Best electric snow shovel

The electric snow shovel is the one winter tool most people should own and few people consider. It is not a small snow blower: it is a replacement for the manual shovel on the fifteen feet between your door and your car, and the two machines here publish enough to size it honestly.

The short answer

The arithmetic this page used to be able to do

Until 2026 Greenworks published something no other winter tool in our registry did: how much ground one charge clears, stated separately for 4 inches and 10 inches of snow. That model, the 2600702, is discontinued. The LED shovel that replaced it publishes no area per charge, no clearing rate, no impeller speed, no charge time and no decibel figure.

Now the Snow Joe, which publishes no area either but does publish a motor rating.

The two, on published figures

1. Greenworks 40V 12 in LED — the deeper, longer-throwing one

Eight inches of clearing depth and a 25 foot throw are the two best hardware figures in this category, and both are two notches above the Snow Joe's 6 inches and 20 feet. It carries 160Wh against the Snow Joe's 96Wh, adds an LED light and an adjustable auxiliary handle, and its three-year warranty covers the battery as well as the tool.

The 40V pack is also the useful kind of pack: it runs 75-plus other Greenworks 40V tools, so a household already on that platform is buying a head rather than a system.

The honest cons, and they are not small: 19.1 lb is six pounds heavier than the alternative, the clearing width is an inch narrower, there is no aimable chute, and Greenworks publishes no clearing rate, no area per charge, no impeller speed, no charge time and no decibel figure — all five of which the 2600702 this replaced did publish. On disclosure this is a step backwards from its own predecessor.

#ad Check the Greenworks 40V 12" Cordless LED Snow Shovel (SS40L410) price on Amazon — how we're funded.

2. Snow Joe 24V-SS13 — the light one

Thirteen pounds, a 13 inch clearing width, a 6 inch cut depth, a 2-blade paddle auger and up to 300 lb of snow per minute at 20 feet of throw. On steps and a deck, five pounds of difference is the whole argument, because this is a tool you carry as much as push.

Publishing a clearing rate in pounds per minute is genuinely unusual and useful: it is the only figure in the category that describes work rather than dimensions, and since Greenworks dropped its own rate figures it is the only one left.

The limits are energy and warranty. Ninety-six watt-hours is a small tank — about 14 minutes at the motor's full 400W rating — and Snow Joe publishes no runtime, no area per charge and no decibel figure. The warranty is two years.

#ad Check the Snow Joe 24V-SS13 IONMAX 13" Cordless Snow Shovel price on Amazon — how we're funded.

Sizing one to your actual paths

Measure the paving you clear, not the property. A path 3 ft wide and 40 ft long is 120 sq ft; a 10 x 20 ft parking apron is 200. Against the Greenworks figures, 320 sq ft of that at 4 inches of snow is well inside one charge, and the same ground at 10 inches is most of one. Anything approaching a full driveway belongs to a snow blower, and our snow blower buying guide sets out where the line falls.

Who should skip both

• Anyone with a driveway to clear. Twelve inches of bite and a 6 inch depth ceiling are hard limits, whatever the snow does.
• Gravel surfaces. A paddle auger contacting loose stone throws it at 20 ft, exactly as a single-stage snow blower would.
• Anyone who wants one battery for everything. A 24V Snow Joe pack and a 40V Greenworks pack each run their own ecosystems — see which platform for winter.

What we cannot tell you

We have not cleared snow with either tool. Snow Joe publishes no runtime, no area per charge, no charge time and no noise figure; Greenworks publishes no runtime in minutes and contradicts itself on clearing depth within one page. Neither publishes a cold-weather derating for the pack, which is the figure that would tell you what these numbers mean at 10F rather than at room temperature.