UPDATE: Jan. 23, 2025, 5:00 a.m. EST New flagship robot vacuums from Roborock, Eufy, Dreame, and more were announced at CES 2025. I'm in the process of calling them in for at-home testing, and will update this guide accordingly.
The best self-emptying robot vacuums have one huge perk past the obvious act of vacuuming the floor for you. (Hint: It's in the name.)
When you outsource vacuuming to a robot, your floors get cleaned way more often, right? There's just one little downside to that extra attention that your floors are getting: More debris off the floor means a dust bin that fills up faster, and emptying a vacuum's dust bin by hand is arguably the worst part of the chore.
Hence, self-emptying robot vacuums were born. These vacs do your vacuuming and emptying for you for weeks (or even months) at a time, storing the debris collected on each trip in a larger compartment that's located in the charging dock. It's the obvious supplementary step for the full hands-off cleaning experience, and it's rare to see a robot vacuum from 2024 or 2025 that doesn't have automatic emptying. (That's why Dyson's move to skip self-emptying on its $1,199.99 robot vacuum was so bold it's comical.)
Are self-emptying robot vacuums worth it?
Not having to lift a finger when it comes to floor maintenance is well worth it for anyone who just doesn’t feel like wrestling an upright vacuum out of the closet every few days. And if you don't feel like manually vacuuming yourself, it's only natural that you'll also decide you don't feel like manually dumping your robot vac's dust bin into the trash can every day. If we're doing this whole automated thing, let's do it the right way.
Automatic emptying quickly proves its worth in households where the layer of pet fur would otherwise have you dumping the vacuum's tiny dust bin after just a few rooms. The best self-emptying robot vacuum cleaners let you off the hook for months at a time. (Most brands claim to have capacities averaging between six to eight weeks, but almost every self-emptying dock I've tested in my large apartment lasted much longer than that.) And when it actually is time to empty the bigger dust bin, most self-empty docks trap dust inside a disposable bag, meaning you won't have to see or touch the nasty stuff at all.
For people with allergies, auto-emptying also spares you from inhaling the inevitable puff of dust that emerges when dumping a dustbin into the trash. Speaking of avoiding the grosser parts of the job, if you're specifically seeking a robot vacuum that mops, many self-emptying docks also take it upon themselves to wash and dry the dirty mopping pads after the job is done.
I've been testing the latest and greatest self-emptying robot vacuums released in 2024 against my old favorites from years prior. So far for 2025, these are the four self-emptiers to consider for your home.
(Note that each vacuum's retail price is listed by default, but that I've also noted the most common sale price each vacuum frequently drops to in "The Good" section. And yes, robot vacuum deals are common all throughout the year — not just during a shopping holiday like Black Friday.)
