Between about 32 and 40 cm for a small enclosed garden, 40 to 46 for a normal domestic lawn, above that only if the ground is genuinely open. The figure is a dimension of the deck, and this site treats it as one.
What the number is
The cutting width in a listing is the width of the cutting circle the blade describes inside the housing. It is a property of the machine, measured on the machine, and it is one of the very few figures on this shelf that is neither an assumption nor a bench result.
What it is not is the strip of lawn a pass clears. Every pass overlaps its neighbour, because nobody walks to a straight line and because the wheel on the cut side has to be on cut grass. The overlap is yours, and it is typically several centimetres.
What it trades against
Mass. A wider deck is a bigger casting or pressing, carrying a longer blade, driven by a motor sized for it. Width and weight rise together, and above about 46 cm a push machine becomes an object you want a drive on.
Power at the blade. A longer blade needs more torque to keep its speed up in thick grass, and a wide deck on an underpowered machine bogs where a narrow one would have cut. This is the commonest mismatch at the cheap end of the cordless shelf.
Manoeuvrability. A wide machine turns in a wider arc and does not fit between a bed and a fence. On a garden with obstacles the wide machine finishes later than the narrow one, and it leaves more edge for the shears.
Storage. A 46 cm deck in a small shed is a real constraint, and it is the reason the folding handle exists.
Why the area figure does not answer this
The square-metre figure in the same listing is an assumption with no publisher, and on a cordless machine it is a battery calculation rather than a statement about coverage. Sizing a deck from it means sizing a deck from someone else’s guess about your grass.
How this site handles it
Every mower page here prints the cutting width as the maker states it and calls it a dimension. Comparison tables sort on it, and never treat it as a performance figure. Where a machine’s stated area and its deck width disagree about the class it belongs to — which happens — the page prints both and says which one was measured.
Wherever this page and the maker’s own documentation disagree, the documentation wins. Every cutting width, cutting height, stated area, pack capacity, flow rate, head, sound level and application rate on this page comes from the maker’s own published figures, with the unit as printed and the source named. None of it is measured here, and no figure is converted into another convention, because a converted number is a different number. And the distinction this page keeps: a stated area is a supposition about your lawn, not a property of the machine. No standards body defines it, no test produces it, and each maker derives it from an assumption it does not publish — a battery calculation on one shelf, a duty cycle on another. This page reports the figure, names the derivation its machine type usually uses, and never ranks two machines on it.
The questions that keep coming in
Does a 46 cm mower cut a 46 cm strip?
Not in the sense the number suggests. The figure describes the deck, and every pass overlaps the last one — nobody mows to a millimetre. The effective strip is narrower than the stated width by however much overlap you actually walk.
Is a wider deck always faster?
On open ground yes, up to the point where the machine becomes awkward to turn. On a lawn with beds, a path and a corner, the wide machine spends the time it saved on manoeuvres and on the strip along the edge it cannot reach.
Last reviewed 26 September 2026