufacturers will extend your mower warranty by 1 year if you register the product online, regardless of where you purchased it from. That’s well worth doing if you want to protect your purchase for the longest period without having to pay extra upfront.
Some sellers and websites will also give you additional purchase protection on top of the manufacturer’s warranty. For instance, if you buy a lawn mower from a seller or merchant on Amazon, you’re protected by the website’s A-to-Z Guarantee, which allows you to file a claim if you receive a product that’s damaged, defective, or materially different to the product depicted in the manufacturer’s description.
🏁 Final Word
Hopefully, this guide should have given you some helpful advice to take with you when you start looking at lawn mowers online.
To recap: make sure to consider mower size, your own mowing preferences, and the features that matter to you. Read customer reviews, only consider mowers with a warranty, wait until off-season if you can, and shop online to get the best deal.
If you’re keen to start shopping for a new mower, check out our buyer’s guides. We have guides for all different mower types – a good place to start is our guide to the best lawn mowers available today.