The Best Snow Shovel for 2025

Top pick

An ideal combination of size, weight, ergonomics, and materials makes this the right shovel to clear off steps, sidewalks, patios, or decks.

We’ve investigated nearly 75 shovels over the past nine years and have yet to find one that is better than the True Temper 18-Inch Ergonomic Mountain Mover with an add-on EziMate BackEZ tool handle. The shovel stands apart from its competitors with a unique combination of several features we found essential in a good snow shovel: a curved handle, a poly wear strip, and a flexible and durable scoop. All of our testers picked the Mountain Mover as the best, but when we added on the secondary handle, improving the ergonomics even more, our crew of shovel testers went bananas over it.

“Yeah, this is it, this is what we’ve been looking for,” one of them said, picking up this tool after about two hours of moving snow with the other shovels.

It’s a unique design. The Ergonomic Mountain Mover was the only model we tested with a curved shaft made of light and durable aluminum. The arcing shape allows for a straighter back while shoveling and also gives full flexibility in hand positioning up and down the shaft. The design stabilizes the scooping motion, eliminating the pendulum effect you feel when using a shovel with a bent shaft. The D-grip at the back end of the Ergonomic Mountain Mover is nice and large, and no one in our testing panel had any problems fitting a hand wearing a chunky winter glove into the opening.

The edge slices and digs well. The business end of the Ergonomic Mountain Mover is an 18-inch-wide flexible poly scoop with a nylon wear strip, which makes for a durable and protected leading edge that won’t gouge or scratch a deck or walkway. We had no problem busting up ice and compacted snow on wooden deck steps with the shovel, and the steps came through the process unmarred. The wear strip is rounded, so it easily finds its way over uneven surfaces like brick walkways or fieldstone steps. The flex in the poly scoop also absorbs impact when the shovel gets jammed, which can’t be said about shovels with metal scoops.

These shovels last. Wirecutter editor Tim Heffernan bought six Ergonomic Mountain Movers for the maintenance crew of the 450-unit co-op in Queens, NY, where he was board president. They use the shovels to supplement their fleet of snowblowers on the property, and the shovels see a lot of action clearing sidewalks, courtyards, and the spaces between the residents’ cars. After a few demanding winters of use, the Mountain Movers are in fine shape, and Tim’s crew reports that they are far better than the generic straight-shafted, metal-bladed models they’d used for years prior

Best for…

Attach this second handle to any shovel’s shaft to make the work easier, safer, and less of a strain on your body.

Don’t forget the second handle. Though the True Temper Ergonomic Mountain Mover is a good shovel in its own right, adding an EziMate BackEZ attachment made a big difference in our tests. This secondary handle attaches to the shovel shaft and allows you to stand straighter while shoveling. It improves posture and extends your reach on level ground, and also makes shoveling a long flight of deck stairs easier, by letting you stand farther back from the shovel to clear off the steps. Everyone on our testing panel, regardless of height, could feel the change in body mechanics and the reduced strain on their back. It’ll work on any shovel, too. As one tester put it, “This thing can turn any old piece-of-shit shovel into a decent tool.”

Flaws but not dealbreakers

No metal on the edge. One drawback to the Ergonomic Mountain Mover’s nylon-wear-strip design—but one that’s worth the trade-off—is that it’s thicker than its metal-strip (or strip-free) competitors. This added beefiness makes knifing the shovel under compacted snow or into a semi-frozen snowbank more difficult, and it struggled to dig in under icy snow that had melted and refrozen on a bluestone walkway. But the nylon strip has advantages that the others don’t. Shovels with metal wear strips can catch on any uneven surface, jarring your shoulders. Such models also damage non-pavement surfaces easily, and in our tests, some of the models without a strip were damaged after just a few hours of shoveling.

The scoop curves a bit. Another downside to the shovel is that the leading edge of the scoop has a slight curve to it. On the models we tested, this was minor, but after multiple reader comments about it, we went to Home Depot and saw that on some units it was more pronounced. In our experience, the curve doesn’t affect snow clearing too much: There may be a few places where a second pass is necessary, but we’ve always been able to scrape flat surfaces clean. If you feel like this will be overly annoying to you, our runner-up pick, the Bully Tools 92814 Combination Snow Shovel has a straight leading edge (but it lacks the curved handle).