9 reviewed · Updated November 2026
Reel mowers have no engine, no battery and almost nothing that can fail. Push the mower, the wheels turn the reel, and the grass gets cut like scissors cutting paper. We researched every reel mower on Amazon US with over a thousand ratings and read what owners reported, and the first useful thing we found is that the shortlist is shorter than it looks, because one company sells the same mower under four different brand names.
The best balance of width, weight and cutting height in the category, and the price of two visits from a lawn service.
Score
8.6Price
$105.87checked Oct 28, 2026
Seven blades and a half inch minimum cut, and the only mower here an owner picked over a Fiskars.
The cheapest, lightest and by far the most reviewed reel mower on Amazon, with four blades as the compromise.
The only mower here that reaches 3 inches, which makes it the only one suited to a normal cool season lawn.
Half an inch to 2.75 inches on an 18 inch deck, and the best middle ground between width and effort.
The 14 inch mower to buy if you mow above an inch and a half, with bigger wheels and a fifth blade over the cheap one.
Five blades at 18.08 lbs, the lightest mower here, and the easiest one to store and carry.
Nine height positions on a 20 inch deck, held back by the heaviest weight here and a rating shared across four sizes.
The only reel mower here that bags its clippings, and the only one with 6,000 ratings averaging 3.7 stars.
Cutting height is the spec that decides whether a reel mower can keep your lawn, and it is the spec roundups bury at the bottom of a table.
Fescue, bluegrass and rye want to sit at 2.5 to 3.5 inches. Most reel mowers cannot get there. The 14 inch mowers from American Lawn Mower Company top out at 1.75 or 2.25 inches. The LawnMaster 20 inch stops at 2.6. Only the Scotts 2000-20S in our lineup reaches 3 inches.
Warm season grasses are the opposite problem. Bermuda, Zoysia and Centipede get kept short, and the Earthwise 1715-16EW and the two cheapest American Lawn Mower models all drop to half an inch.
Work out what grass you have and what height it wants before you look at anything else. A mower that cannot reach your height is the wrong mower at any price.
American Lawn Mower Company explain the mechanism on their own listings, and the sentence is the most useful one in the category: a push mower only cuts what gets between the reel and the cutter bar.
Four things follow from that, and all four come up in owner reviews on every mower we researched.
One more thing nobody warns you about. A reel mower only cuts going forward. Neal Stone, on the 1204-14 in July 2026: "It only cuts pushing forward and just rolls the wheels walking backward."
American Lawn Mower Company makes Great States, Scotts and Earthwise reel mowers as well as the ones carrying its own name. The Earthwise listing says it outright, describing the mower as Earthwise Power Tools by ALM.
The badge engineering is easy to miss and expensive to ignore. Two examples from our research.
The Great States 815-18 and the American Lawn Mower 1815-18 are the same mower. Both cut 18 inches with 5 blades, both adjust from 0.5 to 2.75 inches, both weigh 27 lbs, both measure 25 inches deep by 14 inches wide, and both sit at 4.2 stars. One is gray at $116.00 and one is black at $119.99. The one real difference is paperwork, because the black version leads its bullets with a 5 year manufacturer protection plan and the gray version mentions no warranty at all.
The American Lawn Mower 1204-14 and the Great States 204-14 are also the same mower, right down to the same incorrect 2.2 pound weight in Amazon structured spec block. The Great States badge costs $4.84 more and carries 13,000 fewer ratings.
The proof is on the page. A bullet on the Great States 204-14 listing reads "For best results from Scotts push mower". Nobody changed the brand name because nobody needed to.
Practical upshot: when you compare Great States against Scotts against American Lawn Mower, compare cutting height, blade count and wheel size. Comparing the brands themselves tells you nothing.
Four, five and seven blade reels all appear in this category and no listing explains the difference.
More blades sweep the cutter bar more often, so you get more cuts for every step you take. More cuts per step means a cleaner finish at a shorter height. Earthwise names the grasses its 7-blade mower is for, and they are all fine turf kept short: bent grass, Bermuda, Zoysia, Centipede, St Augustine and Seashore Paspalum.
Above about 2 inches the extra blades stop earning their money. Buy seven blades for a short lawn and five for a normal one, and treat four blades as the budget option on a small lawn you keep tidy.
Google answers the sharpening question with 4 to 8 weeks during the mowing season, or every 10 to 20 hours of use, plus a spring grind and mid season backlapping.
That answer is for golf green reel mowers, which cut at an eighth of an inch and are ground on a machine. For a push reel mower on a home lawn, nothing in our research supports it.
Every manufacturer here says the opposite. American Lawn Mower Company describes heat treated alloy steel blades that stay sharp for years. Scotts and Great States both say blades stay sharp longer. Not one owner in the reviews we read described a 4 to 8 week schedule.
What owners actually report is a symptom rather than a calendar. Galery puts it best, saying the mower starts missing a blade of grass here and there, and then you have to roll back over strips you already mowed. Treat that as your signal, not the date.
Two things to know before you plan on professional sharpening. A backlapping kit costs around $20 to $30 and lets you do it at home, and the blades on a contact reel are the part designed to wear. Sara, on the LawnMaster in October 2024, found her mower squeaking after a month of use on concrete, which is a bearing problem rather than a blade one. Keep a reel mower off driveways and paths.
Fiskars StaySharp Max is the most searched reel mower in America and it is not sold on Amazon US, so affiliate roundups skip it. Its selling point is a contactless reel where the blades never touch the cutter bar, which is marketed as never needing sharpening.
One owner did the comparison properly. BSD ran a Fiskars 18 inch StaySharp Max for a year, then bought the Earthwise 7-blade in July 2017 and reported three things.
The Fiskars front wheels sit well ahead of the cutting bed and the rear wheels well behind it, so on even a gentle hill, in his words, the bed drags on the ground and the mower scalps. Small debris still jammed the reel. And he ended up backlapping and resharpening the non-contact blades himself, which took drilling and tapping the shaft after a set screw stripped.
Contactless does not mean maintenance free, and a cutting bed slung between distant wheels is worse on slopes than one sitting underneath them. Both are worth knowing before you pay a premium for the design.
Width decides how many passes you make. Weight decides how much each pass costs you, because on a reel mower you are the engine.
Under about 3,000 sq ft, a 14 inch mower at 18 to 21 lbs is plenty, and the light weight makes it easy to carry and store. Between 3,000 and 7,000 sq ft, 16 to 18 inches is the sweet spot, and 16 inch mowers only weigh a pound or two more than the 14 inch ones. Above about 7,000 sq ft a 20 inch deck saves passes, and the two 20 inch mowers here weigh 30 and 33.9 lbs.
Flat ground is the real requirement at every width. No reel mower in this category has any drive assistance, so a slope is pure effort both ways.
LawnMaster sells its reel mower in 14, 16, 18 and 20 inch sizes as variations on one listing, so all four report the same 4.1 stars from the same 2,077 ratings. Buying the 20 inch means buying a score that includes everyone who rated the 14 inch.
Pooling is common on Amazon and it is not against the rules. Worth checking anyway. A rating earned by one specific mower, like the 4.3 stars that 2,433 owners gave the Great States 415-16, tells you far more than a number spread across four machines.
Five, and all five are real. A hard grass height limit, stated by the maker as under 4 inches of dry grass for a single pass. Sticks that stop the reel, with one owner putting the limit at twigs an eighth of an inch thick. Weeds that bend over instead of cutting. No cutting on the backstroke, so you only mow going forward. And effort that scales with width, since the two 20 inch mowers here weigh 30 and 33.9 lbs and both draw complaints about being hard to push.
Yes, inside their limits, and owners quantify it. Matthew timed the 18 inch mower in October 2018 as roughly 5 minutes quicker than his corded 20 inch Greenworks and expected the mow to drop from about 45 minutes to about 35. His caveat is the honest one: you look back over a mowed strip and there are blades sticking up here and there that got pushed over instead of cut. A reel mower gives a tidy lawn, not a flawless one.
Under 4 inches, and that figure comes from the manufacturer rather than from us. American Lawn Mower Company state on the 1815-18 listing that the mower suits dry grass under 4 inches for single pass performance, and that taller grass may need multiple passes. Another of their listings says not to let the lawn get much over 3 to 4 inches. The mechanism explains why, because a reel mower only cuts what gets between the reel and the cutter bar.
Far less often than the internet says. Google answers 4 to 8 weeks during the season, which is advice for golf green mowers, not push mowers. American Lawn Mower Company says its heat treated alloy steel blades stay sharp for years, and no owner in our research described a regular schedule. Sharpen when the mower starts missing the odd blade of grass and you find yourself rolling back over strips you already cut. A backlapping kit runs about $20 to $30 if you want to do it yourself.
Depends what you are optimizing for, and two owners gave us the clearest answers. VAL-LA left electric in February 2020 after her rechargeable mower battery stopped holding a charge, the replacement batteries were discontinued, and in her words the whole thing became a giant piece of e-waste. Matthew skipped battery mowers in 2018 because replacement packs can cost $150 apiece. An electric mower is faster and handles taller grass. A reel mower has no part that expires.
Usually not. Reel mowers slice grass rather than tearing it, so clippings are fine and break down quickly. DTB, in August 2026, reports dry patches filling in over time once she stopped paying crews with gas mowers and left the clippings where they fell. Collect clippings if you have weeds seeding, a fungal problem, or a rule that requires it. Only the Sun Joe 20 inch in our lineup ships with a catcher, and at 3.7 stars from 6,020 ratings it is also the lowest rated mower here.
American Lawn Mower Company makes both, plus Earthwise and the mowers under its own name. The Earthwise listing describes itself as Earthwise Power Tools by ALM, and a bullet on the Great States 204-14 listing still reads "For best results from Scotts push mower". The practical effect is that several of these mowers are identical machines in different paint, so compare cutting height, blade count and wheel size rather than brands.
Under about 3,000 sq ft, the Scotts 304-14S at $99.99 is our pick, because at 18.08 lbs it is the lightest mower here and a reel mower gets lifted more than it gets pushed. The American Lawn Mower 1204-14 is cheaper at $82.21 with 15,153 ratings behind it, and the trade is four blades instead of five. Both stop at 1.75 inches, so check your grass wants a short cut before you buy either.