Most Reliable Gas Riding Mower Brands

To help you find the most reliable riding mower for your money, Consumer Reports incorporates ratings for brand reliability and owner satisfaction into its Overall Scores for lawn mowers and tractors. Those scores also take into account data collected during our extensive field testing, which covers everything from handling to how well a mower cuts in multiple modes to noise output at the user’s ear and at 25 feet.

To calculate predicted reliability, we survey our members about the products they own and use the results to make projections about how new models from a given brand will hold up over time. Models from brands that rate near or at the bottom for predicted reliability aren’t eligible for our recommended lists of products, regardless of their performance.

We also ask members how likely they are to recommend their mower to friends or family, and that question serves as the basis for our owner satisfaction rating.

These latest findings come from CR’s exclusive member surveys fielded in the fall of 2020, 2021, and 2022, which leveraged data on more than 11,500 riding mowers that members purchased new between 2012 and 2022.

Below is a detailed breakdown of the winners and losers across the three gas riding mower categories we test. We also have performance results on cordless electric—aka battery—riding mowers. But because battery riders are a relatively new product category—we’ve only been testing them for a few years—we don’t yet have reliability or owner satisfaction ratings for that group.

(For our reliability results on walk-behind mowers—both gas and electric—check out our guide to the most reliable walk-behind lawn mower brands.)