This Is The Most Popular Lawn Mower Brand In The USA (And Why Everyone Loves It)

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

They don't make push mowers or self-propelled residential walk-behind mowers. They don't make electric lawn tractors. Yet John Deere is the most popular brand of mowers in the U.S., and it's really not even close. Almost everyone — John Deere owners, John Deere fans, professional reviewers, and consumer advocacy organizations — seems to agree.

John Deere was first in Lifestory Research's 2025 ranking of mower brands — the sixth consecutive year it has held this honor. LIfestory surveyed 5,842 consumers to find out which brands were most trusted by Americans, and John Deere won with a score well beyond any of the competition. But reputation and trust aren't quite the same thing as earned performance ratings, so we took a hard look at hundreds of professional and consumer reviews, looking for patterns as described by actual purchasers of Deere mowers.

When poring over reviews for something like a lawn tractor, you get reviews that might be tainted from a couple of different angles. Retailers prefer positive reviews, obviously, and tend to post those. And certainly any review by the retailer is abnormally likely to be positive. There's also a tendency of owners who have invested so much in a product to either be artificially fond of the product, or irrationally critical. And there's obviously the problem of no single consumer having extensive comparative experience with a lot of different brands and models. To muddy the waters even further, some pro reviewers were given mowers — and, perhaps worse, one TikTok nano-influencer ended his super-positive review by bluntly asking John Deere to send him a new product.

To see what experts and industry professionals have to say about John Deere's mowers, we looked at quite a few online reviews and rankings. Some reviews and roundups were discarded because of their strange methodologies or criteria. One major publication, for example, no longer recommends gas-powered lawn mowers, which rather puts them outside of the mainstream experience of American homeowners. One Chinese electric mower manufacturer surprised us by including John Deere at the top of its list for commercial mowers, which didn't help us much.

On the whole, the take of professional reviewers is extremely positive. All eight top-rated lawn tractors and three of the four top-rated zero-turn mowers ranked by one major consumer advocacy organization were made by John Deere. One Youtuber, Cole Taylor, gave a reasonable list of pros and cons based on his X500. He praised the mower's power, reliability, turning radius (this gets mentioned more than you'd expect), traction, and comfort. His cons were really telling, though, in that he argued with himself on-camera about cons like its cumbersome safety features. (Indeed, the reverse safety switches on John Deere riding mowers are often disconnected by owners, as are seat safety switches.)

Another YouTuber, Artillery Life, offered a very even-handed opinion of his S100: It's affordable, easy to operate, easy to maintain, and smooth, but not great for hills. He mentioned common complaints about the plastic hood cracking and failing fuel gauges, but hadn't experienced them directly. Overall, his take was that his John Deere was great for his moderate-sized, flat lawn, describing himself as "pretty impressed and happy."

The real-world experience of actual purchasers and users of Deere mowers might tell you the most about the brand's performance across multiple seasons of use, or even across multiple mowers. In fact, the John Deere heritage came up so often in the reviews that one has to wonder how much of the brand's magic relies on reputation. Very little, it turns out.

The brand's consumer reviews are very positive. John Deere had two of the top four zero-turn mowers and two of the five highest-rated lawn tractors in stock at Home Depot, including models that the Home Depot site says are recommended by Consumer Reports. The brand made five of the six highest-rated gas-powered riding mowers at Lowes. The few complaints that kept cropping up were about frequently broken belts, prematurely broken fuel gauges, and missing keys (it's pretty easy to bypass a lawn mower key switch, by the way). Sometimes the complaints focused on accessories like baggers.

But in general, most consumers love their mowers. "This is my third John Deere riding mower. Both of my old John Deere riding mowers are running and cutting and belong to people I know and are still reliable and being used every week!!" one S120 owner wrote in a review on Home Depot's site. A few addressed the Deere heritage indirectly: "I owned one 20+ years ago and this one drives like a Cadillac compared to the one I owned before!" said one S100 owner on Home Depot's website. Reviews on retailer Ag-Pro's website, hosted by John Deere itself, are much more likely to address the machines themselves rather than the sales and service of the retailer. We found this one particularly amusing: "Works great! Now stop emailing me for reviews please."