Best mower for a medium yard

Between the small-yard mowers and the acre machines sits the size most suburban lawns actually are: a quarter to a half acre. It is also the size where a battery either finishes the job or leaves you waiting on a charger, so the arithmetic is worth doing before you buy.

The short answer

What a medium yard actually takes

Mowing time is deck width times ground speed, less overlap. It is the figure that tells you whether a published runtime is enough.

Now set those against the published runtimes: 33 minutes (Greenworks), up to 80 minutes (Ryobi), up to 60 minutes (EGO). A quarter acre is inside all three. A half acre is inside one of them on paper, and that is before thick grass, a full bagger or a slope takes its cut.

The three, on published figures

1. Greenworks LM2108S — the only published half-acre rating

Greenworks is the one manufacturer here willing to put an acreage figure against a specific pack: up to half an acre on an 80V 4.0Ah battery. That is 320 watt-hours for 21,780 sq ft, which works out to about 640Wh per acre — the same figure Kobalt's 1-acre rating on 640Wh implies. Two brands, one number, independently arrived at.

A 4-in-1 deck, a 1.38 to 4.0 inch cut height across seven positions, 3200 RPM and a four-year warranty on both tool and battery round it out.

The honest catch is the runtime: 33 minutes against our 63 minute estimate for a full half acre. The acreage rating and the runtime claim do not agree with each other, and Greenworks does not explain the gap. Plan on a second pack at the top of the range.

#ad Check the Greenworks 80V 21" 4-in-1 LM2108S price on Amazon — how we're funded.

2. Ryobi RY40HPLM01B — the most energy, and the most efficient

Two 40V 6.0Ah packs is 480 watt-hours, the largest here, and the claimed 80 minutes works out to 6.0 watt-hours per minute — the lowest draw of the three. On our arithmetic that is enough for a half acre with margin, which no other machine on this page can say.

Forty-volt Ryobi is also the most widely shared platform in this registry, so the packs run a trimmer, a blower and a mini chainsaw as well.

What it does not publish: weight, cut-height range, charge time or a rated area. For a medium yard the cut height matters most of those — it is the spec that decides whether you can mow tall in summer.

#ad Check the Ryobi 40V HP Brushless 21" Self-Propelled price on Amazon — how we're funded.

3. EGO LM2135SP — the widest height range

Four hundred and twenty watt-hours, a published 60 minute runtime, a variable drive from 0.9 to 3.1 MPH and a cut height from 1 to 4 inches across eight positions — the finest height adjustment in our registry.

On a medium yard that range is genuinely useful: it lets you mow at 3.5 to 4 inches through summer, which is what the extension guidance recommends for cool-season grass, and drop lower for the last cut of the year.

It sits between the other two on energy (420Wh) and on draw (7.0Wh per minute), and EGO publishes no weight for it.

#ad Check the EGO Power+ 21" Select Cut LM2135SP price on Amazon — how we're funded.

Who should skip these three

• Under about 5,000 sq ft. A push mower is lighter, cheaper and perfectly adequate — see best mowers for small yards.
• Over about three quarters of an acre. At that point you are recharging mid-mow every week — see best mowers for large yards.
• Anyone who has not measured. Half the lawns people call "medium" are a fifth of an acre of actual grass — measure it first.

What we cannot tell you

We have not mowed with these machines. Two of the three publish no acreage rating at all, and the one that does publishes a runtime that does not obviously support it. Nobody publishes the grass height, density or moisture their runtime claims were measured in, and nobody publishes a walking speed — which is why the mowing-time arithmetic above states its 2.5 MPH assumption rather than hiding it.